Nathaniel Hawthorne is sometimes remembered for his landmark text The Scarlet Letter, but he was also a master of the short story. “Young Goodman Brown” is a short story set in the Puritan hamlet of Salem, approximately during the era in which the Salem Witch Trials were occurring (Eberwin 23). The text is an allegorical discussion of human nature, and examines the deepest nature of the human heart: Hawthorne gazes deeply into the human soul in this text, and finds human nature, as a whole, lacking integrity and goodness. “Young Goodman Brown” is a tale that sees the darkest evil in humanity, and uses the backdrop of the Salem Witch Trials and the contrast between nature and community to demonstrate the depth of this very human evil for his audience.
The forest is the first of many symbolic features of the story, and Goodman Brown’s excursion into the forest is an integral part of the beginning of the text (Hawthorne). It is important, Cook suggests, that Goodman Brown enter the forest to truly begin to understand the nature of humanity:
“The forest is the antithesis of house and heart, village and field boundary, where the household gods hold sway and where human laws and customs prevail It holds the dark and forbidden things—secrets, terrors, which threaten the protected life” (Cook 473).
As Brown enters the forest, then, he is both physically and symbolically leaving the protection of human culture, and what he enters into is something that is much more primal and much more fearsome than the village (Cook 473-474). Bell notes that historically, the people of Puritan New England would likely have been fearful of the woods; the forest would have held dangers, and this would make the forest the ideal symbol for the darkness of the human heart (Bell).
The forest, despite its darkness and its terrors, is not a direct foil to the village. The virtue of the community seems constantly in flux. In fact, Hawthorne writes:
“But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes” (Hawthorne).
When Goodman Brown sees the Satanic ceremony and experiences the darker side of the people of Salem Village, he calls out to God, but even so, later he is uncertain about what he saw in the forest, despite seeing it with his own eyes (McKeithan 94-96). He loses his ability to trust everyone in the community, even his wife; he has seen the darkest part of the human heart, and he has found it wanting (Levin 351). However, despite what he has seen in the forest, he still seems uncertain of the people around him; he is uncertain of whether his wife was ever initiated into the witches’ Satanic circle (Levin 351).
Overall, the text presents a world in which there is no escape from evil and darkness; Goodman Brown goes into the forest for some unknown reason, and stumbles across evidence that those in his community are practicing witchcraft—and perhaps more importantly, that he alone has not succumbed to the darkness. The message is clear: the human heart is a dark and twisted place, and this allegory demonstrates that even the most seemingly pure individual can be hiding the blackest nature. People, Hawthorne suggests in “Young Goodman Brown,” know very little about themselves, and often know even less about their neighbors, peers, and members of their communities.
Works Cited
Bell, Michael Davitt. Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England. Princeton University Press, 2015. Web.
Cook, R. (1970). The Forest of Goodman Brown's Night: A Reading of Hawthorne's" Young Goodman Brown". New England Quarterly, 473-481.
Eberwin, Jane Donahue. "My Faith is Gone!' “Young Goodman Brown” and Puritan Conversion." Christianity & Literature 32.1 (1982): 23-32.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Young Goodman Brown, And Other Short Stories. New York: Dover Publications, 1992. Web.
Levin, David. "Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne's" Young Goodman Brown"." American Literature 34.3 (1962): 344-352.
McKeithan, Daniel M. "Hawthorne's" Young Goodman Brown": An Interpretation." Modern Language Notes 67.2 (1952): 93-96.
