Content area
Full Text
This essay examines speech acts and sexuality in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," relying on Lacanian psychoanalysis, etymology, and speech act theory to identify how Brown acts as a split subject. While many scholars have taken a psychosexual approach to Hawthorne's tale, critics still treat Brown's voyage into the forest like a morality tale. This paper's unique approach to the story focuses entirely on the passages before Brown departs from his home and after he returns from the forest, interpreting the man's subsequent trauma as an internal bifurcation rather than a spiritual crisis. When examined side-by-side, the few paragraphs before and after Brown's forest experience reveal a split in the main character, vis-à-vis his relationship to others' speech. Specifically, an eventual fusion of sex and speech puts pressure on Brown's reception of speech acts. This fusion grants Brown sexual productivity but traumatizes him in the process.
Goodman Brown has no first name. To be precise, Nathaniel Hawthorne never grants the eponymous hero of "Young Goodman Brown" (1835) anything but a title. As far back as the thirteenth century, "Goodman" referred to "the male head of the household."1 By the 1500s, the term would be used with the possessive pronoun "her" to indicate a man's relationship to a woman.2 These definitions lasted through the 1700s, the historical backdrop of the story, as well as the 1800s, when Hawthorne wrote the tale. In either case, "Goodman" acts as a cultural signifier which emphasizes masculinity and, implicitly, male sexual productivity. As for the man's surname, "Brown" suggests an unpleasant kind of liminality. Since the eighteenth century, "Brown" could mean "duskiness" and "gloom" - neither of which sounds pleasant, but neither of which implies complete darkness.3 In short, the man only has two identifiers: an impersonal, loaded title and a bleak surname that he inherited from previous generations.
To contrast, Brown's wife Faith is only referred to by her first name. One might assume that she appropriated her husband's surname at marriage, but the text never refers to the woman as "Faith Brown," "Mrs. Brown," or even "Goody Brown." The couple may possess a ceremonial bond, but Hawthorne does not conjoin the two of them in language. Even when referring to the characters by their proper names, one...