American Literature: Romanticism research assignment Student Research Submissions 2016

Stephen Defferari

23 November 2016

Reader-Response, Phenomenology, and the ‘Uncanny’ in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”

Even though there are phenomena that readers would identify as ‘uncanny’ in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Minister’s Black Veil,” the term does not appear in either story, and perhaps for good reason. Freud “recognized that people vary greatly in their sensitivity to that [uncanny] quality of feeling,” in which case it is not surprising if one does not experience the feeling at all, whether the experience is supposed to derive from phenomena in reality or texts (Newlin 84). Though what is interesting about his assertion that literature posses “more means of creating uncanny effects than there are in real life,” it creates a subsequent need to resolve the difference between “effect” and “feeling” (Freud 950). The ability or inability of a text to inculcate in readers an ‘uncanny’ feeling foregrounds two concerns which are equally relevant to the subject of readership and hermeneutics: the critical approach to the text, and the “personal assumptions and interpretive protocols” of readers (Leitch 1671).

Whether these aforementioned stories produce ‘uncanny’ feelings for readers or not, the ability of readers to identify ‘uncanny’ effects in the text means that they have must foreknowledge of the term which allows them to do so. I, for example, did not experience any kind of feeling that I would describe as ‘uncanny’ when I read through these stories; however I do own a copy of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, and contained within this voluminous anthology is Sigmund Freud’s book, The Uncanny, which allowed me to identify ‘uncanny’ effects in these stories when I corroborated them with definitions in Freud’s work. I am of the latter sort of readers whose critical approach is conditioned by texts that have been scrutinized and published by “interpretive communities,” and I do not typically approach a text to engage it in a kind “co-creative” process (Fish 2085). Andrew Miller posits one reason or this: “The methods and the object of cultural studies are mismatched,” since the “symbolic “complex whole”” is contained within a cultural complex which is “inaccessible to empirical observation” (Miller 165). Though not to deviate needlessly from the problem, what is the difference between “feeling” and “effects” in their relation to the ‘uncanny’?

I ask the question outright because Hawthorne is prone to asking questions, questions that cause me to question the presence and purpose of those questions in his stories. But it seems a question is as much a matter of presence as it is purpose, at least in “Young Goodman Brown.” The narrator questions the contents of the basin during the unwholesome gathering – “Did is contain water, reddened by the lurid light? or was it blood? Or, perchance, a liquid flame?” – and the authenticity of the events – “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?” (33-4). These are not the interrogative thoughts of Goodman himself questioning his reality, since all of his own questions (only two in number) occur in dialogue – “Can this be so?” – or in thought – “But where is Faith?” (26, 32). The questions of the narrator, if they are to be answered or not, are presumably directed towards an “implied reader” (Iser 1671). By asking readers these questions the narrator indicates that it is limited in its omniscience, and so depends partly upon the reader to provide conjectures about the veracity of the events in the text.

All that readers can do is apply judgement, not certainty.  The pivotal moment in  Stanley Fish’s essay, “Interpreting the Variorium,” is when he asserts that readers “come away from…[poems] not with a statement but with a responsibility, the responsibility of deciding” or judging a problem or crux of a text (2074). Similarly, the presence of questions in “Young Goodman Brown” gives to readers the responsibility of deciding the answers to these questions. Maybe the questions are not meant to be answered. Does it matter if the liquid in the basin is blood or water illuminated by red light? Does it matter if the events are a dream of Goodman Brown or real in the context? Readers have no way of knowing, so it is difficult to judge either way. Judgement in general has a special place in the story because it is the “figure of a man” who states that he has “drunk the communion wine...[with] a majority of the Great and General Court” (Hawthorne 26). In all probability the answers do not matter a great deal when compared with the effect of the events on the subsequent perception of Brown. Though a basic understanding of baptism and Puritan values will help to explain the import of these “effects” on his perception.

