SOURCE: “Visible Sanctity and Specter Evidence: The Moral World of Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” in Essex Institute Historical Collections, Vol. 110, October, 1974, pp. 259-99.

In the following essay, Colacurcio examines “Young Goodman Brown” in the context of Puritan theology, faith, and “spectral evidence” of witchcraft and the devil. Colacurcio suggests that Hawthorne uses his story to demonstrate “that witchcraft ‘ended’ the Puritan world”.

Any seriously “complete” interpretation of Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown” must somehow take account of David Levin's rather exact description of Brown's experience in the actual language of 1692. It may be possible to disagree with his final assertion that the “literal” dimension of “Young Goodman Brown” is “social,” condemning “that graceless perversion of true Calvinism which, in universal suspicion, actually led a community to the unjust destruction of twenty men and women”; but it seems impossible to deny that “spectral evidence” is, in some sense, the central...