Young Goodman Brown: Faith -- the Wife
In the Young Goodman Brown, the two important characters are the protagonist, Brown and his wife Faith. While Faith, the wife, has a small role to play yet her significance increases as we closely study her symbolic use in the story. The story revolves around a man's journey into the heart of darkness to discover the strength of his own faith. He considers himself a moral being but on this one occasion, he realizes that faith is but a weak power which can easily be suppressed by evil forces. Faith acts as a force that continuously tries to stop Brown from committing sin. The author aptly named his wife Faith because throughout the story, she acts as the force that stands opposed to evil. And references to Faith also depict the various stages and forms of Brown's faith at different points in the story.

Faith….

Young Goodman Brown
In the story "Young Goodman Brown," much of the story is centered on Goodman Brown and his struggle to use his faith to suppress his evil impulses and his internal doubts. This struggle is undoubtedly a representation of some of the same struggles that Nathaniel Hawthorne must have faced within his own life in which he embraced the Puritan way of life and its beliefs. Given Hawthorne's background in the Puritan way of life, the story is filled with clear demonstrations of the author having an intimate knowledge of Puritanism as the main character deals with his own struggles of good and evil.

Goodman Brown believes that he is of good character and is from a family of good men. The devil directly challenges Brown's self-perception however and claims that his family members were among those who committed acts such as burning witches or destroying Indian villages. When Brown….

Therefore in the remarkably persistent debate over whether Young Goodman Brown lost faith in human redemption or not, which critics have apparently quarreled over for a century and a half now, this reading takes the side that Brown did in fact retain some core belief that human redemption was possible, or else he would not have been alienated, tried to save the girl or had a family. The resulting message of the allegory becomes that if the reader wants to go to heaven, this will require difficult and deliberate separation from the human community, but may result in achieving the ultimate goal of salvation. Otherwise there is no reason for that costly sacrifice and the reader should just accept personal damnation and join the general mass of well-adjusted hypocrites, if indeed the reference to Salem and the religious leaders and their alleged crimes past and present generalize as many authors….

As soon as that objective was achieved the whole theatrics was withdrawn. On the contrary it could well be nothing but his subconscious that expressed his own desire to see the world according to that perspective in which all the nice people embracing high standards of morality are all but faux. But it could be safe to assume that the whole episode in the forest was the figment of his imagination and his brain concocted everything during the sleep. Towards the end of the story we see that this event had profound effect on his later life and he was never able to recover out of the mental trauma he faced there in the forest that night. He spent the life of skeptic could never trust anyone in his life and because of his dysfunctional behavior he passed away unnoticed "... For his dying hour was gloom" (Hawthorne)
The writer….

)
Doubts enter Brown's mind on page 15, as he looks "up at the sky" (which of course is pitch black in the deep forest at night) and doubts whether there is a heaven. But he cries out that he will "stand firm" - so readers know he still hopes to be strong and resist what is happening to him. But this night is not about resistance: "The cry of grief, rage, and terror" went out from him as he believes his lovely wife's pink ribbon indicates that the Devil has taken her. "Come devil; for to thee is this world given."

The story - like Goodman Brown's heart and conscience - is filled with opposites and contrasts; Brown is "maddened with despair" yet he "laughed loud and long"; there is a scream, then laughter; the night is black, yet a pink ribbon flutters down out of the darkness. There is "horrid….

Goodman's internal conflict was brought about by his realization that he was vulnerable and can easily succumb to the temptations of the devil. Being in the wilderness did not help Goodman prevent this conflict from happening within him, since the wilderness was obviously not a part of society but of nature, therefore, the wilderness only follows the laws of nature and not the laws of humanity. The wilderness acted as the agent that opened Goodman's mind to the true feelings hidden within his heart -- that Goodman is not the faithful individual known in his community, but is actually the person who questions whether he is indeed faithful to God.

Reading "Young" for the first time, the utilization of nature as both a theme and a symbol of Goodman's loss of faith would be the main elements that could be found in the story. A deeper analysis of the story, though,….

Young Goodman Brown - Ambiguities
While in actuality, this short story is an accurate historical reference to Hawthorne's Puritan ancestry and his great grandfathers' participation in the Salem witch trials, through the character of Brown, Hawthorne reveals his own journey of discovery, and its troubling impact upon him. Hawthorne uses the theme of darkness to cast light upon the even darker truth, and shows how the impact of discovering the truth can alter one's life forever.

Although in allegory Young Goodman Brown is married to his Faith, and although it is his Faith that warns him not to undertake his journey of discovery, he takes the journey regardless of warning and travels into the dark past as represented by thick woods where anything might be lurking. There, upon discovering the past, he brings it to light.

He finds that under the cover of darkness, those who are thought to be the most pious….