For Puritans, baptism is complicated by their theological program. To baptize infants is problematic because infants have no knowledge of the Christian denomination they are being born into, and subsequently have no knowledge of its views on faith. Baptism without faith is to no avail for Puritans, nor can it appropriate, call upon, or influence god’s salvific agency. In relation to the story, the unholy baptismal in which Brown participates inducts him into a community of “partakers of the mystery of sin, more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and thought, than…of their own” (Hawthorne 33). And in this capacity, “By the sympathy of [their] human hearts for sin [they will] scent out all places – whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest – where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood-spot” (33). The need of religious context and additional texts in order to determine the “author’s horizon” undermines the efficacy of a phenomenological mode of criticism, since additional texts are required to determine the meaning of the “conscious objects” of the author’s though process (Leitch 1683). Phenomenological theory, however, is still relevant for the story when it is localized in Puritan theology. If “Language brings man and his world into conscious existence,” and “’Being’ is the realm of encounters…[between] subjects and objects…[which makes] the spontaneous availability of each to the other,” then it is possible to conceive of ‘faith’ and the ‘uncanny’ as peculiar instances of being (Leitch 1120; Eagleton 291).

        The difference between the ‘uncanny’ and an instance of “supernatural intelligence” is equal to the difference between “imaginative and supernatural realities,” which is to say it is possible to trace the cause of one back to the imagination while the other has no plausible relation to the imagination (Tatar 168). For English writer Dr. Samuel Johnson, an event of the ‘uncanny’ in some way amounts to an “externalization of one’s consciousness” (Tatar 167). It is “Knowledge…[that] serves as the key to Dr. Johnson’s ability to discriminate between imaginary and supernatural reality,” insofar as the “passing on [of] knowledge of alien matters” provides the only condition under which it is possible to make the distinction between these two realities (Tatar 168). But what if this “knowledge…is of something familiar and well known but forgotten, repressed, or suppressed” in the mind of the person deliberating over the nature of this knowledge and event (Tatar 168)? Or, in the example of Goodman Brown, what if  knowledge of those present at the unholy communion – the minister, Old Deacon Gookin, Goody Cloyse, Faith, and himself – occurs within a context that cannot be differentiated between the dream world and reality? In Heideggerian terms, if “We speak when we are awake and we speak in our dreams,” and language is the medium through which we are engage in being, then being occurs regardless of the situation (1121).

The problem, however, is with the word ‘faith’. Puritan theology does not allow the physical to influence the spiritual, which is to say “Spiritual grace has no connection whatsoever with corporeal or physical realities” (Spronk). But this opens-up a spirit-body dualism which seems to be irreconcilable. If one is not able to influence the spirit or the spiritual agency of god in a physical medium, then how can one’s body affect one’s spirit? ‘Faith’ is a word without a material object present in reality (except of course Goodman’s wife). It is not an ‘object’ that is available in reality to bring consciousness and the world into simultaneous existence. The assigning of names is equivalent to the “tearing [of] objects away from the temporality which is of their essence” (Eagleton 288). The word ‘faith’ is assigned to a spiritual essence or internally kept being which has no foreseeable materiality. In many ways it is for Puritans a timeless state of being without reference to the being or sinfulness of the body and its relationship to the body has always been a topic of debate. ‘Spirit’ in Christianity is always synonymous with inclusiveness and collectivism, for all Christians attest to having a ‘spirit’ which can nether be differentiated from the ‘spirit’ of others, nor can it be thought of as separate from the substance of god. In Kantian terms, “any particular act of cognition” represents how “mind and world shape up to each other in some unspoken compact,” but even still this “mind” retains an uncertain relationship to ‘spirit’ (Eagleton 291).

        If ‘being’ and “the world are…correlatives of one another,” and ‘faith’ is a term given to an ideal object not perceptible in the world, then it can be thought of as a particular type of being in a world created by Puritan theology. This religious conditioning of the world creates an ontological conflict, insofar as ‘Being’ becomes mediated by conditions created in a social context that depends upon restrictions, separations, and regulations – in effect, conditions which reinforce one’s separateness from objects in the world. ‘Being for Heidegger is modified by “an actual social environment,” which is to say this environment creates circumstances of separation that cause ‘Being’ to become “covered up and forgotten” (Eagleton 294). To name Brown’s wife  ‘Faith’ is to symbolically embody an abstract term which represents immateriality, and then to have Brown temporarily leave Faith “evil purpose” is the same as to have him abandon the Puritan world altogether (Hawthorne 25). The inconsistency is the juxtaposition between materiality and immateriality which occurs in the figure of Faith.

