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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 many feel guilty just knowing it is there, and that seems to be the message Hawthorne was sending with this story. Goodman Brown sees his father in the woods, he sees many of the townspeople, he sees his wife, and he sees the devil. While the situations...
Hawthorne writes, "His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and, looking forward again, beheld the figure of a man, in grave and decent attire, seated at the foot of an old tree. He arose at Goodman Brown's approach and walked onward side by side with him" (Hawthorne 293). People, like this man who seems to be the devil, appear and disappear in the wood, and Brown seems to run into them all. The entire sequence in the forest seems like a dream, and seems unreal somehow, which makes the reader question if Brown really experienced his night in the forest.
At first, the reader simply wants to believe the night is a dream, but when Brown returns to his village, he is a changed man. Critic Derek Maus notes, "Hawthorne, like Poe, is focusing on the internal tumult of the character at hand and, as later developments in psychology would demonstrate, the effects of hallucination can be every bit as strong as actual occurrences if they are believed to be real" (Maus, 2002, p. 76). As the story continues,…
References
Barna, M.R. (1998, March). Nathaniel Hawthorne and the unpardonable sin. World and I, 13, 325+.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Young Goodman Brown." pp. 293-302.
Maus, D. (2002). The devils in the details: The role of evil in the short fiction of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Papers on Language & Literature, 38(1), 76.
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
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
) 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,
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
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
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