Young Goodman Brown

Amanda Onalaja

October 19, 2009

Pd. 2 – Ms. Brown

“Young Goodman Brown” is a definite Puritan tale that appeals to pathos and ethos. Written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the story depicts a protagonist named Goodman Brown, a man of great religious faith. Likewise, his entire town is of Christianity, the perfect setting for a Puritan narrative. The events that take place, while fictional, happen around the time of the Salem witch trials. The trials were historic because nearly twenty men and women were accused of witchcraft and executed. This short story doesn’t focus on Puritan life, but the actual struggle as a Christian, wherein Goodman Brown’s faith is tested. The story also has a lot of symbolism, beginning with Faith, Brown’s young wife.

As the story opens, readers are introduced to Brown and his wife, whose one distinct feature is repetitive, “pink ribbons”. The emphasis of the pink ribbons led me to pay special attention to her character and what she represented. Just as her name entails, she is Brown’s faith, his faith in God and Christianity. Actually, when Brown was about to enter the forest and he met the mysterious figure he assured my assumption, “Faith kept me back a while”, was his response when the figure said he was late. Her name has two meanings; it could be his wife or his actual Faith in what he is doing. Another symbolism is the forest in its entirety, it’s said Puritans associate God with light and things holy, but the forest adventured by Brown was described as, “…a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest…It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveler knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude”. The forest must represent the devil since it’s described as lonely and dark. Not to mention the forest is the path Brown takes where he meets the witches and other evil people on his way to the dark meeting.

The appeal to ethos in the story are the biblical references, “was his staff, which bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent… So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, perhaps, it assumed life, being one of the rods which its owner had formerly lent to the Egyptian magi”. The staff like a snake is from the Bible’s Book of Exodus where Moses directs Aaron to throw his staff before the Pharaoh’s throne. When he does, it transforms itself into a snake. The reference is ideal for a story with a Puritan setting since Puritan’s had the strict fear of God in them. It gives Hawthorne’s tale a more significant and religious standpoint instead of just being a fictional work of art.

The symbolism of “Young Goodman Brown” is the most important element of the story. When at the end, readers see that the “dream” Brown had, that depicted the evil sightings, actually changed his life. “A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream”, Brown no longer enjoyed life for fear of the vision he saw. It was as if the forest represented the devil and also the Garden of Eden, and when Brown dreamt and saw all the evil of the world, he was cast out, forever to live in misery.