Metaphorically, to leave the Puritan understanding of faith at the “threshold” is equal to abandoning a mode of being which is inconsistent with the material needs and necessities of reality. However, the inconsistency occurs because Faith is also the name of his wife, a corporeal figure assigned the name Faith. The issue of the perception of the body is at stake in Brown’s leaving: either he is abandoning Faith and a mode of being which disparages the materiality of the world, or he is abandoning corporality and also the materiality which is sustained and predicated by procreation and marriage. I cite the word “threshold” in the story because it represents Heidegger’s “dif-ference,” in which “the gathering of things and world in stillness happens” (Leitch 1120). Therefore, his crossing of this “threshold” is the severance of his ‘Being’ from Faith, and from all the socioreligious connotations which it represents. As Eagleton states, “ in a crisis of resolution” similar to that of Brown when he crosses the “threshold”), ‘Being’ “chooses to be what it is, recognizes its possibilities as its own rather than as determined by the anonymous Other, and projects itself forward towards death in a movement of separation from and re-engagement with the objects of its concern” (295). And further: “Such movements could be seen as a kind of rupturing of its ‘imaginary’ relations with the world – an entry into the ‘symbolic order’ whose structures are those of finitude, difference, individuation and death” (295). Though of course this all depends on the state of the events in the text – was it a dream or was it real? – and what this state means for the ‘Being’ of Goodman Brown. Three things subsequently need to be resolved: determining if the events in the story are ‘uncanny’; the relationship the ‘uncanny’ to the real or dream state of Brown; and the “effect” of these potentially uncanny event upon Brown’s ‘Being’.

        One of Freud’s definitions of the ‘uncanny’ refers to that which arouses sensations of “dread and horror” or fright, and “leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (Freud 930). Brown experiences doubt about his willingness to continue down the “dreary road” to the unholy communion, though it is not until he thinks that his “Faith is gone!” (Hawthorne 30). At this moment he experiences “grief, rage, and terror,” so much so that his emotional state become a strange amalgam of madness and despair (30). If “There is no good on earth,” and “sin is but a name,” then this means that there can be no sin because there is no “good” to contrast it with; though if this is so, then he should not have subsequently evoked the “Devil,” since Satan is a fallen angel who owes its existence to God – a contrastive force of “good” (30). Brown only re-crosses the threshold that he crossed earlier in his abandonment of Faith when he evokes Satan, seeing that both God and Satan are oppositional forces who operate in the same theological world of being that is associated with ‘faith’. ‘Grace’ is effectively the opposite of ‘sin’, as ‘evil’ is the opposite of ‘good’, and ‘faith’ the opposite of ‘guilt’. Maintaining these oppositional terms does not allow Brown to escape the totality of the theological system which has defined his ‘Being’.

The only way to do so would be to entirely deny Christianity and adopt another religious or existential system of being. That “Evil is the nature of mankind” also means that there is an oppositional term – good – to offset the imbalance (33). What is ‘uncanny’ about the scene of the unholy communion is not the participants, but the context. Tatar claims that “Uncanny events have the power to provoke a sense of dread precisely because they are at once strange and familiar” (169). The “evil” exoteric context of the communion is what makes the familiarity of the participants from Salem ‘uncanny’, since the context is what makes them unheimlich – or ‘unhomely’. The presence of associative terms, heimlich and unheimlich, indicates a “genesis of…double meaning…on the nature of a house or home: A house contains the familiar and the congenial, but at the same time it screens what is familiar and congenial from view, making a mystery of it” (Tatar 169).

