"Young Goodman Brown"

Hawthorne's brief allegorical tale, "Young Goodman Brown," raises questions about the nature of good and evil and the ambiguity of the conflict between these two opposing forces. The protagonist and title character, Goodman Brown, is a young man struggling to remain good in the face of temptation to succumb to evil. The struggle is not a clearly defined one but rather involves confusion and uncertainty. Indeed, Hawthorne's central thesis seems to be that life itself is ambiguous, that motives and actions do not permit a single interpretation but rather have a number of different possible interpretations.

On the surface, the story would seem to be a reworking of the Faustian legend using Puritan New England as the setting. In the opening sequence, Goodman Brown is leaving his young wife Faith to go off into the woods on some mysterious errand, which is left unspecified but involves some "evil purpose." As he starts out, Brown vows to himself that after this one night he'll return to his wife, "cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven" (54). He meets a sinister stranger at a fork in the road and the two set off together into the darkest part of the forest. The author does not reveal the exact purpose of this journey, nor does he reveal the stranger's identity, but it nevertheless is clear that the stranger is the devil, and he is leading Brown into temptation.

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have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light" (55). Yet a lingering doubt is allowed to remain - was it an optical illusion, did it in fact occur, or was the occurrence part of Brown's dream? By allowing these doubts to remain, by refusing to provide the reader with a definitive interpretation, Hawthorne raises fundamental questions about the relationship of good and evil. Goodman Brown is tempted by evil, and in the end he appears to resist that temptation, but he does not emerge from the experience with his faith intact. Indeed, all his former certainties about the essential piety and goodness of his fellow townspeople have been badly shaken. He no longer knows who is truly good and who is merely maintaining a pretense of goodness. Thus he is condemned to spend the rest of his life tormented by doubt and mistrust. Even his own wife, so aptly named Faith, cannot be trusted; he treats her coldly and, when waking in the night, shrinks from her. He does not even have the comfort of a Christian belief in salvation and redemption, for Hawthorne tells us that "his dying hour was gloom" (68). The conflicts in this allegorical tale are not between a sharply differentiated good and evil, as conventionally de
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Approximate Word count = 1734
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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