The short story is an art form that was first mastered by the 19th century writer Edgar Allan Poe. In perfecting this form, Poe said “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression” (Mowery, 1997). As he tells his frequently bizarre and frightening tales, Poe presents his readers with symbol-rich imagery and descriptions based on binary oppositions to help build the suspense and horror of his tale. As Mowery explains, binary oppositions are things such as hot and cold, male and female, dark and light. “It is in the subtle shifts in our expectations of the character that tension and conflict are developed” (1997). Yet Poe was not the only author to work within the short story genre or to use the concept of binary oppositions to explore its effects on an audience or a character. This concept of impossibly conflicting viewpoints as one both loves and hates, has faith and does not, is frequently illustrated in terms of the madness that comes upon characters as they experience deep feelings that had potential to overwhelm. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe and “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, both authors employ symbolism and madness to expose the fallacy of the binary opposition.
Poe employs two primary objects in “The Tell-Tale Heart” to illustrate the cause of his narrator’s madness. The old man’s eye is the first of these symbols to appear within the text of the story. As the narrator attempts to explain why he felt led to murder, he says,
It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever. (156).
Basic medical knowledge to the modern reader quickly identifies this condition as symptoms of a cataract, a film that gradually creeps over the eye of an elderly person, eventually rendering him or her blind while also changing the color of the eye to a pale bluish color. It is this encroachment that seems to so bother the narrator, “it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye” (257). “The concept of the evil eye dates back to ancient times. It was believed that those who possessed the evil eye had the power to harm people or possessions merely by looking at them” (Young, 2003: 6). The presence of the evil eye in the loved old man is the catalyst that leads to the narrator’s madness.
The other major symbol that appears in the story is announced within the title; it is the old man’s heart. The heart begins to take on its meaning just as the eye has begun to work its way out of the story. As the narrator continues to stare at the eye revealed in the small light of the lantern, the sound of the beating heart takes on substance and life. When the narrator first perceives it, he says, “there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sounds well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart” (158-159). This sound makes him angry again because he is forced to connect the old man’s heart, and his love, with the baleful gleam of the evil eye that has been so distracting. As this beating sounds increases its rate, the narrator begins to feel it will wake the neighbors and is incited to action. When the heart begins beating again after the murder, the reader begins to question the true source of the sound. “The narrator starts hearing the heartbeat two times, right before the killing and after the killing. The heartbeat that the narrator is hearing is the heartbeat of his own. His conscience is warning him of the consequences he may encounter if he does the deed, eventually leading the narrator to confess the crime” (Sado, 2000). The heartbeat can also be said to symbolize the love the narrator felt for the old man, which will never go away and will always haunt him/her because of the harm they did to him.
Having set things up in terms of the two symbols conflicting against one another, the narrator of the tale continues to insist that he is not mad, eventually convincing the reader this is not the case. It is seen almost at once that the incongruity of the ‘evil eye’ housed within a person that had been loved drives this caregiver to extreme distraction, pushing his/her mental state over into a madness that sought escape in whatever form it could devise. “He discloses a deep psychological confusion. Almost casually he admits lack of normal motivation … Yet in spite of this affection he says that the idea of murder ‘haunted me day and night’” (Robinson, 1965: 369). Although the rationality of the actions taken are illustrated as a means of proving the absence of madness, “If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body” (159), the macabre details delivered completely without emotion and with a simple step-by-step precision tend to hint otherwise, “The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs” (159). This casual approach to murder and the horrid butchering that occurred afterward is further accented by the narrator’s audacity of placing his own chair directly over the spot where the body was hidden as s/he talked with the officers that had come to investigate a shriek that was heard. “The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was singularly at ease” (160). As the tale ends, it becomes clear not only that the narrator is completely insane, but also that this insanity was brought about by an inability to avoid the evil eye and the guilt of having killed a loved person placed within the narrator’s care.
