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Young Goodman Brown is a man at a crossroads in his life. Newly married and already settled in his hometown of Salem we find YGB ready to set out on a journey, leaving his wife, Faith, behind. While they are together everything seems to be all right. It is when YGB sets off that the trouble soon begins. Or perhaps the trouble has already begun and the journey is only secondary.
YGB is already lost in a morass of his own moral ambiguity. The journey he takes weather real, imagined, or something in between aptly illustrates how lost YGB really is. We may assume that Faith has been invited on a similar journey through her own troubled dreams. However she stays at home while YGB leaves his Faith to set out for the forest. The setting Hawthorne chooses in that of the forest mirrors the dark and dreary thoughts that go on inside YGB s mind. The paths we choose to walk are always of our own creation and YGB s path down a dark trail emphasizes the dangers when we walk with no moral compass.
YGB leaves his wife with the intention of completing his journey and returning to Faith and after this one night I ll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven. (Hawthorne, 119) Yet with this intention he still sets forth for his meeting with the devil. Hawthorne emphasizes the split between convention and the unconscious by having Brown move from the town to the country as he follows his impulses. The deeper he moves into the forest, the more completely he becomes one with his evil (Bung, Netfind) Immediately upon setting out from the town of Salem YGB had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest. (Hawthorne, ) While this may refer to the physical road that he walks through the forest, it also applies to the psychological road through YGB s mind. From here on YGB undergoes a dreamlike (or dreamed) experience that turns him into a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not desperate man. But is it the journey that causes these symptoms or is it the symptoms that has cause the journey?
Come to the end of his journey at the moment when evil did dip his hand and prepare to lay the mark of baptism upon their foreheads (Hawthorne, 127) YGB cries out Faith! Faith! . Here the dream ends and YGB finds himself in the woods of a regular forest. Here Hawthorne asks the reader to consider the possibility that the whole thing was a dream. Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch meeting? (Hawthorne, 127) Now the truth is told that it never really mattered if it was dream or not. The entire journey through the evil forest works as well if its a real forest or a forest of the mind.
A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative man did he become from the night of that fearful dream. (Hawthorne, 127) YGB lived a life of his own creation. He was the man he always was long before he entered the dark and gloomy forest. The many hints of Brown s unconscious fascination with evil are communicated, but Hawthorne recognizes that our waking life and the life of dreams are bound up together that life is like a dream in its revelation of terrifying truths. His point is that the truth conveyed in the dream that faith may betray usi's also a truth of waking experience (Levy, Netfind) He was a man who saw everyones sin but his own. Blind to his own sin and therefor unable to forgive others their sins he died as he lived. Upon his tombstone carved no hopeful verse for his dying hour was gloom. (Hawthorne, 128) Work Cited Page 1.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Literature and Society Young Goodman Brown 2. Bunge. Aolnetfind web forest. 2 / 2 / 99.
Bunge, Nancy. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. 3. Levy, Leo B. Aolnetfind web fearful dream 2 / 2 / 99. Levy, Leo B.
The Problem of Faith in Young Goodman Brown. Modern Critical Views: Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Harold Bloom.
NewYork: Chelsea House, 1986. 115 - 126.
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Research essay sample on Young Goodman Brown Nathaniel Hawthorne
