SOURCE: “Hawthorne's Polar Explorations: ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 1, June, 1969, pp. 45-56.

In the following essay, Carpenter considers “Young Goodman Brown” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” as companion pieces, with the first tale treating corruption brought on by isolation, and the second by society.

The misadventures of Young Goodman Brown and Major Molineux's youthful cousin Robin have in recent years been as extensively interpreted as any of Hawthorne's shorter works. Since both tales are ambiguous and puzzling in the characteristic fashion of the best Hawthorne stories, it is not surprising that they have elicited attention from a variety of critical perspectives. Their imagery, symbols, cultural milieus, historical backgrounds, psychoanalytic implications, and mythic patterns have all been so thoroughly examined that we know as much about the individual tales as we can rightly expect from the application of the critical intelligence...