Young Goodman Imagines Himself an Excessively adman
Young Goodman rown will become a bitter and hopeless man, "A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man," whose "dying hour was gloom," and who cannot even smile and be joyful with his own wife and children. This perpetual foul mood is attributed in the story to the ill effects of his "fearful dream." Indeed, at the story's beginning he does seem far more light-hearted than he will become. However, one might suggest that the seeds of his distrustful and stern nature are planted far earlier and that even from the beginning he is falling into such a mindset, for Young Goodman rown has an excessive (one might even say gothic) perception of nature and evil which from the beginning inclines him to think the worst of the natural world around him and to fault people more harshly….

Although Lomax does admit his actions do influence his condition, Satan does still lure him more covertly.
These two stories are, however, incredibly similar. In both cases, Satan poses as a man in order to lure the two characters into forgetting their faith and joining him in sin. Both Brown and Lomax have young brides who, despite their original virtue and faith, eventually help lead their husbands into Satan's arms. Faith, Brown's wife, is seen in the forest partaking in the satanic rituals; he then looses all his trust in humanity, and looses his faith in both senses. Despite Mary Ann's original purity is proven through her suicide, at the very end she does influence her husband Lomax to let sin into his heart. When greed fails, Satan finds that vanity may be a better road to lead Lomax down, partly through his wife's weakness for fame. Both Brown and….

Young Goodman Brown," Nathaniel Hawthorne suggests that a young man's nightmare about his wife being sucked into a witch's cult sours him on his wife as well as their larger community, and causes him to live out his life as a bitter and suspicious man. However, other points in the story argue against the events being a dream. Near the end of the story, Nathaniel writes,
Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting? Be it so, if you will. But, alas! It was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become, from the night of that fearful dream."

However, by considering the rest of the story, it seems unlikely that Goodman saw the events in a dream. If they were real events, he….

Brown sees the initiation of a new "soul" into the devil's dark group, and this symbolizes the disintegration of Brown's own soul. He may not have "danced with the devil" in the forest, but the devil has still corrupted his soul. Another critic notes, "The devil, in the form of doubt and duplicitous thoughts, has done his work within the heart and soul of Goodman Brown, even if the physical details of the story are merely a reverie. Hawthorne removes the mask of piety from his characters to show that the real devil is the one lurking within each individual" (Maus 76). Indeed, Brown allows the devil to take over his life and ruin it just as effectively as if he had signed over his soul and received something in return. Hawthorne writes, "A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become,….

If this is true, then that would mean Brown is the grandson of the devil himself, and he would not be afraid or angry at the devil, he would embrace him. Of course, since Brown turns into such an unhappy and strange old man, it could be said that he did indeed fulfill the prophecy, and he was the devil, while those around him were not. One literary critic puts it a little bit differently. He writes, "Young Goodman Brown experiences in the Salem woods his other self, his inner demon" (Moores). Another critic agrees, and writes, "Hawthorne removes the mask of piety from his characters to show that the real devil is the one lurking within each individual" (Maus 76). Young Goodman Brown becomes then, what he is most afraid of, and that is the true sadness of the story, and it seems like that is the real….

Like the Devil, the mysterious stranger does not appear to be evil initially. Similarly, at the destination of the walk through the trail, Goodman encounters a flaming alter that is also reminiscent of biblical stories. In his dream, the flaming alter probably represents a complete indoctrination into evil ways.
Fundamental Conflicts

The most important conflict in the story is represented by Goodman's decision about whether or not to forsake all that is good and his Faith (and faith) for what he knows is evil. The fact that he takes hold of a staff (although not the one that he witnessed transform into a serpent) suggests that Goodman was very close to embracing evil.

The man offers Goodman Brown the staff, saying that it might help him walk faster, but Goodman Brown refuses. He says that he showed up for their meeting because he promised to do so but does not wish to….

Young Goodman Brown
Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" is a strange and unsettling story of a young man who travels through a wood overnight and allows his experience to change him forever. There are many themes in this short story, including the age-old theme of good and evil, but a close reading of the work can make the reader thing Brown's journey is a symbolic acting out of his own sinful nature and his secret inclination toward evil, and many critics feel that way too. Brown very well could have dreamed the entire sequence in the woods, because there is a fantasy and dreamlike quality to it, but under it all was his own guilt at the evil that dwelt inside him.

Young Goodman Brown is not an inherently evil character, but each person has some evil or hatred that lives within him or her. Many never allow it to show, but….

Young Goodman Brown
The short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne has been a saga of great interest to scholars, students, writers and ordinary readers, over the many years since it was published. The story stands out as classic example of Hawthorne's talent at his craft, and the characters, the setting and the theme are extraordinarily interesting from many perspectives, and Hawthorne wrote it in such a way that it becomes a ghoulish nightmare, a devilish trek into the past. The ironies are powerful and obvious, and they contribute significantly to the themes. For this paper the focus will indeed be the theme and setting, how those elements contribute to the story, and why critics have explained the theme and setting in so many radically different ways.

The Story by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne set this short story in Salem, a place that is notorious for weirdness, darkness, hangings, paranoia about witches, and other unknown evils.….