This same sense of madness and descent into despair as a result of an inability to find a means of compromising oppositional beliefs can be found in Nathanial Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown.” Hawthorne wrote his stories from a perspective already deeply embedded within the myth and beliefs of the Puritan world. His ancestors had landed on North American soil with a sword in one hand and a Bible in the other, ready to tame the savages body and spirit. He grew up in Salem, the site of some of the most famous witch trials ever documented in this country, and his own training and upbringing were heavily influenced by many of these same belief systems. It is not surprising, then, that these ideas had a strong influence on Hawthorne’s stories and provide the foundation upon which many of these stories are built. However, while Hawthorne was strongly steeped in these ideas, his writings reveal a deep questioning of their validity and a doubt regarding the wisdom of endorsing such a strong spiritual opposition. In Puritan society, one was either an evil sinner or a saintly penitent with no room or understanding for the concept of a middle ground. Hawthorne explores the possible consequences devout belief in this opposition might have on an impressionable mind in his short story “Young Goodman Brown.” Like Poe, Hawthorne uses imagery to provide an intimate understanding of the main character’s descent into madness as a result of his inability to negotiate equally valid conflicting concepts such as good and evil.
At the opening of the story, the title character Young Goodman Brown sets off from his home at dusk with the intention of having his required conversion experience that signals the young Puritan’s transition from learner to modeler of true spiritual enlightenment in his society. “The conversion experience – a sudden realization brought about by divine intervention, a vision, or perhaps a dream – easily translates into the dream allegory of Hawthorne’s work and allows the author to use Puritan doctrine and the history of Salem to argue the merits and consequences of such a belief” (McCabe, 1998). The concept of the conversion experience was central to the Puritan society as a secular and a religious rite of passage that opened the individual to participate in the adult culture. This concept was closely tied to the central tenets of the religion as “the Puritans distinguished between ‘justification,’ or the gift of God’s grace given to the elect, and ‘sanctification,’ the holy behavior that supposedly resulted when an individual had been saved” (Campbell, 2008). This illustrates some of what Goodman Brown must have expected as he set off from his house that evening. Preparing to take his first steps into the adult male community of his spiritual and physical home, he was ready to receive the sanctification of his God and perhaps discover he himself had proven faithful enough to justify his own quick elevation within that society. Expecting to discover a profoundly deep inner faith, Hawthorne demonstrates through Brown’s progress how this conversion experience is more a kind of madness in itself, caused by the discovery that pure good is not possible and an inability to justify this with the realities of evil inherent in the human race.
Perhaps the most obvious form of symbolism Hawthorne includes in this story is Goodman Brown’s wife Faith. This young bride appears at the beginning of the tale as she begs her husband not to set out on this journey. Her warning, “may you find all well when you come back” (293), seems to indicate the peril does not apply strictly to Goodman Brown as he sets off on his journey, but for Faith as well in being left behind, alone in the darkness. This provides the reader with the sense that Goodman Brown is testing his Faith in more ways than one as he enters the forest, an idea reinforced through Hawthorne’s description as he makes his way “on his present evil purpose. He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind” (294). The most blatant indication of the danger of Brown’s journey so far comes with Goodman Brown’s response to the older gentleman when he is admonished for being late: “Faith kept me back a while” (294). Although the reader knows the younger man is referring to his wife, the name of the lady also serves to warn the reader that a pure faith such as Goodman Brown possessed prior to entering the wood would have been better off had he simply trusted to its council and remained home for the night. Through this early interaction, Hawthorne is working to show that a complete conversion to the tenets of the Puritan religion leads not to salvation as is supposed, but to an utter loss of faith as the belief in a forgiving God is incompatible with a belief in a human soul that is beyond redemption.
