Into the Woods with Nathanial Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown - Essay Example

Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne A Puritan Everyman, Young Goodman Brown departs from the company of his beloved spouse Faith, apparently a symbolic character, to rendezvous with the Devil in the murky woods of New England. The plot setting is in Salem, a place vividly reminiscent of malevolent and satanic occurrences, such as witchcraft. Every reader of this Hawthorne short story will be astonished why a righteous Puritan is encouraged to embark on a journey to darkness. It seems that Goodman Brown is looking for his dark side, the spiritual vibes he imprisoned in the deep recesses of his unconscious because they tries to overpower his Puritan belief and conviction, which is unsympathetic of malevolence and darkness.

The name Faith fits the personality of Goodman Brown’s wife. With the perfection of her character, Faith symbolizes the inner strength of Goodman Brown, his devotion and loyalty. When Brown finally grasped the reality that he has lost his Faith he lays down his value system and accepts the nature that steers individuals to wickedness. Without his wife Faith, he witnesses the threatening backwoods surrounding him with its dreadful hums and noises. However, as the storyteller emphasizes, “he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors” (Hawthorne 1992, 30).

Without Faith, he himself is the malevolence he has been attempting to oppose, and he grips the power, although fleetingly, and grants it control over his consciousness. Once in the woods, Brown witnessed all the wicked things that a devoted Puritan should not be witnessing, like the evil transformation of the supposedly ‘good’ people in their community such as Goody Cloyse, Deacon Gookin, and even his wife Faith. Brown, in my opinion, takes such a night’s journey to test his Faith, Belief, and Conviction.

Like any devoted Puritan, Brown is eager to know if his religious devotion and virtuosity will stand the test of the Devil. Brown is knowingly oblivious to the genuine essence of his frightful journey, but his unspiritual side bellows for expression and insists he continue the rendezvous in the murky wilderness. While the dark woods generally manifest the unconscious, reunited energies of Goodman Brown, so is the Devil whom he meets on the road. The features in the tale firmly substantiate such an interpretation.

Satan, for example, seems to be “in the same rank of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to him… they might have been taken for father and son” (Hawthorne 1992, 25). Satan is also clothed in a similar way as Brown. The pink ribbons, on the other hand, are meant to embody the purity and incorruptibility of Faith. These pink ribbons signify the strength of Faith, her cleanliness which kept Brown from the clutches of evil for a long time. I think that Brown’s experience in the dark woods is his unconscious taking over his conscious state of mind.

Brown is suppressing the expression of his unconscious evil nature but there comes a time when he lays his guard down and allows his darkest nature to surface. This is a story of a man struggling to strike a balance between his ‘good’ and ‘evil’ nature. References Hawthorne, N. Young Goodman Brown and Other Short Stories. Dover Publications, 1992.