19세기 중산층 남성성으로의 고통스러운 여정: 너새니얼 호손의 「젊은 굳맨 브라운」을 중심으로

Abstract

This paper attempts to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” in terms of how the short story dramatizes psychological ordeals that young men, including the 31-year old yet unmarried author himself, underwent as a rite of passage for growing into middle-class adulthood during the 1820s and 1830s. For successful initiation into the middle class in early 19th-century America, young men were required to live up to the following two ideals: self-made manhood and the middle-class ideology of domesticity that touted the new family form of a privatized nuclear household based on strictly divided gender roles and spheres. First, young Brown, who married just three months ago, feels still confused about his new role as the head of a middle-class nuclear household, particularly because his family does not fit into the middle-class domestic ideology: his wife, Faith, sexually overpowers Brown, dismantling the gender hierarchy in the house. Bewildered, the young husband’s immediate response to the threatening female sexuality is to repress and evade it, in accordance with the precept of split gender roles of the middle-class family ideology. Second, this feeble-minded young man cannot cope with the uncertainties and complexities surrounding the middle-class men’s world either. More specifically, the social vicissitudes and consequent, confusing moral standards that are inextricably intertwined with the middle-class market are beyond his epistemological and psychological capacities, as evidenced in the following examples: his childish belief in his ancestors’ absolute morality; his parochial worldview limited to what he has assimilated from the teachings of his village religious leaders; and his weak-heartedness. Overwhelmed by this complicated middle-class adult world, the young man represses a dawning awareness of the vulnerable state of his own mind. That is, he allegorizes the complexities as the Devil’s omnipotence so as to displace his own anxiety onto others, just as the Puritans did in the Salem witch trials at the end of the 17th century. Hawthorne, however, does not intend to reprimand this immature young man for his failures. What the author wants to suggest by foregrounding Brown’s psychological ordeals and failures in “Young Goodman Brown” is to share and discuss with the age’s youths the excruciatingly painful experiences they have to go through to grow into middle-class manhood. More specifically, with this sympathetic and self-reflective short story, the author awakens his contemporary young men to typical mistakes that arise from their shared epistemological and psychological limitations, thereby warning them of a possible tragic end like Brown’s: a young man’s gloomy alienation from the harsh middle-class world of early 19th-century America.