The Style in “Young Goodman Brown” Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story or short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” is an interesting example of the author's multifaceted style, which will be discussed in this essay. Edgar Allan Poe in "Twice-Told Tales - A Review", which appeared in Graham's Magazine in May 1842, comments on Hawthorne's "originality" and the "quiet and subdued manner" which characterizes his style: Hawthorne's Essays have much of Irving's character, with more originality and less refinement; while, compared to the Spectator, they have an enormous superiority on all points. The spectator, Mr. Irving, and Mr. Hawthorne have in common that quiet, subdued manner which we have chosen to call repose. . . . In the essays before us the effortlessness is too evident to be misunderstood, and a strong undercurrent of suggestion continually flows beneath the upper flow of the quiet thesis. In short, these effusions of Mr. Hawthorne are the product of a truly imaginative intellect, contained and to some extent repressed by fastidiousness of taste, constitutional melancholy, and indolence. Peter Conn in "Finding a Voice in a New Nation" reveals a characteristic of Hawthorne's style regarding his stories: "Almost all of Hawthorne's finest stories are remote in time or space" (82). Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown" is no exception to this rule, being set in historic Salem, Massachusetts, in 1600. Herman Melville in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (in The Literary World, Aug. 17, 24, 1850) has a noteworthy comment on Hawthorne's style: Nathaniel Hawthorne is a man, thus far, almost entirely mistaken among men. Here and there, in some quiet armchair in the noisy city, or in some deep corner among the silent mountains, it can be appreciated for something of what it is. But unlike Shakespeare, who was forced by circumstance to do the opposite, Hawthorne (either out of simple reluctance, or ineptitude) refrains from all the noise and popular spectacle of broad farce and bloody tragedy; content with the calm and rich expressions of a great intellect at rest, and putting few thoughts into circulation, unless they are arterialized in his great warm lungs and expanded in his honest heart. How beautifully does this critic capture Hawthorne's fundamental attitude, which avoids "noise and spectacle" and emphasizes his "rich expressions.
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