Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”, Essay Example

Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” is a strange and dark tale about the village of Salem, Massachusetts back in the time of the Puritans. It is a story about sin and guilt, and about the loss of faith and its consequences for the person involved and for those around them.

The reader meets Goodman Brown as he is leaving his new wife, Faith, to go to a mysterious meeting in a lonely part of town. He meets up with a man and as they go walking in the woods together, the reader slowly realizes that Goodman Brown’s companion is the Devil, and he is bragging about how many people he knows in this community and how he has helped persecute the Quakers and the Indians in the past.  Goodman Brown declines to go with the Devil, but still stumbles onto his Black Mass and sees many people from his village there, including his minister and Deacon and also his own wife, Faith. When he sees her, he cries out and suddenly his vision disappears and he finds himself alone in the woods.  He comes back from the forest a changed man, and for the rest of his life is withdrawn and suspicious and unhappy.

There is a lot of symbolism in this story: his wife’s name is Faith, but when Goodman Brown talks about her, he is also talking about his religious faith, and when he cries out “My Faith is gone” (Hawthorne 30) he is talking about them both. The dark and frightening woods he wanders in could also be a symbol of sin and the hidden darkness in Salem that Goodman Brown is not aware of until his fateful meeting in the woods.

The symbolism, and the themes that are dealt with like sin, guilt and loss of faith, make this a classic Hawthorne story and probably one of his most famous.

Works Cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel.  “Young Goodman Brown and other Stories”. New York: Dover Publications. 1992. Print.