The Rewriting of the Faust Myth in Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown”

In this function as a "cautionary tale" (King 35ff.) and shocking example of moral depravity, the Faust myth, especially in the English chap-book version of the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, titled The History of the Damnabk Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, was immensely popular in New England in the late seventeenth and continuing into the eighteenth century, representing the very antitype of Puritan selfconception. Because of this powerful, if highly ambivalent, presence of the Faust myth, "[i]t is in the Puritan heartland of New England that many of America's most famous 'Faustian works came into existence" (Durrani 405). [...]the Faustian model combines both of these tendencies, the Enlightenment model of reason and self-development, as well as the romantic-gothicist model of magic self-exploration, with the possibility of one or the other becoming dominant, depending on whether Faust or Mephistopheles, the benign impulse of humanist progress, order and noble aspirations, or the satanic impulse of negation, chaos, and destruction prevails. Goodman Brown, even though he is not even fully initiated into the world of evil he has set out to explore, and indeed appears to repudiate its temptations at the last moment, is punished for his one night of half-hearted transgression and is condemned to a life-long curse of misanthropy, loneliness, and depression. [...]it seems that the older version of the Faust myth, the Puritan-Protestant view of the Faustian pursuit as damnable and evil in itself, as an unpardonable act of hubris which irrevocably damns itself, prevails in Hawthorne's story against the optimistic version of Goethe's belief in human redemption, in spite of all error and failing, through constant striving and self-improvement. First of all, the Walpurgisnacht scene in Faust is only one of many episodes in which Faust follows, with the help of Mephistopheles, his pursuit of deeper knowledge and experience, whereas in the case of Goodman Brown, his Faustian act of transgression and subsequent disillusionment is limited to this one night, after which he returns, at least externally, to his 'normal' life.