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Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—Awful Harmony:
When Goodman Brown finally finds the demonic gathering in the heart of the forest, the story emphasizes the importance of the moment with heightened imagery:
He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance, with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness, pealing in awful harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out; and his cry was lost to his own ear, by its unison with the cry of the desert.
Imagery is a literary device that appeals to the senses, and in this case Hawthorne is engaging sound. Rather than seeing what's happening in the woods, Goodman Brown initially only hears it. This means that he (and the reader) must come to a gradual understanding of what's going on.
At first, Goodman Brown hears a familiar hymn, suggesting that perhaps he's stumbled on a Puritan religious service, the kind that he knows intimately from home. It seems like there's a crowd of voices singing, implying that a whole community might be there worshiping. This stands in odd juxtaposition with the story's preceding passage, which described Goodman Brown as "demonic" and "frightful" and engaged in "horrid blasphemy." For a moment, it seems possible that rather than being corrupted in the forest, he might be saved.
But immediately, the sound changes—from a choir of human voices singing a religious hymn, it becomes simply the sounds of the wilderness (associated with evil and sin) creating an "awful harmony," implying that something disturbing is happening. When Goodman Brown shouts, he can't hear his own voice because it simply joins the sounds of the wilderness. To suggest that Goodman Brown's human voice is indistinct from the frightening sounds of the wilderness underscores the story's message that humanity is part of nature and therefore prone to sin.
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