SOURCE: "Setting and Fictional Dynamics," in Hawthorne's Functional Settings: A Study of Artistic Method, Editions Rodopi, 1977, pp. 128-31.

In the essay below, Carlson discusses how Hawthorne inverts the symbolic significance of the forest and village settings to initiate the breakdown of Goodman Brown's simplistic understanding of good and evil.

The most obvious ambiguity in "Young Goodman Brown" (New England Magazine, April, 1835) falls under H.-J. Lang's third classification, . . . the ambiguity of external actions. Was Brown's experience in the forest real, or was it a dream? Certainly, a strong case for this ambiguity could be culled from the implications of the scenic elements, but this is not the ambiguity which I intend to discuss because, clearly, it makes little difference to the ultimate meaning which Hawthorne wished to express. To the reader who asks "[h]ad Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream...