The Uncanny Village: How Freud Illuminates "Young Goodman Brown" Annabelle Toler-Scott College

In The Uncanny Sigmund Freud argues that the uncanny is not only that which is new, but that "the "uncanny" is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar" (Freud 1). In Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "Young Goodman Brown", Hawthorne uses the uncanny to dramatically change both Goodman Brown and the reader's understanding of the Puritan village that is Goodman Brown's home. He does this by intentionally not defining the conditions of Goodman Brown's world and by utilizing the tool of repetition; both by demonstrating the many states of Faith's symbolic pink ribbons, and by representing the villagers and Goodman Brown's wife Faith as "double" characters.

Freud asserts that representation of the uncanny in a fantastical world can only be successful if the author is ambiguous about the state of the world that they are thrusting the reader into. In "Young Goodman Brown", Puritan Goodman Brown leaves his wife at home for a midnight rendezvous with the Devil, eventually imposing on the Devil's congregation in the woods. This literary world is certainly far from the reality we experience; however, if Hawthorne made this clear from the beginning of the story, then, as Freud concludes,...