Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, Neither Real Life Nor a Dream, is a Parable of Fiction Writers’ “More Real Than Real” Inner World

At the end of Hawthorne’s much-analyzed short story, the narrator asks, “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting? Be it so if you will; but alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown.” For he could not rid himself of the idea that all the apparently righteous people of his community were, secretly, in league with the Devil. This idea was so powerful that it cast a shadow over the rest of his days, so that even “…his dying hour was gloom” (1, pp. 149-163).

Most interpretations of this short story are prejudiced by the narrator’s suggestion that there are two, and only two, possibilities: Either young Goodman Brown had a dream or it was a real-life experience. I say neither. And as Sherlock Holmes has often said:

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Dreams

Readers, it is true, may not know if a story is a dream or not until they have evaluated clues or are told. But characters, who are under contract to mimic real people, have no such difficulty. Characters, like real people, won’t realize it’s a dream while they are still dreaming, or before they are wide awake, but, once completely awake, they, like real people, find dreams obvious. After all, they wake up in bed (or in some sleeping position); their dreams quickly fade from memory unless they write them down or make some other special effort; and all of the magical flying and non sequiturs to their real life are obviously unreal, in retrospect.

Real Life

Aside from the fact that the Devil is only a literary metaphor—evil is real, but not Satan—it is quite clear that various things happen in this story that couldn’t be real. Moreover, subsequent to the experience, young Goodman Brown does not lead his life as though he thought it had been objectively real. He doesn’t flee or fight or investigate. But it had seemed real; in a way, more real than real.

“More Real Than Real”

What is neither a dream nor real, but feels, in the words of Nobel Prize novelist, Toni Morrison, “more real than real”? According to Morrison, it is novelists’ subjective experience of their characters and stories. Or, as I would say, it is the way people with multiple personality experience their alternate personalities.

Young Goodman Brown is a parable about fiction writers’ “more real than real” creative subjective experience.

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne. “Young Goodman Brown” [1835]. In Nathaniel Hawthorne: Selected Tales and Sketches. Third Edition with Introductions by Hyatt H. Waggoner. New York, Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1950/1970.