My first attempt at reading this was when I was 11. Lololol stupid idea.
Then were required to read it in high school. I actually didn't mind Hawthorne's prose so much, but I have a high tolerance (if not a soft spot) for the verbose and overly-flowery. However, he is one hell of a Debbie Downer! "Bleak" might be a good word.
I tried to at least have some fun with the paper I had to write on it; everyone was given a symbol (red, the letter A, nature, etc) and had to write about what it meant in the context of the story. I was given "spiritual forces" so I argued that what the characters were perceiving as the divine/demonic was merely a function of their psychology, having been indoctrinated with Puritan teachings on sin, and they were unnecessarily inflicting internal ideas of morality on an amoral world-- but it turned out my teacher was quite religious and not okay with this interpretation. (But considering an abstract thing like "spiritual forces" is usually what a symbol represents rather than the symbol, I'm still at a loss as to what she actually expected me to write about!)
Ouch. XD I imagine getting into it as a kid would've been impossible.
It's not that I'm against flowery/verbose writing (hell, I read H.P. Lovecraft, and Lolita is one of my all-time favorite books), but Hawthorne was too much for me to stomach. Oddly enough, I liked one short story of his... "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment." I wasn't as fond of "Young Goodman Brown" mainly because it was more rambly and the subject matter wasn't my cup of tea. But I'd much rather have YGB than The Scarlet Letter any day.
I kind of liked "Young Goodman Brown," but I read it along the same lines as my thesis for that Scarlet Letter paper, that it was the unattainable Puritan ideals of goodness that were the problem and not the humans who couldn't live up to them in the first place. I think it also helped Goodman Brown was so much shorter and more compact. (Well . . . compared to Scarlet Letter, lol).
"Young Goodman Brown" had more of an impact on me than The Scarlet Letter, I'll give it that. XD It also helped that it was a short story rather than a novel, so it was more straight to the point.
Then were required to read it in high school. I actually didn't mind Hawthorne's prose so much, but I have a high tolerance (if not a soft spot) for the verbose and overly-flowery. However, he is one hell of a Debbie Downer! "Bleak" might be a good word.
I tried to at least have some fun with the paper I had to write on it; everyone was given a symbol (red, the letter A, nature, etc) and had to write about what it meant in the context of the story. I was given "spiritual forces" so I argued that what the characters were perceiving as the divine/demonic was merely a function of their psychology, having been indoctrinated with Puritan teachings on sin, and they were unnecessarily inflicting internal ideas of morality on an amoral world-- but it turned out my teacher was quite religious and not okay with this interpretation. (But considering an abstract thing like "spiritual forces" is usually what a symbol represents rather than the symbol, I'm still at a loss as to what she actually expected me to write about!)
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It's not that I'm against flowery/verbose writing (hell, I read H.P. Lovecraft, and Lolita is one of my all-time favorite books), but Hawthorne was too much for me to stomach. Oddly enough, I liked one short story of his... "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment." I wasn't as fond of "Young Goodman Brown" mainly because it was more rambly and the subject matter wasn't my cup of tea. But I'd much rather have YGB than The Scarlet Letter any day.
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