English Literature

That Nathanial Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown addresses how human beings perceive and respond to the coexistence of good and evil is hardly a novel observation.  The more interesting question, given the fact that the text never truly resolves whether Browns journey into the forest actually occurred or was merely a dream, is whether Hawthorne intended to comment on the good versus evil dichotomy generally with reference to the human race or more specifically with reference to how a particular individual approaches questions of good and evil.  This question is especially important given the fact that Hawthorne lived for a long while in Salem, Massachusetts, a place well-known for its extreme Puritan views (Abrams 358), and his personal experiences with this tension between good and evil must have been extraordinarily intimate. A careful review of the storys text, and the main thesis of this paper, is that Hawthorne did intend to present an implicit argument to the effect that individual human beings must reconcile themselves to the fact that evil is a necessary complement to good.  A failure to accept the necessity of evil has tragic consequences for Brown whereas the storys other characters are able to continuing living their lives fruitfully because they are able to acknowledge the presence and the inevitability of evil.  In support of this thesis, that an individuals inability to accept the coexistence of evil with good has tragic emotional consequences, this paper will contrast how the storys characters approached the good versus evil dichotomy, how Hawthorne employed a stylistic technique that heavily relied on symbolism in an effort to portray Brown as an absolute believer in good, and how this type of moral absolutism ironically doomed Brown to a life of emotional solitude and unhappiness.

As an initial matter, it is important to acknowledge that the world created by Hawthorne is from Browns perspective one of extremes and absolutes.  There is no moderation, in terms of tone and its effects, throughout the story.  On the one hand, for example, all of the characters to which Brown refers as a frame of reference are either very good people or very bad people.  The good people tend to be influenced by Christian virtues and include Goody Cloyse, his minister, and Deacon Gookin.  His wife is also portrayed at many times as akin to an angel and being adorned in a soft and virtuous pink color.  Even his own name, Goodman, illustrates and reinforces this rather extreme version of goodness and virtue to which Brown aspires to as an idealistic characterization of human existence and the community in which he lives.  The bad people, on the other hand, are influenced in the text by the devil.  Whether anyone was actually in the service of the devil is not clear from the story, the entire sequence of events perhaps being nothing more than a bad dream, but the creation of the two extreme poles represented by Christian virtue and the devil demonstrates that Hawthorne did intend to create extreme types of human behavior through which he could more effectively compare moral absolutism and moral moderation.  Such an interpretive approach has been noted in the academic literature one scholar, in this respect, has stated that Hawthornes fiends and devils, rarely presented in corporeal form, generally prove to be a force that corrupts mankind in the realm of the psyche HYPERLINK httpwww.questia.comPM.qstaod5000702923(Maus 76).  This reference to the human psyche, in turn, suggests an individual psychological conflict in which a human being either comes to terms with the coexistence of good and evil or becomes psychologically traumatized by clinging to unrealistic expectations.  Another scholar has characterized the short story as a failed attempt to resist moral absolutism by characterizing Browns venture as a failed journey, noting that Goodman Brown leaves the security of his hearth, his home and his Faith to undertake a journey he knows is not in keeping with who he thinks he is--a good Christian husband HYPERLINK httpwww.questia.comPM.qstaod5016654146(Moores 6).   The initial thematic point of departure is therefore Browns internal psychological and spiritual refusal to accept the fact that evil is always present and a pervasive feature of human existence.  These struggles are consistently set forth in the text.

In the very beginning of the story, for example, Brown explicitly states that he feels guilty and perhaps unclean for setting out on this journey specifically, he states that  Poor little Faith thought he, for his heart smote him. What a wretch am I, to leave her on such an errand HYPERLINK httpwww.questia.comPM.qstaod101082851(Hawthorne 61).  Leaving his Faith, a symbolic representation of his moral conviction that goodness is a dominant aspect of human existence, is a journey that he only pursues with a great degree of guilt.  Brown must test his Christian convictions, he must determine whether his belief in the essential goodness of people is fundamentally correct, and such a testing process demands that he step away from and question his faith for the duration of the journey.  The realization that develops as Brown progresses through this journey is that his faith in goodness and other human beings has been misplaced.  This faith has been misplaced with respect to his own ancestors, with respect to highly esteemed members of his community, and even with respect to his own angelic wife.  Walking along the dark path with the old man, in reality the devil, Brown either learns or begins to admit that both his father and his grandfather had committed acts that were deemed to be sins under an absolute Christian paradigm of human behavior.  The devil informs Brown with respect to his grandfather that  I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem and with respect to his father that it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philips war HYPERLINK httpwww.questia.comPM.qstaod101082853(Hawthorne 63).   Goodman found these acts, beatings and perhaps murders, to be difficult if not impossible to accept.  Interestingly, the text does not provide enough background information to know whether these acts were carried out with honest intentions or with malice.  This, however, is not particularly important because the fact is that Goodman cannot reconcile the fact that even his loved ones have committed acts that are considered evil in a Christian perspective.  The same theme is reinforced when Browns spiritual advisors are portrayed as having evil parts and most particularly when Faiths pink ribbon drops to the tree branch.  The falling of Faiths ribbon, in a very real way, symbolizes the realization by Brown that there are no pure angels and that human beings are flawed by design.  As a moral and religious absolutist, or at least Hawthornes representation of such an approach to good and evil as they pertain to the underlying nature of human beings, Brown is consequently traumatized and completely unwilling to function normally in a society in which good and evil are merged rather than clearly distinguished.  This trauma is also cleverly illustrated throughout the text through Hawthornes use of vivid imagery and symbolism.

