Decentering Ecophobia in “Young Goodman Brown”

ABSTRACT The forest in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story “Young Goodman Brown” is at the center of an anthropocene relationship between man and nature. Though rooted in a time prior to the understanding of global warming and ecological disasters, Hawthorne’s text personifies nature as a sentient and malevolent character rivaling the Christian Goodman. As a work of early American literature, “Young Goodman Brown” demonstrates the contemporary notions of ecological awareness and its implications as they present themselves through the ecogothic vis-à-vis the protagonist and his experience in the forest. Placing Hawthorne’s forest within the context of the ecogothic illuminates a series of questions concerning the heterogeneity between human and nature in nineteenth-century American literature, the ontological and negative aspects of ecophobia as a byproduct from the anxieties of the anthropocene, and the marginality of forest-dwelling communities within the ecogothic as posthuman. Using the works of Simon C. Estok as the theoretical framework, the article argues that the ecophobia presented in “Young Goodman Brown” is brought about by similar contemporary sociopolitical components that hinder a healthy perspective toward an ecologically conscious future.