Nick Harris

Blog 8/8/2025

 

“Young Goodman Brown” enters the Wrestling Arena: Barthes and Hawthorne on the Nature of Good and Evil

In the story “Young Goodman Brown,” Nathaniel Hawthorne critiques both the hypocrisy within Puritan society and the peril of viewing morality as a strict, black-and-white universal. When peering through the lens of the Roland Barthes essay “Wrestling,” the reader of “Young Goodman Brown” understands more clearly the dichotomy of perspective within the story. “Wrestling,” a comment on the artistry of popular cultural constructs in the light of immediate absolutes, betrays Hawthorne’s wrestling of black and white, right and wrong. Readers must question a Puritanical notion of Good, as represented by the “Young Goodman” of Hawthorne’s story, when he confronts its necessary opposite.

A Barthes view, in the realm of the wrestling metaphor, brings to each moment of the story a step in the wrestling match that Goodman Brown has in his contemplation of the world of good and its relation to the world of evil.  Goodman Brown, while journeying through the forest, meets the old woman who taught him the catechism, Goody Cloyse – only she now exclaims the moaning of a witch that has lost her broomstick (Hawthorne 280). He encounters his minister and a deacon on horseback, late for a meeting in the dark forest, presumably with the devil (282). Eventually he encounters a multitude of worshipers of the Devil, including his wife, Faith—whose name he has symbolically used as his grounding against the dark forces, but who he now sees to be in the throes of the Dark Figure who presides over the service: “…ye had hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are you undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness” (287). Goodman Brown escapes from this unholy meeting, but only to become, for the rest of his days, “A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man” (288). Each of the steps he takes along the way in the dark forest shows an immediacy of event, as in the throes of wrestlers Barthes wrestling ring. Goodman Brown survives the match, but the experience has forever wounded him, forever disillusioned him.

I am bringing the very French thinking of Barthes, one which defies overall structure in lieu of the immediacy of events, into the American wrestling ring by using the Barthes lens on a classic American short story. This is not a haphazard pairing. Barthes writes that the wrestling match is “a spectacle of excess” in which each gesture carries “a precise meaning, like those of the ancient theatre” (Barthes 17). In “Young Goodman Brown,” the forest is not a realistic space but a symbolic one; the journey through the forest conveys and heightens moral extremes, much the same as in Barthes wrestling arena.  For Barthes, the outcome of the wrestling match is not important; what matters is the clarity of the roles and the satisfaction of the moral drama. “What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself” (Barthes 19). Therefore, the fact that Goodman Brown’s outcome is disillusionment does not dissuade the reader from feeling fulfilled. Though  catharsis is not exactly the sigh of relief that Barthes wishes, the process of experiencing, moment by moment, the wrestling match soothes the readers need for visceral enticement.

Barthes, to American readers, should not be unfamiliar. The American champion of Barthes’ popularist aesthetics, Susan Sontag, brought these French ideas into an American landscape replete with the dominance of structural thinking. Sontag did so first with her proclamation of an artistic interpretation that is “Against Interpretation.” In the essay of that title, along with many others such as her “Notes on Camp,” Sontag professes the insistence of the American aesthete to herald their unique ideas and not to follow the throng of structuralists who would claim to know what makes “greatness” in art. Many American academes refused this call to uniqueness at the time that Sontag presented it (the 1960s), holding on to a traditional idea that structure creates a distinguishing factor for what is artistic and what is not. (For example, the writings of Annie Dillard are replete with this insistence that “the formal relationship among parts is the essential value of all works of art [Living with Fiction  34] -- but Dillard is far from alone).

A Barthes interpretation of “Young Goodman Brown” shows how literature can directly address the question of ethics. The young “Good” man of the story continually addresses head on the “Good” people of his life and finds that they have masks of evil laying behind them. In Goodman Brown’s case, the evil is devil-centered, as befits his Puritanical upbringing. But this juxtaposition of good with evil makes him question the ethics that he has heretofore consistently believed. The deliberation of these ethics, though causing an ironic depression within the protagonist, forms the theme of the story and the impetus for readers to engage with it. The creation of the discipline of “ethics and literature” thus becomes one of the foundational reasons for reading literature, purposes that students and other readers of literature are continually questioning.

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Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “Wrestling.” Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 1972, pp. 15–25.

Dillard, Annie. Living by Fiction. New York:  Harper & Row, 1982.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown,” 1835. Reprinted in Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches. Library of American # 2. 1982, pp.276-289.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984, pp. 95-104.

The image is AI generated from Google Gemini by Nick Harris 8/7/2025 using the prompt "Young Goodman Brown wlaking in forest, realistic trees and fog, small red eyes looking on from behind tree"

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