Essay Comparing Gray And Young Goodman Brown

Oscar Wilde challenged widely-accepted Victorian ideals in his plays, while Nathaniel Hawthorne produced hefty critiques against Puritan society. Apparently, subtle insinuations have no place in transformative literature, and The Picture of Dorian Gray and “Young Goodman Brown” defend this principle quite emphatically. The former is a story of an Adonis driven to madness by a cynic, and the latter is a tale of a devout Puritan exposed to the dark secrets of his Salem community. These descriptions are clearly simplified, but they allude to the inherent Faustian qualities of each work. The purpose of these Faustian structures poses a question that is critical to understanding the similarities between the narratives. Despite Wilde’s literary focus on Decadent-based themes and Hawthorne’s development of early American Gothic ideals, the threads of Faustian symbolism cross the conventional boundaries that separate literary movements. At the most basic level, Faustian allusions are generally used to develop the good vs. evil archetype, but Wilde and Hawthorne take a more ambitious route, using Faust to communicate a religious message. The Faustian typifications of Gray and Brown extend the good vs. evil archetype to a

The quasi-magical realist styles of Hawthorne and Wilde separate the good vs. evil archetype into two alternate views of reality, thus creating an intrinsic Faustian dichotomy within each work. This powerful literary structure is then used by Hawthorne to reveal inherent contradictions within Puritan society and by Wilde to criticize the regimented, prosaic nature of Christianity during the Victorian era. In “Young Goodman Brown”, Hawthorne’s description of the witch-meeting in the forest provides a particularly telling example of his magic realist