Hawthorne Young Goodman Brown

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 seem very real to him, they have a dreamlike quality, too. 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, it becomes clear that Brown -- clearly guilty about his own inner evil, has projected it onto the townspeople around him, including the minister and his own wife. Hawthorne notes when Brown emerged from the woods the next morning, "The good old minister was taking a walk along the graveyard to get an appetite for breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed, on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint as if to avoid an anathema" (Hawthorne 302). Brown allows his experience in the forest to turn him away from the townspeople and especially his wife. Another critic, Mark Richard Barna notes, "To use a word descriptive of many people today, Goodman Brown became a cynic" (Barna, 1998). That perhaps is his worst sin. He allowed the devil, or the vision of the devil, to manipulate him, and he lost his own faith in God and his loved ones.