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, but at the same time, its reliance on allegory may leave the reader with more ambiguity concerning the meaning of the tale than clear understanding.
An allegory is the representation of some abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms which represent them. The story of Good Brown serves as a representation of certain spiritual and societal ideas, with what happens to Brown serving to show what Hawthorne believes happens in the Puritan community. Individuals, objects, and events in the story are symbolic in direct ways, though the underlying meaning may not be so direct. Goodman Brown's name is representative of his character, for he is a "good man" in the community and is the one clearly "good man" in the story. After all, the story itself deals with the difference between perception and reality, and Goodman Brown is reality, while the community of which he is a part may be as he believes it to be or it may be different. His goodness is tested as he takes his journey--a journey is often an allegorical representation of the learning experience--and is left with doubts he never had before.
Goodman Brown is Hawthorne's vision of innocence compromised in t...