IN a literary epoch when the dominant field of action was the frontier settlement, the forest, and the fort, Hawthorne fo- cussed on the world of moral imagination. His "Young Goodman Brown" (1835) is a paradigm of this particular world, and Brown's behavior on a fateful night in his life is the key to this haunting tale. Although the motives for Goodman Brown's behavior are ambiguous, the consequences of his compulsive acts are clear but frightening. It is truly an enchanted forest into which Goodman Brown en- ters on his way to keep a tryst. "The magic forest," says Heinrich Zimmer in The King and the Corpse, "is always full of adventures. No one can enter it without losing his way. The forest has always been a place of initiation
