Perhaps
because his Puritan uncle, a magistrate who ordered the public whippings of a Quaker woman and
his son John, a judge who presided over a witchcraft trial were both sanctimonious hypocrites
themselves, andwas so disturbed by the heinous sins of his relatives, this self-righteous
character emerges throughout the works of Hawthorne. In "" Brown himself is such a
character.
He is so certain that he is one of
the Puritan "elect" that he dares to go into the dark, sinister forest with the devil
himself. The social contextof Goodman's encounters with Goody
Cloyse and Deacon Gurkin--real persons who participated in the involved in Devil's worship--is
significant. The time period is more significant than the place.
For, the time of the Puritans is pivotal to the development of character and theme. This outer
reality is pivotal to the development of character in "Young Goodman Brown."
Theme, the central and unifying idea about human
experience that grows out of all the other elements of the story, also develops because of the
setting. In "Young Goodman Brown," after his experience in the forest, Goodman
concludes that all human beings are hopelessly corrupt, totally damned, and must, therefore, be
rejected. He remains a sanctimonious hypocrite because he rejects others when he himself
"lost his Faith" figuratively, rather than literally as he interpreted the
incidents.
__________________________________________________
If the reader interprets "Young Goodman Brown" as an , the Goodman represents
a type of Everyman-- "Goodman" was a title beneath "gentleman"--who must
test his faith. His wife Faith represents Goodman's devotion; he tells others that "Faith
has kept me back a while," but he plunges into the forest one night. The dark
primeval forest represents the environment in which Goodman explores his doubt as he pursues the
Black Mass which symbolizes his descent into Hell where like a dream, he awakens and knows that
he has lost his Faith.
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