The purpose of this research is to examine the theme of salvation in Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown." The research will be organized by presenting a description of the pattern of ideas in the work and then show how Hawthorne makes use of the idea of salvation to develop the narrative and ideas.
"Young Goodman Brown" seems to be a simple tale with a simple plot. While walking with a roving traveler who turns out to be the devil, Young Goodman Brown is reminded of his "grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem" (Hawthorne, 1888, p. 63) and of the traveler's status as factotum for the governors and church deacons. Young Goodman Brown's family history, plus his preoccupation with the fate of his soul--that is, salvation--combine to make him a bitter and gloomy man rather than someone who anticipates the benefits of paradise. It helps somewhat to know that Young Goodman Brown chooses to go walking on a particular night against the advice of his wife Faith, but that has meaning only to the extent that the story is about the cultural context in which he takes that walk. For it turns out that the values of the culture are too strong for Young Goodman Brown's vulnerable personality, and they destroy him.
The first line of the story refers to Salem, and it is very clear that this means Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritan homeland in the New World, in the late 1600s. That settlement has been characterized as one of vitality owing to the positive qualities of the Puritan ethic (Becker, 1915, pp. 95ff). Yet Massachusetts Bay was also a rigid theocracy, with a history that has been described as "the story of the vain and pathetic effort of single-minded men to identify the temporal and the spiritual commonwealths" (p. 97). The attributes of vanity and single-mindedness dominate "Young Goodman Brown" and ultimately interrogate the Puritan id...