Young Goodman Brown Summary & Analysis

Hawthorne creates a stark contrast between the seemingly perfect young newlyweds and their sinister setting, Salem at nightfall. Their names, “Faith” and “Goodman,” promise the characters’ piety and morality, and Faith’s ribbons seem child-like and innocent. But the setting of the story is important—Salem is the Puritan town famous for its murderous and hypocritical “Witch Trials”—suggesting that either sin or a problematic terror of sin lie beneath the beautiful exterior.

The threshold of the house symbolizes a turning point, a moment in which Goodman Brown can choose to listen to Faith and stay at home as a good husband, or follow his curiosity and go off alone into the night. Faith’s fear of bad dreams suggest a few possibilities: that there may be something evil and supernatural about Brown’s mysterious nighttime journey; that she may simply fear being lonely without her husband at home; or that she worries about what she might do without her husband around.

Guilt and paranoia are key emotions in the story. Goodman Brown feels crushing guilt not only because he is abandoning Faith but also because he fears that Faith knows about the sinful purpose of his journey. He fears being discovered to be a sinner and he is certain that Faith is saint-like, and so it doesn’t occur to him that Faith might be begging him to stay at home to keep them both from going into the forest that night and sinning.

Even though Goodman Brown just lied to his wife and admits to himself that his journey is evil, he continues to think of himself as one of the Elect, the people who the Puritans believe are predestined by God to go to heaven. He believes that his wife’s saintliness will make him saintly, too. He seems to think he can just dip a toe into sin and then draw back, no harm done.

The forest for Puritans marked both a place of fear and a place of possibility. It contained threat (“heathen” Indians and a world out of the control of Puritan society, but also an escape from the pressures of that society and its members all watching each other for sin. For Brown, who is walking into the forest expressly out of a sinful curiosity, the forest seems to hide sin everywhere. The forest might also then be seen as reflecting his own mind, full of its own confusions and terrors.The mysterious man hints at supernatural powers by mentioning that he was in Boston just a few minutes before, an impossible feat. Hawthorne’s use of the double meaning of Faith’s name makes the story into a parable.

Goodman Brown feared that he would see a “devilish Indian,” but instead the devil (as the man’s snake-shaped staff suggests him to be) takes the form of a man who closely resembles Goodman Brown, and who wouldn’t look out of place in “civilized” Salem or Boston. The point is clear: the devil is just at home among the Puritans as he is among the “heathen” Indians. The snake staff recalls the Biblical story of Adam and Eve’s loss of innocence, in which a devilish snake tempts Eve into sin. And one might argue here that the story of Goodman Brown is one of gaining knowledge of good and evil, of learning that good and evil are not always visible simply by their appearance and so can lurk anywhere. At the end of the story, Goodman Brown must try to live in the world with this new knowledge.

Goodman Brown must choose whether to continue onward or turn back, the same choice he had to make at the threshold of his house. Once again, his family connections seem to urge him to turn back and stay in town; this time, instead of Faith asking him to stay in town, he thinks of the many generations of upright Puritans that came before him who would have wanted him to turn back. He believes that all his relatives have been saintly, and the idea of being the first sinner horrifies him. This is important, because it means that he measures his own goodness against the goodness of his community, not against an absolute sense of right and wrong; he wants to do good in order to fit into his community, not in order to be moral or devout. Put another way, Goodman Brown’s morals are hollow, held up from without rather than within. Further, this problematic framework for moral behavior emerges from the logic of Puritanism: the Puritans believed that the Elect were predestined by God to instinctively be moral and go to heaven, and so doing good became a tool for proving that a person was part of the Elect and a rightful member of the Puritan community rather than a legitimate expression of one’s internal moral compass.

The man continues to reveal the hypocrisy of Puritanism, claiming that Goodman Brown’s ancestors hid their evil behavior behind their semblance of piety. Goodman Brown seems most shocked not that his father and grandfather were sinners, but that they didn’t trust him enough to tell him the truth, and that the family bond between them was therefore less strong than Goodman Brown believed. However, he understands that in Salem, it is even more important to seem saintly than it is to be saintly, and that the community would have responded to rumors of sin with ostracism, not mercy. Put another way, Goodman Brown is recognizing how Puritanism’s total refusal to accept any sin makes it essential to hide one’s own sins. At this point, though, Goodman Brown still believes that the community at large is so anti-sin because it is holy.

After revealing all of Goodman Brown’s family as sinners, the man now reveals all Puritan leaders as sinners as well, meaning those men were only pretending to be saintly. Yet Goodman continues to believe that even if his own family and the unapproachable Puritan leaders might be sinners, at least the people and immediate leaders of his own community are good. When the man laughs at this, too, Goodman continues to believe that Faith, at least, is saintly and honest. Even though he is losing faith in his broader community, and even though he is realizing that he is a human, not a saint, he thinks it’s possible for someone like Faith to be perfectly good.

