Young Goodman Brown Analysis

In the article “Young Goodman Brown’s ‘evil purpose’: Hawthorne and the Jungian shadow,” written in 2005, the author D.J. Moores is writing towards an audience of people that care about psychology. His audience also includes people that have read the short story “Young Goodman Brown” and have thought about the changes in the main character's life and how it affected him psychologically. Moores is a credible author having written five books and many scholarly articles along with teaching ecstatic poetry at Kean University.

Issue section: Moores is writing this article based on the Jungian theory, which is referring to an unconscious aspect of one’s personality that the unconscious ego doesn’t claim as itself. The shadow that the author mainly

They had to have been a dream or Goodman Brown’s case a nightmare or his unconscious making it up. Predmore claims that readers perspective of the short story can be broadened by looking at it from a Jungian theory rather than from freudism and that it can look at all of his unconscious state. Predmore states that it shows at the beginning of the short story that Goodman Brown’s problems are psychological because they can not happen to someone in the right state of mind or at all in real life. “Before anything ‘strange’ or supernatural happens, he wonders to himself, ‘What if the devil himself should be at my elbow?’ and in the very next instant the devil magically appears, as if Brown has conjured him out of his own mind” (251). Predmore then goes on to explain that in mythology that the destructive qualities of the unconscious show up to the hero in personified form and the hero must conquer them. “What Brown encounters in the forest is the unconsciousness, then, is the Puritan version of the terrible mother, witchcraft, which threatens to engulf the strict and narrow consciousness of this typical Puritan boy” (252). The anima is than brought up talking about the sexual aspects of the story or the feminine part of the man. “Neumann says that the ‘anima… confronts the ego hero with a “trial” that he must withstand” (253). In the article Predmore states that Brown isn’t able to save Faith, his wife, from the anima in his conscious personality because she is there in the forest with him. The shadow that Brown has is what he views as the negative aspects of Puritan views. “Brown’s culture, of course, is Puritanism, and Hawthorne shows that what Brown experiences with the devil and with the ritual over which the devil presides clearly reflects the values the Puritans considered negative. The three archetypes play an important role to Brown and his unconscious trip into the woods to see the