Young Goodman Brown

(1835)

As night descends on the 17th-century village of Salem, Massachusetts, a youthful newlywed named Young Goodman Brown bids farewell to his innocent young wife, Faith, and heads out on a mysterious walk through the darkening forest, where he soon meets an older stranger, whose appearance, conduct, and attitudes resemble those of the devil. As Brown reluctantly heads farther into the forest, he thinks he sees more and more of his fellow townspeople (including respected elders whose virtue he had long trusted) assembling for a Satanic ceremony, but the greatest shock occurs when he thinks he perceives his own wife at the perverted meeting. Calling out to her and urging her to resist the very evil by which he himself is so obviously tempted, he suddenly finds himself alone in the forest, but when he returns to town, he has become an embittered, suspicious, and judgmental man—estranged for the rest of his life from his wife and from the rest of his community and convinced that he is surrounded by sinners.

As does much of Hawthorne’s fiction, “Young Goodman Brown” brims with symbolic characters, an allegorical plot, pungent irony, evocative names, and suggestive images. Here as so often elsewhere, Hawthorne is mainly interested in the moral implications of the events he describes and in the spiritual dimensions of the personalities he depicts. By exploring Brown’s temptations and his encounter with evil, Hawthorne creates a tale that is typically ambiguous and unsettling—one that resists any simple interpretation, and one that leaves readers, if anything, even more mystified than Brown himself. Uncertainties, irony, and symbolism are present right from the start: Brown departs on his journey at “sunset” (a detail that already suggests the descent of literal and figurative darkness), and he is a citizen of “Salem village” (a town famously associated, because of its notorious trials of alleged witches, with an irrational obsession with the supposed evil of other people). As Brown bids farewell to his allegorically named wife, Faith (who obviously symbolizes both his marital bond and his trust in the teachings of his religion), he notices that she is wearing “pink ribbons, ” which clearly associate her (at least at this point in the story) with delicate feminine beauty and an almost childlike innocence. Faith’s parting hope that Brown will “find all well” when he returns is powerfully ironic in light of the cynical, suspicious attitude he displays at the end of the tale, while Brown’s assurance that “no harm will come to [Faith]” if she remains confident in God is also richly ironic, especially in view of his own present and future rejection of the very kind of trust he urges her to display. Brown seems simultaneously naive and arrogant at this point in the story; as he departs on his journey of initiation into darkness, he blithely assumes that he can easily return, assuring himself that “after this one night I’ll cling to [Faith’s] skirts and follow her to heaven” (Tales). Of course, this confident assumption about his future proves false: Although he returns physically to his village, he never returns to his earlier faith (or Faith). By the end of the story he has become pessimistic and misanthropic, and his earlier confidence in his Faith has been replaced by an egotistical assurance of the sinfulness of others and of his own self-righteous authority to sit in judgment of them.

Ironies and ambiguities abound in this carefully crafted tale. Thus Brown worries about the dangers posed by “devilish Indian[s], ” rather than fearing either his own planned encounter with the devil or the evil impulses embedded in his own sinful nature. He overconfidently assumes that his Puritan ancestors and contemporaries are incapable of sin (“We are a people of prayer, and good works to boot, and abide no such wickedness”), thus displaying the kind of spiritual pride that inevitably precedes a fall. Quickly forgetting that the devil is a master of illusions who can easily deceive the senses, Brown naively assumes—merely because he finds a few pink ribbons in the forest—that Faith must have succumbed to evil, and when he proclaims, “My Faith is gone!... There is no good on earth, and sin is but a name, ” he reveals an impulsive extremism, a willingness to leap (without thinking) to hasty and drastic conclusions—a willingness that already foreshadows the inflexible self-assurance he displays at the end of the story. He already begins to partake in what is later called “the mystery of sin, ” in which humans become “more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and thought” than of their own. By rashly rushing to the conclusion that Faith and the townspeople are guilty of sin and hypocrisy, and by unmercifully judging them rather than examining his own failings or scrutinizing his own conscience, Brown turns his back on the trust, hope, charity, and forgiveness that are the essence of the faith he has himself betrayed. By the end of the story, he symbolizes a kind of rigid legalistic judgment, an unbending spiritual arrogance, that alienates him from the very people (including his wife) he might have learned to love and forgive, whatever their real or supposed flaws. Instead of learning from his real or imagined experiences in the woods that all human beings (including, and perhaps especially, him) are inevitably imperfect, he sets himself up as a merciless judge, hypocritically convicting others of hypocrisy. Like the Salem judges (including an ancestor of Hawthorne himself) who felt confident in condemning alleged “witches” to death, Brown becomes obsessed with others’ sins rather than seriously confronting his own. He moves from a kind of naive faith at the beginning of the story to a kind of naive self-righteousness at the end. His ultimate outlook is both hopelessly simplistic and simplistically hopeless.

Hawthorne crafts the story with careful attention to detail, patterning the work around such symbolic contrasts as the opposition between light and darkness, town and forest, good and evil, and reality and appearance. The plot is fairly simple and straightforward, with relatively few characters, no digressions, and a rising sense of suspense that builds to an effectively puzzling climax. Just as Hawthorne plays on Brown’s suspicions and uncertainties, so he similarly perplexes his readers, particularly by raising the distinct possibility that the whole account of the convocation in the forest, which he had just so vividly described, may actually have been only an illusion: “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch meeting? ”. Ultimately (Hawthorne suggests) the “reality” of the meeting is unimportant. What matters, instead, are the moral and spiritual choices Brown makes in response to the events, whether those events were real or merely imagined. The ways Brown chooses to treat others (and to regard himself) are far more significant than anything that may or may not have happened in the dark and lonely woods.