Literature overview and analysis

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While in actuality, this short story is an accurate historical reference to Hawthorne's Puritan ancestry and his great grandfathers' participation in the Salem witch trials, through the character of Brown, Hawthorne reveals his own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 members of the community can be transformed into people capable of the worst evildoing. He discovers the human capacity for injurious deeds, and he discovers the duplicitous truth of the Puritan past where the accused and condemned were actually the innocent. The accusers, who believed themselves to be saintly and acting according to the Good Book, were the ones who were filled with evil.

Hawthorne uses the Puritan witch trials (including spelling variations of names of the accused taken from the trial transcripts) to demonstrate that those who are completely absorbed in self-righteous beliefs can easily lose sight of themselves. They can become completely unaware of their own degree of evilness. In the case of the Puritans, while claiming to be defending their towns from the devil they were unaware of how devilish they had become.