that he was not comfortable with this guiding principle of Puritan existence. In Young Goodman Brown, we see Hawthorne have Goodman Brown internalize fear of the devil and suspicion of others. He does not accuse nor question himself or others, and by his silence he is complicit in the injustices and intolerance of his Puritan ethos that does not permit him to answer whether ôwe are a people of prayer, and good works to bootö (Hawthorne 1900 1). Men like Cotton Mather had little doubt about the answer to such a question. At the height of the Salem Witch trials that culminated in a number of judicial murders, Mather (1950) defined the people of New England as ôa people of Godö (9). Thus, a reading of Young Goodman Brown might have made Mather question his moral righteousness in a manner that might have made him question his right to persecute others due to sheer intolerance.
Much like Cotton Mather, Goodman BrownÆs response to his experience is to take everything that happens at face value and never try to resolve what has disturbed him. The worl
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