Study Guide

  Surface and Underlying Meanings

   Plot and Structure

    In “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne presents several underlying ideas related to sin, evilness, and hypocrisy.  The basic conflict is the problem of good and evil, which never has a black-and-white solution but falls somewhere between in a gray-or “Brown”-area.  The implicit moral is that we should never lose our faith in good even though evil prevails.  The central idea in the story is the loss of a man's faith in his fellow man due to his realization that evil and hypocrisy are present in everyone.  The story depicts the Fall of Man in a Puritan setting.  Young Goodman Brown gains a knowledge of sin and is then transformed, ad one critic puts it, into Old Badman Brown,  The use of aptonyms like Goodman Brown, Goody Cloyse, Goody Cory, “Good old Deacon Gookin,” are obviously intended to emphasize Hawthorne's ironic intent.

    The story may be paraphrased thus: One evening near sunset sometime in the late seventeenth century, Goodman Brown, a young man who has been married only three months, prepares to leave his home in Salem, Massachusetts, and his pretty young bride, Faith, to go into the forest and spend the night on some mission which he will not disclose other than to say that it must be performed between sunset and sunrise.  Although Faith has strong forebodings about his journey and pleads with him to postpone it, Brown is adamant and sets off.  His business is evil by his own admission; he does not state what it is specifically, but it becomes apparent to the reader that it involves attending a witches Sabbath in the forest, a somewhat remarkable action in view of the picture of Brown, drawn early in the story, as a professing Christian who admonishes his wife to pray and who intends to lead an exemplary life after this one night.

    The rising action begins when Brown, out of the village, enters the dark, gloomy, and probably haunted forest.  He has not gone far before he meets the Devil in the form of a middle-aged, respectable-looking man, whom Brown has made a bargain to meet and accompany on his journey.  Perhaps the full realization of who his companion is and what the night may hold in store for him now dawns on Brown, for he makes an effort to return to Salem.  It is only a feeble attempt, however, for, though the Devil does not try to detain him, Brown continues walking with him deeper into the forest.

    As they go, the Devil shocks Goodman Brown by telling him that his (Brown's) ancestors were religious bigots, cruel exploiters, and practitioners of the black art-in short, full-fledged servants of the Devil. Furhter, they young man is told that the very pillars on New England society, church, and state are witches(creatures actually in league with the Devil), lechers, blasphemers, and collaborators with the Devil.  Indeed, he sees his childhood Sunday School teacher, mow a witch, and overhears the voices of his minister and a deacon of his church as they ride past conversing about the diabolical communion service to which both they and he are going.

    Clinging to the notion that he may still save himself from this breakup of his world, Goodman Brown attempts to pray, but stops when a cloud suddenly darkens the sky.  A babel of voices seems to issue from the cloud, many recognizable to Brown as belonging to godly persons, among them his wife.  After the cloud has passed, a pink ribbon such as Faith wears in her cap flutters to the ground.  Upon seeing it, Goodman Brown is plunged into despair and hastens toward the witches' assembly.  Once there, he is confronted with a congregation made up of the wicked and those whom Brown and always assumed to be righteous.  As he is led to the alter to be received into this fellowship of the lost, he is joined by Faith.  The climax of the story comes just before they receive the sacrament of baptism: Brown cries to his wife to look heavenward and save herself.  In the next moment, he finds himself alone.

The denouement (resolution, unraveling)of the plot comes quickly.  Returning the next morning to Salem, Goodman Brown is a changed man.  He now doubts that anyone is good-his wife, his neighbors, the officials of church and state-and he remains in this state of cynicism until he dies.

