Plot: The Most Important Element

Plot: The Most Important Element within Nathaniel Hawthorne's Short Story "Young Goodman Brown" Although it is very difficult to isolate the most important element of any piece of fiction, especially one written by such a master of the genre as Nathaniel Hawthorne, in my opinion, the most important element of Hawthorne's allegorical short "Young Goodman Brown" is its unusual plot, perhaps followed closely by its setting (the Puritan community of late 17th or early 18th century Salem, Massachusetts) and characterizations of Young Goodman Brown; his wife; the man in the forest, etc.

Plot is the single most important element of this particular story, however, because it creates the very condition of possibility by which the title character, Young Goodman Brown undergoes so many profound and permanent changes by the end of a relatively short story. As a result of the plot, Young Goodman Brown's mood, his attitudes toward various community members he admired only yesterday (quite literally), his skepticism and cynicism, and in his entire outlook and personality change overnight.

At the beginning of the story, Young Goodman Brown, even though he is being lured, right from the start, toward the devil (his excuse for being late into the forest, to meet his walking companion there, is that "Faith kept me back awhile" (Hawthorne, p. 1264) seems both affectionate and energetic: "Young goodman [sic] Brown came fourth, at sunset, into the street of Salem Village, but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife" (pp. 1263-1264).

Allegorically speaking, the plot of "Young Goodman Brown is the major element that allows Hawthorne to express the story's most important underlying idea, that of how much a person can indeed change, literally overnight, once he or she has lost faith in the individuals and/or belief systems (e.g., the Puritan "pillars of the community of Salem in Young Goodman Brown's time, and the Puritan belief system itself), even if only as the result of a vivid dream, like the one experienced by Young Goodman Brown, of his and his wife Faith's night of devil worship deep in the forest.

As Hawthorne tells us at the end of the story, for example, "A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream (p. 1272). The plot itself consists of a symbolic journey unto the Puritan heart of darkness, a place of communion with the devil himself, which, as it turns out, is only a dream.

Nevertheless, the dream material clearly traumatizes Young Goodman Brown as much as if the evil trip into the forest, where in the dream, he even meets his wife Faith (" My Faith is gone!'" (p. 1269), he cries in despair, into the darkness, seizing one of his wife's symbolic pink ribbons from the branch of a tree) had happened to him in real life.

Within his frightening dream, Young Goodman Brown, reluctant yet somehow determined, sets out, near sunset, on a journey into the forest, from which his new young wife with pretty pink ribbons in her hair, "My love and my Faith'" (p. 1264) tries in vain to keep him back. This is not just for purposes of companionship, Faith is also troubled by her own thoughts and dreams, especially when alone, foreshadowing of how she, too, will find it impossible to resist the lure of the forest.

The man Young Goodman Brown meets, at the start of his journey deep into the forest, carries a walking stick with a serpent's head. He, and it, symbolically represent the devil. Along the way, they meet.