The Curious Style of Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown :: Young Goodman Brown YGB

The Curious Style of girlish Goodman browned The multi-faceted title found in Nathaniel Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown has many features of interest. It is the intent of this essay to elaborate on these features, with support from literary critics where available. Herman Melville in Hawthorne and His Mosses, (in The Literary World August 17, 24, 1850) has a noteworthy gab on Hawthornes style Nathaniel Hawthorne is a man, as yet, almost short mistaken among men. Here and at that place, in some quiet arm-chair in the clanking town, or some deep nook among the noiseless mountains, he may be appreciated for something of what he is. But unlike Shakespeare, who was forced to the verso course by circumstances, Hawthorne (either from simple disinclination, or else from inaptitude) refrains from all the popularizing noise and install of broad farce, and blood-besmeared tragedy content with the still, rich utterances of a great thinker in repose, and which sends few thoughts i nto circulation, except they be arterialized at his large fond(p) lungs, and expanded in his honest heart. How beautifully does this critic capture the prefatorial attitude of Hawthorne, who avoids the noise and show and emphasizes his rich utterances. Could Hawthornes rich uterances be the reason for Henry Seidel Canby in A Skeptic Incompatible with His measure and His Past to talk about the dignity of his style? And indeed there is a lack of consistence between the scorn that our younger critics lavish upon Hawthornes moral creations and their respect for his style. They admit a dignity in the expression that they will not allow to the thing expressed (62). Canby continues Hawthornestyle has a mellow beauty it is sometimes dull, sometimes prim, but it is neer for an instant cheap, never, like our later American styles, deficient in whole tone and unity. It is a style with a patina that may or may not accord with current tastes, yet, as with Browne, Addison, Lamb, Thoreau, is undoubtedly a style. Such styles recant only from rich ground, long cultivated, and such a soil was Hawthornes. . . . keeping back from the new life of America into which Whitman was to plunge with such exuberance, he kept his style, like himself, unsullied by the prosaic world of industrial revolution, and chose, for his reality, the workings of the moral will. You can scarcely praise his style and chafe his subjects.