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   The story may be viewed as an allegory.  An allegory is a narrative which has two meanings, the literal one and the symbolic one.  Each character and action in the literal story has a symbolic counterpart.  “Young Goodman Brown,” like most allegories, contains moral or philosophical implications.  Brown is not just a Puritan who lived in seventeenth century New England; on another level hi represents each of us.  He is, in a sense, Everyman, as his name symbolizes.  He eants to taste evil briefly, then settle down to an exemplary life with his wife, Faith.  Her name, too, suggests that she symbolizes her husband's religious faith.  The journey Brown takes into the forest represents the one each of us takes into adulthood when we become aware of the nature of evil.  The forest itself, where most of the action occurs, is a gloomy place associated with evil acts; it can be said to represent unredeemed man.  It is contrasted with the quiet village, which symbolizes goodness and is associated with daylight.  The allegorical struggle between Brown and his faith begins when he leaves Faith, daylight, and the village to journey into the dark forest.

    Almost immediately he meets a devil figure and explains his lateness by saying that “Faith kept me back awhile.”  Again the statement is true on two levels-Brown was detained by both his wife and his religious faith.  Hawthorne says of Brown and his companion that “they might have been taken for father and son.” On the allegorical level, Brown is the child of Satan while he is in the forest.  The devil is described as “one who knew the world, and would not have felt abashed at the governor's dinner table,” a way of saying that evil is present everywhere in the world.  The staff is described as a serpent, a symbol of evil and temptation, an obvious reminder of the serpent-tempter in the garden of Eden.  It also suggests the tree of knowledge and thus symbolizes Brown's initiation, his awareness that evil is a part of all he had formerly considered “good.”  One by one Brown's friends and relatives appear in the forest and shatter his faith in their goodness.  When his wife is present at the devil worship, Brown exclaims, “My Faith is gone!  There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name.  Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.”  At this moment Brown comes face to face with the knowledge that evil is a part of all man.  This side of man is represented allegorically then by the devil worship service.  Although he had suspected the truth (otherwise he would not have made the journey), he cannot accept it and deal with it maturely.  He calls to Faith to resist the devil, then finds himself alone.  He has seen the truth and can never return from that knowledge.  Since he was a Puritan and a Calvinist, he can see only man's depravity.  He lives out his life isolated from humanity.  He has lost the allegorical struggle by failing to come to terms with evil, to accept it as a normal part of life.  His faith in mankind has been shattered.

    Psychologically speaking, we can look at “Young Goodman Brown” on a much deeper, personal level as the story of a young man whose innocence is betrayed, as a man who spends a traumatic night with the devil and never recovers from the terrifying experience.  Brown attends devil worship and finds that his bride of three months is to be baptized at the service.  Brown resists the devil, but instead of finding peace as a result, he finds himself isolated from his fellow man.  In fact, he is never at peace again and “his dying hour is gloom.”

    In psychological terms, the journey which moves from the village to the forest, from light to darkness and back again, is also one from the conscious to the unconscious.  It moves from social and moral order to wildness and terror, from inhibition to untamed passion.  Brown cannot reconcile the two worlds; therefore he is broken.  Both Faith and the devil figure are projections of Brown's psyche.  During the journey Brown encounters Satan with his staff, which is lkened to a serpent, the Freudian phallic (male sexual organ) symbol.  Brown also meets friends, teachers, and relatives.  Even Faith herself is there, wearing the pink ribbons, the mixture of white (for purity) and red (for passion).  Brown cannot deal with this newly discovered knowledge and becomes “himself the chief horror of the scene.”  He belongs to society in which morality involves the repression of natural instincts.  The more hi suppresses his desires, the more curious he becomes about the nature of evil.  After giving in to his impulses, however, he becomes the victim of a guilt complex, burdened with doubts and fears.  Hawthorne's suggestion that the events were only a dream fits the Freudian theory that dreams are fulfillments of wishes, expressions of repressed desires.  That the whole lurid scene may be interpreted as the projection of Brown's formerly repressed impulses is indicated in Hawthorne's description of the transformed protagonist:

In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown.  On the flew among the black pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such laughter as set all the echoes of the forest laughing like demons around him.  The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man. 　

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