Even a cursory examination of Hawthornes stylistic use and deployment of symbolism further supports this papers thesis more particularly, his style in this story employs and relies on a variety of symbols to very clearly demarcate the distinction between good and evil and to demonstrate how Browns absolute faith in goodness functions to destroy his ultimate faith in all human beings when he finally recognizes that goodness can never be an absolute condition of any human beings existence.  It is well-established in the academic literature that Hawthorne depended heavily in symbolism to make points subtly rather than overtly indeed, it has been observed that

The notoriously elusive and ambiguous atmosphere of Hawthornes colonial New England fiction, in which objects seem to start away with almost ghostly indistinctness and setting so often becomes murky and confused, remains a misunderstood -- if widely discussed -dimension of Hawthornes craft.

The point is that symbolism matters in Hawthornes work.  The use of symbolism in Young Goodman Brown is integral to the presentation of the storys dominant theme.  The most persuasive use of symbolism in this respect relates to Browns wife.  First, she is named Faith.   Her very name symbolizes Browns emotional attachment and his spiritual dependence on goodness.  His journey demands a departure from faith and once he learns that evil coexists with goodness he can never again be truly reunited with Faith.  This inability to reconcile with Faith his wife symbolized his psychological and spiritual inability to reconcile good and evil at the end of the story, for example, it is provided that  Often, awaking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith, and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled, and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away.  

His wife may very well have never existed and the storys dominant theme would have been the same.  Academics have noted that Hawthorne frequently used female characters symbolically one academic has argued after analyzing female characters in all of Hawthornes work that

The critical recognition of static types of female characters in Hawthornes work has a long tradition, though the significations that critics accord to these types are--by, as I suggest, authorial design--still much in play. The repeated pairings of women representing values of purity or chastity with others who are tainted by sensuality and tendencies toward philosophical speculation is a constant in his oeuvre, though the texts themselves can seem to sanction readings according authorial sympathy to either term of the equation.

The story is ultimately about a single human beings struggle with the nature of his own existence and the struggle with the design and the nature of human beings.  Faith as a woman is not as important to Hawthorne as Faith as a symbolic representation of goodness found and lost.  An additional effective use of symbolism involves the devils staff.  What at one point in the story appears to be a simple walking aid is suddenly transformed into what appears from Browns perspective to be a living snake.  This type of symbolism accomplishes multiple goals.  First, it is well-established in the Christian bible that the original sin attributed to Eve derived from the offering of an apple by a snake.  Snakes therefore often function as symbols of temptation and sin.  Second, and more importantly, the very fact that what appeared at first glance to be a simple piece of wood was not simply a piece of wood symbolizes the dangers associated with believing in absolute truths.  Even when Brown witnessed the transformation from inanimate staff to living snake, he refused to abandon his belief in absolute certainty by noting that  This, of course, must have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light HYPERLINK httpwww.questia.comPM.qstaod101082852(Hawthorne 62).  Moral relativism is thereby characterized as a type of deception in Browns mind, a trick played by a sensory moment of confusion, and it is this very inability to view the world more moderately that ultimately causes his subsequent sadness and emotional isolation.

In the final analysis, both the trajectory of Browns journey and the symbolism used to characterize the nature of the journey suggest that Hawthorne was doing much more than merely contrasting good and evil.  A more persuasive argument is that Hawthorne intended to demonstrate the dangers of moral absolutism in the form of dominant Christian values of the time in which the story was written.  Moral or religious absolutism would inevitably lead to disillusionment given the fact that good and evil coexisted as natural features of all human existence.