SOURCE: “Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Revival Movement,” in American Transcendental Quarterly, Vol. 44, Fall, 1979, pp. 311–32.

In the following essay, Shuffelton examines “Young Goodman Brown” in the context of New England spiritual revival movements of the 1820s and 1830s, finding some parallels between revival meetings and Brown's experience in the forest.

Because the best of Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction so often incorporates historical materials, a great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted both to these materials and to his use of them. Although this activity is crucial to our understanding of Hawthorne's work, our concern with his artful transformation of his sources can also mislead us about the nature of his imagination and his art. Intensive study of Hawthorne's use of history ironically tends to encourage the stereotype of the recluse writer in a Salem attic by suggesting that his working out of universal human dilemmas in historical terms displaced...