Review of “Young Goodman Brown” (1835)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (writer).
Read in 2017.
By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places—whether in church, bed-chamber, street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty bloodspot.
A wonderfully disillusioned twist to the familiar Christian moral allegory of a witches’ Sabbath, here in Puritan Salem with native pagans, but it might as well be any part of medieval Europe.