![]() ![]() ![]() This Faustian-style exchange is not clear, however, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s eminent short story “Young Goodman Brown,” set in and around the Puritan village of Salem at the time of the famous witch trials. ![]() Irving’s Tom Walker, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus all follow this narrative: Walker trades his soul in exchange for being the wealthiest man in colonial Massachusetts, Gray for eternal youth and beauty, and Faustus for Mephistopheles to be at his beck and call for 24 years of conjuring. In the classic format of the Faustian bargain tale, when a mortal man makes a deal with the Devil, he seeks a well-defined, short-term personal gain - knowledge, power, authority, riches - in exchange for a long-term loss: his immortal soul. ![]()
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