        If one experiences an ‘uncanny’ series of events in reality or a dream, does it change the overall uncanniness of its effect? The problem with being able to determine whether or not the experience of Goodman Brown can be identified as ‘uncanny’ is the ambiguity of his emotional state following the loss of Faith in the wood, and after the concluding of the experience. Following his experience, the narrator states that Brown has become “A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not desperate man…from the night of that fearful dream” (Hawthorne 34). Whether the dream is true or not is superfluous to the disorienting effect it has wrought upon the life of Brown. He “turns pale” during the minister’s sermon, and he abstains from the “bosom of Faith,” presumably owing to the aftereffects of the experience (34). This effect seems to correspond with notions associated with the ‘uncanny’ exactly for the reason that it has altered his perceptions of his fellow citizens of Salem.

The difference that has occurred is that is ‘Being’ has shifted from one of ‘faith’ to one of ‘guilt’, insofar as it represents his induction into the “loathful brotherhood by the sympathy of all that was wicked in his heart” (Hawthorne 32). The questions that the narrator directly asks readers work to involve them into these ‘uncanny’ effects, and to question them. For the same reason that I do not experience an ‘uncanny’ sensation upon reading the text, the effects thereof at least incite readers to reevaluate the interpretive “protocols” that we use to evaluate textual phenomena. Though what is truly sinful or guilt-creating about the events of Goodman Brown? If Puritan dualism posits that we cannot influence the spiritual agency of god (even though we supposedly posses a spirit), then how is it that god has either the interest or intention to influence the physical? If god was not working through the psyche of Goodman, whether he is dreaming or not, then the events are simply products of Goodman’s imagination. All of the hypotheticals which derive from the narrator’s questions not only work to undermine any sort of ‘uncanny’ feeling which the text may produce, but they specifically force readers to examine the effects of the events. Though even with these effects, what are readers to make of Brown’s changed state?

It seems ambiguous to have made him “conscious of the secret guilt of others,” both in terms of “deed and thought” (Hawthorne 33). At worst, the act of abandoning faith lead him to a communion of his heimlich fellow citizens, in which they all become “partakers of the mystery of sin” (33). If it is a dream sequence, then the ‘uncanny’ purpose of the dream perhaps amounts to an “externalization of [his] consciousness,” in which his abandonment of faith becomes a source of his guilt (Tatar 167). The problem is with relation of the ‘canny’ and the ‘uncanny’ to ‘faith’ and ‘guilt (respectively): a loss of ‘faith’ in that which is unfamiliar (i.e. the spirit of immaterial) gives way to ‘guilt’, a familiarity with either a sense of wrong or ‘sin associated with a series of actions or beliefs. ‘Faith’ cannot be known because the spirit cannot be known, since Puritan theology asserts that the body has no way of influencing the spirit. Subsequently, if ‘faith’ is the defining mode of being in Heideggerian terms, then amounts to either an absence of self-knowledge, or an absence of ‘Being’ in general. Ye the point of the unholy communion that Goodman attends is to have knowledge of other people’s sin rather than his own. I think that the point of this paradox is that ‘faith’ and ‘guilt’ are heterogeneous terms which complicate ‘Being’ in general. How can one possess ‘faith’, an unknown relation to an unknowable god, and ‘guilt’ simultaneously, when Puritan theology adheres to the notion of ‘original sin’. If everyone is inherently rendered ‘guilty’ by original sin, then the idea of ‘faith’ calls into question human agency: if the willful act of having ‘faith’ is a function of reason, then does reason have its source in the body, spirit, or some composite of the two.

Works Cited

Eagleton, Terry. “The Politics of Being: Martin Heidegger.” The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Blackwell, 1990, pp. 288-316.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, Norton and Co., 2001, pp. 1622-1636.

Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction between Text and Reader.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, Norton and Co., 2001, pp. 1670-1682.

Hirsch, E.D. “Objective Interpretation.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, Norton and Co., 2001, pp. 1682-1709.

Fish, Stanley. “Interpreting the Variorum.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism,  edited by Vincent B. Leitch, Norton and Co., 2001, pp. 2067-2071.

Miller, Andrew. “The Uncanny and Cynicism in Cultural History.” Cultural Critique vol. 29, 1994, pp. 163-182.

Tatar, Maria. “Toward a definition of the Uncanny.” Comparative Literature, vol. 33, no. 2, 1981, pp. 167-182.