Nathaniel Hawthorne sets the character and story of“Young Goodman Brown”(YGB) in the colony of Massachusetts town of Salem, where the Puritans tried to create a religious society with strict morals and pious standards, but also where the infamous Salem Witch Trials occurred. These trials killed the lives of many innocent people and tarnished the names of countless others. The people carrying out these acts otherwise known as the Puritans believed that some people are predestined by God to go to heaven, and that those people are identifiable by their morality and piousness; people cannot earn their way to heaven by performing good works, but if they are part of the elect, they will instinctively and naturally do good. Hawthorne uses the setting to explore the dark side of the Puritan emphasis on the appearance of good.
At the beginning of the story, YGB believes wholeheartedly in these Puritan tenets, even though he is at that moment lying to his wife, Faith, saying that he is on an overnight business trip when in fact he is heading off into the forest out of curiosity to attend a witch’s meeting. He believes in the perfect goodness of his wife who seems to radiate pureness, with her pink bow and purity, that generally believes in the goodness of everyone else, too. He believes that after his dalliance in the woods with the devil, he will be able to return home and live as a good man with his perfect wife and go along with her to heaven. However, when he gets to the forest, in what may or may not be a dream, he discovers that essentially the entire town, including Faith, whom he had thought to be incapable of sin, are at this convocation, are “friends of the devil.” In horror, Goodman Brown concludes that “There is no good on earth, and sin is but a name.” He concludes that everyone is evil and that the word “sin” means nothing because everyone is sinful. When Goodman Brown returns to the town, he is no longer the happy young newlywed he was when he left. He is bitter, stern, and gloomy and mistrusts the “good” appearances of everyone around him, instead seeing sin everywhere, hiding below that surface.
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Goodman Brown’s wife, Faith, is the embodiment of faith and purity, even in her actual name. YGB's internal conflict is based on whether to “keep the faith” and come to terms with his recent revelation. At first, the struggle is literal: his wife begs him to remain at home and not head off into the woods; YGB's decision to leave behind Faith becomes a metaphor for his epiphany about religion, which he similarly abandons at the end of the story. Faith remains a symbol of YGB's religious faith throughout the story: when YGB first meets up with the devil, the devil accuses him of being late, which Goodman Brown explains by saying “Faith kept me back a while,” a play on words(Hawthorne 2) meant to refer literally to his wife Faith begging him not to leave, and figuratively to his religious faith, which could have stopped him from meeting up with the devil, but didn’t.
From a modern perspective, Goodman Brown’s revelation that everyone is sinful in some way seems obvious: of course, no one is perfectly good, as Brown imagined Faith and many others to be. That’s just human nature. But it is here that Hawthorne levels his most profound criticism of Puritanism. Goodman Brown believes that his experience or dream has forced him to see through the lies of perfect goodness told by his religion. And so he abandons it. Yet the story presents his actions not as a triumph but a tragedy, and Brown lives a life of suspicion, sadness, anxiety, and gloom. The story, then, suggests that the true issue is Puritanism and its internal logic, the way that it demands all goodness or none, perfect purity or eternally damned sin. Such a world, the story suggests, is one at odds with the realities of being human, one in which no one who takes it seriously can't live a good life because it is impossible to live a perfect one.
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