In his short story "Young Goodman Brown," Nathaniel Hawthorne creates an image of innocence compromised in the face of the evil of the world, an evil that is always hidden and that masquerades at times as the height of probity. The way the story is presented leaves a question open as to whether Young Goodman Brown's experience was real or a vision. Hawthorne in this story does what he often does in his fiction--he juxtaposes light and dark, good and evil, innocence and experience, and fashions a moral fable out of the interaction of opposites, doing so in a way that leaves issues unresolved and that hints at the moral struggle in the world without truly resolving it or issues it raises about human behavior. Hawthorne brought profound moral and psychological insight into his fiction as he explains the complexities of human motivation and action. Hawthorne was convinced that most American literature of his time was too imitative of British models, so he devoted himself to the creation of an authentic American voice. He saw the conventional novel, with its concern for verisimilitude, as incapable of capturing the moral and social climate of America. He wrote a different sort of work, romances in which the "real" and the "marvelous," the actual and the imaginary, could mingle more freely so that the author could render through allegory and symbolism what he saw as the heightened drama of life in America. "Young Goodman Brown" follows this course precisely.
The form of the story is that of a story of initiation, and ritual and ceremony are dominant as Goodman Brown is invited to become an initiate into the community of evil. This is considered one of Hawthorne's most profound tales:
In the manner of its concern with guilt and evil, it exemplifies what Melville called the "power of blackness" in Hawthorne's work. The thrust of the narrative is to move the protagonist toward a personal and climactic vision of evil which le...