Exploring the concept of Faith in such an obvious way enables Hawthorne’s primary focus to remain grounded upon the Goodman’s journey as a physical symbol of the character’s descent into despair. He first meets with a character that resembles him so much in shape and form that “they might have been taken for father and son” (294). The people that Young Goodman Brown sees and hears as he makes his way to the heart of the forest further illustrate the concept that the human soul is beyond redemption, regardless of their good works performed in the light of day. First, he is told of the acquaintance his father and grandfather have had with the wily fellow met in the woods as well as given reason to doubt the goodness of the men and women Young Goodman Brown looks up to in his village life. Then the two men come upon an elderly woman walking through the woods, presumably to the same destination: “a female figure on the path, in whom Goodman Brown recognized a very pious and exemplary dame, who had taught him his catechism in youth, and was still his moral and spiritual adviser, jointly with the minister and Deacon Gookin” (295). It is his meeting, or rather the witnessing of the meeting between the good woman and his companion, that first opens Young Goodman Brown’s eyes to the idea that the people he has considered so good in his lifetime are as full of the sin and corruption that his religion professes exists in all men at the time of their birth. Despite her many good deeds in the town and her close association with everything good and honorable, Young Goodman Brown sees Goody Cloyse as a well-versed witch, the most evil creature in creation, as she associates herself with the stranger and unhesitatingly makes use of his serpentine walking stick. What becomes clear to him through this journey is that “damnation is not inherited but chosen and is redeemable through human agency,” but even “if guilt itself was escapable, brotherhood with the guilty was not” (Ziff, 1981: 142). At almost every step along the way, it seems Young Goodman Brown is about to defy the devil’s wishes and refuse to follow along the path to his conversion experience, but each time he tries, another familiar voice, shape or sign spurs him to continue on until he is no longer capable of retaining any Faith in any shape at all.
Despite Young Goodman Brown’s last second decision to turn to God before being consecrated in the Devil’s congregation, the fact that he is able to find no peace in his future life emphasizes Hawthorne’s assessment that devout belief in the Puritan ideals can lead to nothing other than miserable insanity as the individual becomes incapable of trusting either their own interpretations or the sincerity of others. According to Soler (1998), the revelation of the conversion experience “is often the result of a Purtian confronting his repressed evil. According to the Journey towards Justification, this confrontation should teach him to let go of his worldly dependence and strive for a life without sin.” Although his Faith has been tested, Goodman Brown is no longer able to believe in her. His experience has taught him that all people contain evil in their souls and that no one can be trusted. Even his own thoughts are subject to questioning and at no point in time does he ever return to the easy lifestyle with his neighbors he once knew. Regardless of appearances, his life is now one full of evil at every turn where the slightest evil counteracts even the greatest good and no hope remains that a Godly life might eventually lead one to heaven. In this story, “Hawthorne poses the dangerous question of the relations of Good and Evil in man but withholds his answer. Nor does he permit himself to determine whether the events… are real” (Fogle, 1970: 16). This dreamlike quality provided is the final clue that Hawthorne, like Poe, finds only madness in attempting to hold to a pure belief in one half of an binary oppositional concept.
Through both of these stories, Poe and Hawthorne explore the concept of binary oppositions and the effect they can have on the human mind as it dedicates itself to one half of the concept. The narrator of the Tell-Tale Heart has devoted him/herself to the pure concept of love and devotion to a single person, but the changes that come over that person are hateful. The stress that builds as the narrator obsesses over attempting to reconcile these oppositional features contained within the same object eventually drives the individual mad, causing them to engage in brutal murder. In the same way, the main character of Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” has dedicated himself to an idealistic concept of adult spirituality and a sense of what is good. However, good cannot exist without evil and the character is forced to come into contact again and again with images of the blending of good and evil within the same object. Like the narrator of Poe’s tale, the character is unable to reach a conciliatory position between these two poles and spends the rest of his life in a type of madness in which he is no longer able to fully connect with others, including his wife.
Works Cited
Campbell, Donna M. “Puritanism in New England.” Literary Movements. (2008). Web.
Hawthorne, Nathanial. “The Young Goodman Brown.”
Fogle, Richard Harter. Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Light and The Dark. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970.
McCabe, Michael E. “The Consequences of Puritan Depravity and Distrust as Historical Context for Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” American Literature. Florida: Florida Gulf Coast University, 1998.
Mowery, Carl. “An Overview to ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Short Stories for Students. Gale Research. (1997).
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Aerie Books, (2003).
Robinson, E. Arthur. “Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Vol. 19, N. 4, (1965), pp. 369-378.
Sado, Koji. “The Mind of a Killer.” Romanticism. University of North Carolina. 2000.
Soler, Angie. “The Journey Into the Puritan Heart: Nathanial Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” American Literature. Florida: Florida Gulf Coast University, 1998. Young, Laura. “The Evil Eye.” Voices. Vol. 13, N. 1, pp. 6-7.
Ziff, Larzer. Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America. New York: Viking Press, 1981.