摘要

    纳撒尼尔•霍桑是19世纪美国浪漫主义作家的杰出代表。一方面，他深受清教主义“原罪论”的影响，使他致力于探索隐匿在人们内心深处的“原罪”。另一方面，由于受到超验主义思潮的影响，他对清教思想进行了反思。他意识到清教伦理对人性的压抑和对幸福生活的摧残，但同时又无法彻底摆脱这种他从小就耳濡目染的旧的文化传统。于是，处在这个历史转折时期和这种文化环境中的霍桑常常处在矛盾的心态之中。本文主要通过分析霍桑短篇小说《小伙子古德曼布朗》中神秘晦暗的人名和意象，结合清教主义和超验主义来阐释霍桑在人性观上存在的矛盾性，从而使读者对霍桑本人以及他的作品有更深层次的理解。

关键词：霍桑；《小伙子古德曼•布朗》；矛盾；象征；意象；清教主义；超验主义

Abstract

    Nathaniel Hawthorne is an outstanding American romanticist writer in the 19th century. On the one hand, he is deeply influenced by the "Original Sin" of Puritanism, which makes him devote himself in exploring the "sin" hidden in people's deep minds. On the other hand, influenced by Transcendentalism, he makes a rethinking of Puritanism. He realizes that the Puritanism ethics constrains humanity and destroys happy life of general people, but simultaneously unable to get rid of the old cultural tradition which has influenced him since the childhood. As a result, Hawthorne, living in this transitional period of time and such cultural environment, frequently got perplexed. In this paper, the writer reveals Hawthorne's contradiction on good and evil nature of human beings through the analysis of the names and surnames of the characters, the images in the story. Then, the theories of Puritanism and Transcendentalism are used to explain Hawthorne's contradiction so as to make readers understand Hawthorne and his works better.

Key words: Hawthorne; Young Goodman Brown; contradiction; symbols; images; Puritanism; Transcendentalism 

1 Introduction
1.1 Hawthorne---the Contradictory Man

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) is an outstanding American romanticist writer in the 19th century. He is hailed as the "American Shakespeare" by Herman Melville. (Melville, 102) He is interested in probing the nature of human beings. Throughout his life, Hawthorne creates quantities of thought-provoking short stories and classic novels which espouse the nature of human beings, thus he is universally regarded as a representative master in the moral and allegorical writing in American literature. And until now, Hawthorne and his works have still attracted many scholars throughout the world.