Young Goodman Brown\'s Excessive Perception of Nature and Evil

Young Goodman Imagines Himself an Excessively Badman

Young Goodman Brown 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 Brown 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 than they might deserve.

That Young Goodman Brown is well on his way to becoming an evil spirit of himself is evident from the beginning of the narrative. The point-of-view in this narrative is designed so that the reader sees the world through the young puritan's eyes, following only his perspective and his understanding of the surrounding town and forest. Goodman associated the devil with the wilderness outside Salem. As he goes farther and farther along the devil's path, he goes farther and farther away from civilization until at last he reaches an area with no more roads. The wilderness is made synonymous with immorality, and he falls into both. This indicates a deep fear of nature and an association of the natural physical world with evil. Yet the narrative's association of evil and danger with the physical world is not merely clear in the story arch but in the very language of the narrative.

Through-out the story, the wilderness Goodman walks through becomes increasingly personified. Nature becomes more anthropomorphized as he walks farther with the devil, and also most sinister. At the beginning of the story the road he walks is described as "dreary" and "darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest...as lonely as could be...(with) innumberable trunks and the thick boughs." The trees and woods, though God's creations, are already being seen as gloomy, dark, and lonely. This characterization will soon become bolder, and in a matter of paragraphs Goodman describes the way as "wilder and drearier...the dark wilderness." Towards the end, the woods are in fact described in terms of pure evil, as if it had a human malevolence to it: "The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds -- the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts,... As if all Nature were laughing him to scorn... A chorus, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness pealing in awful harmony together... The cry of the desert..." Goodman in fact comes directly to associate unadulterated nature, as represented by the roadless wilderness with its streams and trees and animals, with the worst vices and most guilty sins of humanity. Thus it is that the narrative shows him imagining that "the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling beasts, and every other voice of the unconcerted wilderness were mingling and according with the voice of guilty man."

Goodman sees the woods as excessively evil, when one considers that they support him and his people and provide for them the raw materials of food and shelter and fire. Certainly the rational mind could not imagine that the trees and earth were inherently evil, yet Goodman does just this. One can only assume that his horrified opinion of raw nature is actually an inability to come to grasps with the natural functions of his own humanity. Goodman, like many good platonic Christians before him, seems to consider that which is physical to be evil and this applies both to the body of the forest and the body of the self. It is no coincidence, the reader may assume, that most of the sins with which the devil accuses Goodman's fellow church-goers are carnal sins or the results of carnality.

Goodman's perception of evil in his fellow men is also excessive, for he does not doubt the devil in the slightest when that solemn fellow pronounces "Evil is the nature of mankind... The communion of your race." Goodman believes everything which he sees and hears of his fellow men, and is even ready to believe that his beautiful and loyal Faith (whom he heard calling out for help!) is evil, for afterwards "he shrank from the bosom of Faith..." Not only is he eager to believe ill of all people, he also seems to have a very active imagination as to what sorts of evil exists in the hearts of men. Assuming, as one might well do, that his dream is indeed a product of his own foul imaginings, one sees that Goodman places a wealth of sexual and violent crimes on the heads of his fellows. Most of these are sexually related, from elders who "whispered wanton words to the young maids," to wives who sleep with their husbands as they poison them to "fair damsels" burying illegitimate babies in their gardens to hide illicit relationships. It can be no mistake that the devil uses most sexual words when describing the quest to find sin, suggesting that his follows will "penetrate, in every bosom... The fountain..."