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Allegory and Symbolism: Young Goodman Brown and The Mask of the Red Death Essay

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Young Goodman Brown Nathaniel Hawthorne

In Salem, Massachusetts, in the 17th century, in a community of god-fearing Puritans, lives Young Goodman Brown. He is leaving his house and his young wife of three months, Faith, at dusk on an errand which will keep him away from home the whole night. He is going to a witches sabbath to be inducted into devil worship.

His journey takes him through the forest which he enters with mixed feelings of doubt and excitement. There he meets a strange man with a staff that resembles a serpent. Goodman Brown expresses his doubts about his mission and the man, who seems to be a devil figure, accompanies him while trying to persuade him to carry through his mission. The fact that he hears and sees various supposedly upright figures of the community, including men of the cloth and his own catechism teacher, persuades him that his disillusionment with the Puritan faith is justified. However, he is truly shocked to see his own wife at the meeting. At the moment of baptism he calls her to look up to heaven and resist, at which point everyone disappears and he finds himself alone in the forest.

The experience turns him into a bitter and disillusioned man who never again can trust any member of his community. He dies a suspicious, desperate man.

Nathaniel Hawthorne did not publish this story in Twice Told Tails perhaps because it was too personally autobiographical and failed in the original conception as an allegory. Perhaps when he started to write it and gave the principal characters their names, he believed that it would be allegorical. However, apart from Young Goodman Brown as Everyman, or Faith as, literally, faith, the other characters are not archetypes. They could even have been real people to Hawthorne. Indeed, the devil figure is suggested to resemble his ancestors. Perhaps the catechism teacher and the churchmen were also real people in Hawthornes life.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was brought up in the Unitarian church so viewed the Calvanist faith from the outside and its iron world, as he called it, appalled him. He was ashamed that members of his family had persecuted Quakers and had sentenced Salem witches to be burned. He abhorred the arrogant exclusivity of New England puritanism and its culture of biblical promise and manifest purpose.

However, he could not rid himself of the belief in, what Melville described as the innate depravity and original sin from whose visitation, in some shape or another, no thinking mind is always and wholly free For this reason, not only have Hawthorne and Goodman Brown lost faith in their religion, they have also lost the belief in the innate virtue of the human soul and, therefore, cannot make the leap of faith necessary to encompass the optimistic transcendentalist doctrine in a new beginning, the salvation of man in commune with Nature and Emersons Oversoul.

Goodman Brown struggles through the dark forest which symbolises mans spiritual journey through a difficult, dangerous and sometimes treacherous life. In this case, however, it only leads to evil.

In the history of New England Calvinism there was a period of zealous self-awakening which preachers like Jonathan Edwards demanded was necessary to achieve personal salvation. Goodman Brown awakes at the end of the story but not to find his salvation. On the contrary, he is left in more doubt than before; he loses his Faith a second time and lives out the rest of his life in suspicion and distrust toward the community in which he lives and his own wife and family.

On losing his faith (in his belief in the knowledge of right and wrong, virtue and sin, good and evil, in God and in his fellow man) he had nothing on which to base his life and give it meaning. He lost the ability to be joyous and resigned himself to a cynical existence while awaiting an inevitable death. As Hawthorne wrote to Longfellow There is no fate in the world so horrible as to have no share in its joys and sorrows. Hawthorne knew the necessity for human warmth and contact yet was a solitary man who lived in isolation.

The Masque of the Red Death Edgar Allan Poe

Prince Prospero takes 1,000 of his friends to his castle to escape the plague of the red death that is ravaging the country. After 6 months he holds a masque in a suite of 7 rooms which runs from east to west and the colours of which represent the 7 ages of Man. There is no natural light, only enormous torches placed outside in a corridor that runs the length of the walls, the light from the flames filters through the stained glass and increases the atmospheric effect. In the last black room with red stained glass windows is a huge clock which strikes the hour. As midnight approaches a reveller wearing a mask representing the Red Death and with clothes spattered with blood appears. Prince Prospero chases him through the suite until arriving at the black room, where, on attempting to stab him, he is struck down and dies. The rest of the revellers grab the newcomer, only to find that this shroud and mask are empty. They all succumb to the Red Death.

This short story was originally published as The Mask of the Red Death and later changed by Poe to The Masque. According to Cassells English Dictionary (1970) the definition of mask is a covering for the face while masque is a play or dramatic entertainment the performers wearing masks which is more indicative of Poes allegorical intentions. It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. Possibly from the Arabic word maskhara meaning buffoon, in English masquerade taken to mean a ball or assembly at which people wear masks or disguise, pretence.

We are told that the suite of seven rooms represents the seven ages of man, therefore the masked ball is symbolic of Life which is pretence and duplicity although accompanied by pleasant music, dcor and lights. The revellers go through Life wearing masks that hide their real faces. The clock in the seventh room is symbolic of Time and every hour reminds them that Time is unstoppable: when the clock strikes the hour, the musicians pause to listen, the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hand over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation. Death appears as midnight nears, Prince Prospero is angry but can do nothing. It is interesting that the Prince himself directed, in great part.. the construction of the suite of rooms, therefore helping everyone, including himself, toward their own death.

However, Poes Masque is not a very satisfactory allegory if the purpose of such is moral and didactic. The only conclusion that we can draw is that we cannot avoid death. There is nothing the reader can extract from the story that suggests alternative behaviour would result in an alternative, possibly happier, ending.

We can disagree with Goodman Browns interpretation of his experience but not with Prince Prosperos. Poes aim is not to offer alternatives but to indulge us in our macabre delight in the Gothic, the grotesque and the spine chilling.

With regard to the backdrop of the two plots, while Young Goodman Brown has a realistic setting, using the dream possibility to frame the fantasy while Poes story is set in a totally fantasy world.

The time spans and balance are also different. In Goodman Brown, the action introduces the story and the denouement spans the rest of Browns life, while in the Masque we wait 6 weeks until the action begins and it is over in a space of a few hours.

The conclusions to both stories are not diagrammatically different. There is no escape; neither for Hawthorne, from the basic sin and depravity of mankind, nor for Poe, from death.

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