Young Goodman Brown

It takes time to understand that each human experience reflects in some way the human experience, that our humanity connects us to others across time and space through language. But what does it mean to be human, and what is this thing called life? What do teachers mean when they state that great literature must reflect something universal about being human, and what do they mean when they say: you cannot be neutral, you must choose a generic, ideological perspective from which to see the world? There are thoughts that are all too often sidetracked by philistine urges, by the desire to see what is considered art as a tool by which to hammer others on the head with a political or sociological perspective. (If I say Jack London is a master storyteller, someone inevitably will say he believed in eugenics and therefore his writing is suspect.)

The reward for writing is the writing itself: writers write because we have to write; there is no choice in the matter. Which gets me to the task at hand: I want to explore briefly the various themes outlined just now—universalism, humanity, and ideology—in a wonderful short story by the famous, widely-known American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The story is “Young Goodman Brown,” and though I am not versed in the necessary jargon to explicate for academic ears all that the allusions and references meant to the contemporary writers Hawthorne wrote alongside, I have been taught, on a cursory level, a conventional understanding of the story. 

The bulk of “Goodman Brown” takes place over the  course of one eventful night that we experience through the eyes, feelings and thoughts of the story’s protagonist, a character symbolically named for his innocence (Young), his righteousness (Goodman), and the fact of his heritage, which is Anglo or English origin (Brown). Here we have an ‘everyman’ who stands in for what we are to understand as a prototypical Puritan villager newly married and living in Salem Village, in Colonial New England. 

Here is Spark Notes' version of the story’s summary:

Newly married, Goodman Brown leaves his house for a mysterious purpose. As he  leaves, his wife, Faith, wearing a pink ribbon in her cap, pleads with him to stay. She says she becomes scared when she spends the night alone. Brown assures her that if she says her prayers and gets  to bed early no harm will come to her. As he departs he looks back, feels a twinge of guilt, but is also worried Faith might have had a premonition or dream about the task at hand.

Brown sets off on a road through the gloomy forest. “With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose.” He soon comes upon a man in the road who greets Goodman Brown as though he had been expecting him. The man looks normal except he carries a walking stick featuring a carved serpent, which is so lifelike it seems to move. 

The man offers Goodman the staff, but Goodman refuses. He says he showed up for the meeting because he promised to but now wants to return to the village. Goodman tells the man his family members have been good Christians and that he feels ashamed to associate with him. The man tells Goodman that he knew Goodman’s father and grandfather, as well as other members of the church of New England, and even the governor of the state. 

Goodman Brown says that even if this is so he wants to return to the village for Faith’s sake (a pun). Next, the two come upon an old woman hobbling through the woods, and Goodman Brown recognizes Goody Cloyse, who he knows to be a respected woman from the village. He hides, embarrassed to be seen with the man, and the man taps Goody Cloyse on the shoulder. She identifies him as the devil and reveals herself to be a witch, on her way to the devil’s forest ceremony.

Soon he hears the voices of the minister of the church and Deacon Gookin, who are apparently on their way to the ceremony. Shocked, Goodman Brown swears that even though everyone else in the world has gone to the devil, for Faith’s sake he will stay true to God. However, he soon hears voices coming from the ceremony and thinks he recognizes Faith’s voice. He screams her name, and a pink ribbon from her cap flutters down from the sky.

Certain that there is no good in the world because Faith has turned to evil, Goodman Brown grabs the staff, which pulls him quickly through the forest toward the ceremony. When he reaches the clearing where the ceremony is taking place, the trees around it are on fire, and he can see in the firelight the faces of various respected members of the community, along with more disreputable men and women and Indian priests. But he doesn’t see Faith, and he starts to hope once again that she might not be there

A figure appears on a rock and tells the congregation to present the converts. Goodman Brown thinks he sees his father beckoning him forward and his mother trying to hold him back. Before he can rethink his decision, the minister and Deacon Gookin drag him forward. Goody Cloyse and Martha Carrier bring forth another person, robed and covered so that her identity is unknown. After telling the two that they have made a decision that will reveal all the wickedness of the world to them, the figure tells them to show themselves to each other. Goodman Brown sees that the other convert is Faith. Goodman Brown tells Faith to look up to heaven and resist the devil, then suddenly finds himself alone in the forest.

The next morning Goodman Brown returns to Salem Village, “and every person he passes seems evil.” He sees the minister, who blesses him, and hears Deacon Gookin praying, but he refuses to accept the blessing and calls Deacon Gookin a wizard. He sees Goody Cloyse quizzing a young girl on Bible verses and snatches the girl away. Finally, he sees Faith at his own house and refuses to greet her. It’s unclear whether the encounter in the forest was a dream, but for the rest of his life, Goodman Brown is changed. 

My teacher—the man who taught me the story in the course on teaching pedagogy—argued that Brown’s initiation—his dream, or vision, or bad trip—culminates in the revelation that everything Brown previously held to be true about his life has been false, and he lives the rest of his life resigned and cynical, but victorious in this understanding. He returns to the village and views the others as they really are. Here is that moment in the text:

“…young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of Salem village, staring around him like a bewildered man. The good old minister was taking a walk along the graveyard, to get an appetite for breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed, on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint, as if to avoid an anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at domestic worship, and the holy words of his prayer were heard through the open window. "What God doth the wizard pray to?" quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that excellent old Christian, stood in the early sunshine, at her own lattice, catechising a little girl, who had brought her a pint of morning's milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child, as from the grasp of the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied the head of Faith, with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and bursting into such joy at sight of him, that she skipt along the street, and almost kissed her husband before the whole village. But Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on without a greeting. Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?

(italics mine)

Goodman Brown must accept things in his life the way they are, and he responds accordingly. His quest culminates—it is completed—with the newly gained knowledge about the world he inhabits. He must resist the urge to knowledge gained in the service of Evil (their participation in the ceremony will reveal to them all the wickedness in the world). This is Joseph Campbell's “Hero’s Journey” applied to "Young Goodman Brown," but also to the Biblical story in Genesis of Adam and Eve. My professor taught this ideology to my pedagogy class

The Spark Notes interpretation of the story, in the section of their textual interpretation labeled “Summary,” equates Goodman Brown to Adam (from Genesis) and  Faith to Eve, who succumbs to temptation. In the Spark Notes analysis, Hawthorne wrote the story as an attack on American religion.

More than an attack on American religion I see Hawthorne's story as an attack on the hypocrisy of respectable society. Brown resists temptation and passes out. Like the later protagonist in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, we see the  prototypical everyman as somewhat sheepish but intelligent enough to avoid the pitfalls of life; in this case Brown is tempted by power. 

When he awakens, the next morning, Goodman Brown's brow is softened "by the coldest dew." He is Baptized. From here forth he sees the people around him for their vanity and hypocrisy. He has experienced, either in real waking life or in a dream, that good and evil intertwine. There aren't 'good' and 'bad' people, there are only people and they should be based on their individual choices. He cannot understand Faith's choice and he can no longer take the village hierarchy seriously. 

If Hawthorne attacks religion (Puritanism) in "Young Goodman Brown," he takes aim at its aversion to Nature. Young Goodman is blessed by the morning dew: the thing that wakes him, the one truth in his life, is Nature; Nature was the very thing the suspicious Puritan mind feared most: the wilderness and the natural world, to the Puritans, was anathema to progress.

There is great irony at the heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” On the one hand, those community members privileged with the right to ascertain evil in the outside world turn out to consist of evil themselves, and Goodman Brown begins to experience, at the culmination of his trip, those community members privileged with the right to ascertain evil in the outside world as multifaceted. The story does touch on something profoundly human in that it relates to loss.