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Analyzing “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Formalist View vs Marxist View
Think of all the different literary perspectives that someone can read a text like “Young Goodman Brown” from and you will understand a bit about the importance of Literary Theory.
One reader might look at this literary work from their own set of beliefs and think that Nathaniel Hawthorne was putting down religion, while a different reader might look at the historical context of the story and think he was trying to bring awareness to the horrible events of the Salem Witch Trials.
Looking beyond the story, and beyond the words on the page, is key to understanding what might really have been going on in the author’s mind. There are many perspectives we could use to look further into the meaning of this text, but let’s choose Formalism and Marxism for now.
A Formalist View
Explaining and interpreting the short story “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne through a Formalist lens requires an interpretive approach that emphasizes literary form and devices in the text (Brewton).
Victor Shklovsky stated that “literature has the ability to make us see the world anew — to make that which has become familiar strange again” (Bertens 29). This causes us to experience the…
