confronted contingency and nuance as fundamental attributes of human psychology, even (or especially) in 17th-century Salem. He would have done it by entering the consciousness of Goodman Brown, who is not self-aware, still less prepared to acknowledge the possibility of physical or moral ambiguity. Just as the good Puritan fathers fused temporal and spiritual, Goodman Brown conflates the perceived and real. It is not only that he trusts his senses too much but also that he imbues idiosyncratic sentient and psychological experience with universal moral significance. How and why that happens constitutes the action of Hawthorne's story.
"Young Goodman Brown" contains elements of allegory with which Cotton Mather would have been familiar. The text cites Goodman Brown's "aptly named" (Hawthorne 1) wife Faith and the figure of the devil. But what provides texture and credibility to the allegory is the social environment of Puritanism. In that regard, Hawthorne alludes to the Glorious Revolution in England
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