Romanticism and Realism in Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown :: Free Essay Writer

Romanticism and Realism in Young Goodman Brown Herman Melville in Hawthorne and His Mosses, (The Literary World August 17, 24, 1850) has a noteworthy comment on Hawthornes romantic style And now, my countrymen, as an excellent author, of your own form and blood,--an unimitating, and perhaps, in his way, an inimitable man--whom better can I commend to you, in the first place, than Nathaniel Hawthorne. He is one of the new, and far better generation of your writer. The whole step of your beeches and hemlocks is upon him your own broad prairies are in his soul and if you travel apart inland into his deep and noble nature, you will hear the far bellow of his Niagara. Nathaniel Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown includes both the inimitable, nature-oriented style of romanticism as well as elements of trulyism. M. H. Abrams defines romantic themes in prominent writers of this school in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as being cinque in number (1) innovations in t he materials, forms and style (2) that the work involve a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings (3) that external nature be a persistent subject with a sensuous nuance and accuracy in its description (4) that the reader be invited to identify the protagonist with the author himself and (5) that this be an age of new beginnings and high possibilities for the person (177-79). Let us rise Young Goodman Brown in light of the above. First of all, Hawthorne was a real innovator in his use of the mental approach to characters within a story. A. N. Kaul considers Hawthorne preeminently a psychological writer burrowing, to his utmost ability, into the depths of our common nature, for the purposes of psychological romance. . . . (2). Q. D. Leavis says Hawthorne has imaginatively recreated for the reader that Calvinist sense of sin. . . . But in Hawthorne, by a wonderful feat of transmutation, it has no religious significance, it is as a psychological state that it is explored (37). Th e reader experiences most of the story through the eyeball and feelings of the protagonist, Goodman. In the following passage the reader is allowed, as is typical, to read his thoughts despicable little Faith thought he, for his heart smote him. What a wretch am I, to leave her on such an errand She talks of dreams, too.