Aug. 28th, 2007

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"For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State."

"Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul."
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"Young Goodman Brown": curious how the wording of the curse Brown almost gets marked with, that those marked will be more aware of the evil in their fellow humans than in themselves, is kind of borne out in the unmarked Brown's subsequent behavior. And what's the deal with Faith? I mean, the exact deal--she's this, she's that, but what's Hawthorne's take on religion? And is his return to her at the end ironic, representing his new faith in evil? It's only while he's in the woods that he's not with her in some sense. The hymn is clearly ambiguous, isn't it, as to whether there's any separable, lost but real good in it, or if it's just the cover on the duvet of evil.

And what does it mean for human nature to be identical with evil, and what does it mean that one person but kind of but maybe resists (a la BM, never noticed that connection before--it's oddly exact). Thinking hard on this and "Molineux", and what they meant to Hawthorne. Was Hawthorne just a Tennyson, not really knowing what he knew? He seems to know something I don't, at times, or is anyway very good at giving that impression. Other times he's horribly bare and predictable. Strange man.

(Something in me resists the idea that this story is just an attack on Puritanism. It's too...central, first of all. Though I suppose the Puritan strain could have been close enough to Hawthorne's center to be worth this kind of treatment. But then, Molineux. And then, the fascinating either/orness of it: wrong or right, how could he ever know? And if right action leads to heaven, his first hour after death will be entirely ungloomy, one would think--so he's not necessarily even making a bad wager. If your suspiciousness comes from a vision, from how life reveals itself, it's hard to call that a character flaw. Again, though, H. could be targetting what Puritanism (or puritanism) did/does to innocents like Brown.)

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