A great writer Nathaniel Hawthorne is a person who uses different themes and characters in his writings. He is a romantic writer who uses different literary devices, such as metaphor, irony, symbols in order to make his works more understandable and reaching to the reader. He himself as a person has a very interesting family history. His father died and he was forced to live with his relatives, mother and sister. Every writer’s storyline influences their writings and Nathaniel Hawthorne was not an exception to the rule. Hawthorne’s family history shaped the theme of his writing including good versus evil, hypocrisy, and temptation.
The theme of good versus evil is present in his short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” where the protagonist faces an internal struggle with his faith and morals. Goodman Brown embarks into the forest during nightfall ostensibly as a hopeful Christian man who believes that good resides in all people. Blame and suspicion are key feelings in the story. Goodman Brown feels pounding blame since he is forsaking Faith as well as in light of the fact that he expects that Faith thinks about the evil motivation behind his excursion. He fears being found to be a miscreant and he is sure that Faith is holy person like, thus it doesn't jump out at him that Faith may be imploring him to stay at home to keep them both from going into the woodland that night and erring. Despite the fact that Goodman Brown only misled his wife and admits to himself that his excursion is underhanded, he keeps on considering himself one of the Elect, the general population who the Puritans accept are fated by God to go to paradise. He trusts that his wife's righteousness will make him principled, as well. He assumes he can simply dunk a toe into sin and afterward move back, no damage has been done. The woodland for Puritans checked both a position of apprehension and a position of probability. Both of them contained danger ("pagan" Indians and a world out of the control of Puritan culture, additionally a departure from the weights of that society and its individuals all observing each other for sin. For Brown, who is strolling into the woods explicitly out of an evil interest, the backwoods appears to shroud sin all over the place. The woodland may likewise then be seen as mirroring his own particular personality, brimming with its own particular disarrays and terrors.The baffling man clues at extraordinary forces by saying that he was in Boston only a couple of minutes prior, a unimaginable accomplishment. Hawthorne's utilization of the multifaceted nuance of Faith's name makes the story into an illustration.
Humans are often faced with temptations that goes against their personal beliefs and values and the author talks about these issues in his literary works. In “Young Goodman Brown,” Brown passes many Samaritans that he recognizes as honorable citizens; however, he then realizes that they are on their way to worship the devil. Goodman Brown shows he has a solid confidence before he enters the woodland and at times amid his trip to the dark mass. Hawthorne utilizes the very name of Goodman Brown's wife, Faith, as an image of Goodman Brown's own confidence all through the story. Goodman Brown's solid confidence can be seen through the underlying portrayal of Faith: "And Faith, as the wife was relevantly named, push her own particular beautiful head into the road, giving the wind a chance to play with the pink strips of her top" (Hawthorne 140). Hawthorne proposes she is immaculate and pure, as is Goodman Brown's own particular confidence. Additionally, the consoling answers Goodman Brown provides for Faith propose that his confidence can't be debilitated: "'Amen!' Cried Goodman Brown. 'Say thy supplications to God, dear Faith, and go to bed at nightfall, and no mischief will come to thee'" (Hawthorne 140). Hawthorne just uses the size of the voyage through the backwoods and the dark mass as a representation of all the transgression and insidiousness which encompasses us in this world. Goodman Brown still appears to have confidence in his own particular good convictions, yet he has lost his confidence in whatever is left of the world to hold these convictions. Goodman Brown's own particular absence of confidence on the planet has made him unforgiving on the grounds that he accepts no one but underhandedness can be generated from fiendishness and there is nothing that should be possible to change it. Also, during the Salem witch hunt, citizens in Salem would accuse each other arbitrarily of being witches for their own personal gain. Many people were trying to make use of this situation. The procedure went the following way. According to the source: “To figure out whether there was a real body of evidence against the denounced, they were typically taken either to the Salem Village meetinghouse, to Reverend Samuel Parris' home, to Ingersoll Tavern at Salem Village or to Beadle's Tavern in Salem Town. There they were addressed by a judge before a jury, which chose whether or not to prosecute the blamed on charges for witchcraft” (History Of Massachusetts Web).
Works Cited
American Literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne. The American Literature Website. n/a. Web. 9 Apr.
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<http://www.britannica.com/biography/Nathaniel-Hawthorne>.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Young Goodman Brown. Mankato, MN: Creative Education, 1993. Print.
History of Massachusetts. Salem Witch Trial Victims. n/a. Web. 9 Apr. 2016.
Mellow, James R. Nathaniel Hawthorne in his times. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Print.
