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영어

This paper aims to demonstrate Hawthorne’s historical consciousness in “Young Goodman Brown,” upon the assumption that the story shares with his other works two dynamic forces of historical consciousness, conflictual and coexistent-the centripetal and the centrifugal. The centripetal force of historical consciousness in “Young Goodman Brown” features the dominating dynamic of Puritanism, through which Hawthorne assimilated positively the concepts of God's inscrutability and duality of the human heart. The Puritanic concepts posit and establish Hawthorne’s unknowable Reality, or indeterminacy of the human subject, and his concept of double-duality of the human heart, represented in Goodman Brown’s character. The centripetal force in the story is thus a dynamic which characterizes Hawthorne’s “historicity of the text.”
Hawthorne's reaction against the Puritanic “either/or” paradigm of absolute oneness is represented in the story by the centrifugal force of historical consciousness. It is a dynamic force which negates and subverts the Puritanic absolutism through the paradigmatic diversified conception of Goodman Brown and features Hawthorne’s “textuality of history.” Hawthorne’s poetics of multiplicity as a centrifugal dynamic tries thus to establish an aesthetic mode of shadowing many truths inherent in thehuman existence represented through Goodman Brown.
The centripetal and the centrifugal forces inherent in the historical consciousness of the story typify the American ethos of contrariety and multiplicity in diachronic and synchronic perspectives, and the transcendental centrifugal, which is yet to be approached, sublimates the two conflicting forces in an aesthetic entity of Hawthorne’s romance.