Prompt 6: On Names
What fictional character — from any genre — would you rename? What name would you give that individual and how would this change effect you? How would this change mediate your- and/or their understanding of their world?
I wrote most of this almost immediately upon reading the prompt and then let it sit for a week because I, for some reason, wanted any other answer, which maybe says something about my relationship to this character by itself.
I was a bit surprised by how immediately the answer came to me. I would change a character’s name, less for its effect on me and more for the effect I think it would imply for the author. I would change Young Goodman Brown’s name to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s own. He’s an author who is never not working his shit out in his writing (which is part of why he appeals to me, I think. Other teenagers had Holden Caufield as their surrogate to rail against the world. I had Hawthorne and absurdist plays).
But I don’t really care for what he might do if he made The Scarlet Letter or Blithedale Romance a little more on point.
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But Hawthorne, in all his works, was a haunted man, and Young Goodman Brown is the only time he comes close to saying what haunted him. Hawthorne saw, even if only in his image of humanity, the Black Mass. I want him to write of what he saw. It was not the work of witches. It was not the work of the devil. It was horror he could see in his own heart and others. We know at least one of these was his deep shame at his ancestors’ participation in the Salem Witch Trials.
But… when did he learn of this? Was there another night when he saw the implications within his own heart and consequently those around him? What happened in *that* night? How was he haunted in his day?
This is a lot to ask. It changes the genre. Inevitably the effects of this would spill over into other changes in the work apart from names. The characters in the village would not be safe projections onto the past, but much more pointed.
If Quentin was the fictional character I felt a lot of resonance with, (somewhat annoyingly to me) Hawthorne also had struck me as a kindred spirit, (t least for the boy and the young man I was): haunted, haunted especially at the dissonance between the way he believed the world could or should be and the way the world really was. Young Goodman Brown so cannot turn his face from horror he cannot even love his wife.
Apart from my own curiosity about what Hawthorne’s hauntedness was, I also want it because I think he may have had a better chance at exorcising whatever he could not unsee. Because I’m not sure his writing ever really did let him let it go. He could name it, but it doesn’t seem in his works that he faced it.
