Introduction
Two of America’s greatest writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson, were profoundly influenced by the religious attitudes of their time. Puritanism still held strong sway for both writers, having a strong impact on the way they saw their world and what they chose to write about. Emerson was able to escape some of the Puritan ideals as he experienced firsthand the development of Unitarianism and helped develop the concepts of Transcendentalism, but Hawthorne seemed trapped within the Puritanical mindset. For both writers, nature and science held profound significance for the human soul, often using these as analogies for their views on the afterlife or the state of God himself. This can be seen through Hawthorne’s short stories “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Birthmark” as they are compared with Emerson’s Nature.
Main body
As Young Goodman Brown sets off on his dark journey, his young wife Faith implores him not to go, sensing some kind of immediate peril. Although Hawthorne presents a story in which a man is simply taking a walk through the woods at night, he is creating a strong analogy between the natural environment and the hazards of the Puritan faith. The emphasis on young here indicates the journey Goodman Brown is proposing to undertake is a journey to find the necessary conversion experience deemed important in the Puritan religion of Hawthorne’s time. As a newly married man, it would be among Goodman Brown’s chief concerns to establish himself as a member of the community and take his proper role as the head of a household by undergoing this journey. Yet, the fear expressed by Faith indicates there is a hidden peril in undertaking such a 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. The sense of foreboding in testing his own faith/Faith is further emphasized as Goodman Brown enters the forest “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). In this solitary journey, Hawthorne indicates that the doctrine of purposefully seeking challenges to faith already weakened by church dictates is a highly dangerous proposition with the capability of leading many men and women to their dooms rather than their salvation.
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 well 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 evilest creature in creation, as she associates herself with the stranger and unhesitatingly makes use of his serpentine walking stick.
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 viewpoint regarding his religion. 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.
The search for a means of perfecting life beyond the bounds of nature is examined in Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark.” Hawthorne uses the symbol of the birthmark as a way of illustrating science’s approach to the aberrations of nature as a problem that needs to be fixed. Aylmer’s wife Georgiana has a tiny hand-shaped birthmark on her face that shows most clearly when she is pale and upset and tends not to show at all when she is happy and rosy. While some people chose to look upon the birthmark as a magical charm, “some fastidious persons – but they were exclusively of her own sex – affirmed that the bloody hand, as they chose to call it, quite destroyed the effect of Georgiana’s beauty, and rendered her countenance even hideous.” This was the approach taken by Aylmer to such a degree that his only consideration of it was to find a means of removing it, regardless of the dangers this process might present to his lovely wife’s ultimate health or future. The essential nature of the mark to the lady’s person is brought forward several times such as just before he administers the final draught: “Know, then, that this crimson hand, superficial as it seems, has clutched its grasp into your being with a strength of which I had no previous conception. I have already administered agents powerful enough to do aught except to change your entire physical system.” When he does give her the drink to change her system, she is perfected and can no longer remain on earth in human form.
Although Emerson seems to agree with Hawthorne that science is not necessarily the answer to final earthly perfection, in direct opposition to Hawthorne’s analogy of the forest, in which nature serves as a reminder of the sinful activities of man, Emerson, in Nature, posits nature itself is the means of transcendence. He tries to convey what he means when he describes the transcendent power of nature: “In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, – no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.” As Hawthorne calls into question the reliability of science, demonstrating through his short story how science effectively kills what nature has already blessed as perfect, Emerson also indicates science leads us away from the powers of nature. By investigating the patterns of nature, Emerson says, science forgets to call into question the reasons of nature and it is this oversight that leads mankind to lose its connection to the universal and infinite.
Conclusion
Thus, while Hawthorne uses nature as a means of demonstrating the evil and sinfulness of mankind through the use of analogy, Emerson uses quite similar analogies to illustrate how nature points us to what is right and good about us. The two writers seem to agree that nature can serve as a means of attaining a transcendent spirit, yet disagree on the final result. Young Goodman Brown takes a walk in the darkened woods and finds the only devastation while Emerson’s same walk connects him to the sky and the concept of something much greater and more powerful than himself. Both writers seem to share a similar conception of science, as well as Hawthorne’s characters, use science to remove a birthmark that ends up killing a lovely lady and places her husband into eternal damnation for his pride while Emerson’s science neglects to incorporate the necessary and inextricable qualities of spirit into their experiments to less dreadful but similarly disappointing results.
Works Cited
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. American Transcendentalism Web. (2003). Web.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Birthmark.” Literature Network. (2007). Web.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Young Goodman Brown.” Literature Network. (2007). Web.