Accepting Faith In Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown

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Hawthorne’s story of ‘Young Goodman Brown’ centres around a young married man living in a strict puritanical society who, on the eve of Halloween, leaves Faith, his aptly named wife, and ventures into the forest where he meets up with the devil. The text recounts Goodman Brown’s journey to and from sin, and the unintended consequences and insights it engendered. Interpreting this story at face-value, it appears to be a simple allegory regarding the importance of not giving up ones’ faith though upon closer analysis, its meaning becomes far more complex. Rather than cautioning against giving up one’s faith, Hawthorn’s short story ‘Young Goodman Brown’ does quite the opposite, providing a scathing critique of puritanism, insinuating that …show more content…
Accepting Faith as a physical manifestation of Brown’s own religious faith, rather than simply his wife, her account of troubled dreams and thoughts is reflective of Hawthorne’s own position towards the temptation inherent to puritanism. Even within one’s faith, something that is perceived to be the key to goodness and salvation, there lies the temptation of evil, wicked dreams and unsure thoughts that cause fear on the night of the devil. Consequently, provided that one remains with their faith, temptation will always loom insidiously, a seductive call to the forest where in the darkness, one is freed from the shackles of the Puritan beliefs which consider human nature inherently …show more content…
Throughout the entire text, Goodman Brown finds awful truths revealed about Faith, literally his wife, but symbolically his Puritan beliefs. His faith is prone to temptation, a sly call to darkness always lies within a guise of virtue, his faith is revealed to be a mask for humanity, deemed sinful by puritan beliefs, and lastly, his faith is shown to be the true manifestation of evil, its constricting standards of morality driving others to commit egregious acts in shame rather than express the multi-faceted components of their own humanity in public. From killing babies born out of wedlock and harassing maids rather than expressing one’s sexuality, to killing husbands rather than demanding financial autonomy, Puritanism forces individuals to commit horrific sins in private lest they ever do anything in public that even marginally violates the morality codes intended to suppress human nature. Ultimately, Goodman Brown chooses to turn away from the devil, a figure that Puritans equate with true human nature, and cling to his belief in a restrictive, hypocritical faith, a choice that results in shame, misery and resent for the rest of his
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Compare And Contrast Young Goodman Brown And The Minister's Black Veil

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Minister’s Black Veil” there is an overarching motif of unpardonable sin. Hawthorne, born in Salem Massachusetts in 1804, was born into a struggling Puritan family in which he had never met his father, who died when he was a young boy. The tragedies and hurdles he faced as a child created the vivid imagination and overall grim and unpleasant mood that is present in his writing. Although these stories have very distinctive plots…

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