Goodman Brown is as hypocritical as his father and grandfather; he wants to be thought of as good, and so he steps into the forest to avoid being seen by Goody Cloyse. His fear of the forest, and of whatever supernatural beings it might hide, is not as strong as his fear of being thought a sinner. Of course, one can also recognize that Good Cloyse also only lets down her appearance of goodness when she is in the forest; after all, Goodman Brown thought her unimpeachably good for all these years.

Once again, Goodman Brown learns that someone who he looked up to is actually a hypocritical sinner: like Goodman’s father and grandfather, Goody Cloyse is far less saintly than she pretends to be. As his teacher and his old family friend, Goody Cloyse’s closeness to the devil increases the pressure for Goodman to “follow the herd” and worship the devil. As a witch, she has a strong relationship with nature and the supernatural; like Goodman Brown, she goes into the forest to find the devil, but unlike Goodman Brown, she walks through the forest unafraid, uses plants in her flying ointment, and uses the devil’s serpent staff to make herself disappear.

Even though the devil is exposing the Puritans’ hypocrisy, Goodman Brown continues to believe that his wife is saintlike. Again, the symbolic name Faith lets Hawthorne simultaneously describe Goodman Brown’s sense of responsibility to his religion and to his wife. Goodman Brown’s stop-and-start journey illustrates his ambivalence toward sin and the devil: he resists the devil’s glib arguments, and he rejects Goody Cloyse’s example. Yet note once again that even as he resists the devil the relief he feels is a relief of having avoided the guilt of facing his saintly community, as opposed to a relief of having actually been saintly himself.

Once again, Goodman Brown’s eagerness not to be caught in the woods reveals his hypocritical desire to appear saintly, though he knows his journey is sinful. The revelation that the minister and Deacon Gookin are also hypocrites horrifies him: even more than Goody Cloyse and the past generations of Browns, the minister and deacon are supposed to exemplify piousness and lead the Puritan community (and not feeling guilt when he saw them was a motivating factor in his motivation to resist the devil). It doesn’t occur to Goodman Brown that they might have his same human flaws. Though the surrounding nature has gotten darker and more ominous as Goodman Brown walked deeper into the woods, his desperation makes him turn to nature: he leans against a tree, and looks to the stars for a reminder of heaven, as if the stars could guide him now that the minister and deacon no longer can.

The supernatural obscures nature as doubt and despair eclipse Goodman Brown’s faith in his wife. Again, Hawthorne plays with the double meaning of Faith’s name: Goodman Brown’s three outcries can be read as pleas to his wife or as appeals to both his and her religious belief. The falling ribbon, which initially symbolized Faith’s innocence, now also signify Goodman Brown’s lost faith and innocence.

Stripped of his innocent “faith” in his wife, Goodman Brown becomes almost inhuman, more terrifying than his worst fears of nature and the supernatural. The Puritans believed that humanity could be divided into the saints and the sinners, and so, having lost his “Faith” and his last reason to strive for saintliness, he lets himself fully become a sinner, blaspheming and calling for the devil. The devil’s congregation is a travesty of a church, as if mocking the hypocrisy of the Puritans—who have been revealed to look saintly on the outside but be sinners within—but the hypocrisy of his community no longer shocks Brown or makes him feel ill: he has lost his faith and accepts that all humans are sinners. But he does not yet enter the clearing and join the throng, and the possibility that Faith might not be there keeps him from declaring himself a sinner.

As the devil’s congregation begins, the usual order of things falls apart: nature melds with the supernatural, people considered to be saints in Puritan society stand with sinners, and humans harmonize with beasts. The devil’s resemblance to a minister and the ritual’s similarity to a church ceremony draw attention to the hypocrisy of self-righteous Puritan piousness. The appearance of Goodman Brown’s parents’ ghosts emphasizes his need for familial guidance, but their contradictory advice leaves him as helpless as before they appeared.

The devil’s speech and the sight of the congregation seem to further prove the hypocrisy of the Puritans and the folly of innocence and faith. The devil encourages Goodman Brown to doubt the most profound and sacred relationships, and especially family relationships: husband and wife, father and son, mother and child. The devil denies that humanity is divided into sinners and saints; instead, he claims that all humans are naturally sinners, and that the choice to sin is just a matter of giving in to nature.

After all his indecision on the halting journey, Goodman Brown must make a final decision whether to lose his faith and innocence, give into his community and family’s hypocritical example, and become a sinner. Though Goodman Brown can’t resist the devil on his own, the presence of his young wife gives him the moral strength to resist through her. His last-minute rebellion against the devil and his community leaves him suddenly alone, foreshadowing the distance he will feel between himself and his community and family for the rest of his life.

Though Goodman Brown resisted the devil and avoided being baptized as a sinner, he lost his faith and his innocent trust in his Puritan community. Ironically, he cannot relieve his new mistrust of Faith and the other Puritans by questioning or accusing them, because to do so would be to admit to having seen them in the forest and to his own temptation by the devil: instead, he shrinks away from the deacon and stares wordlessly at Faith. Even though he has lost all faith in Puritanism, the hypocrisy of Puritanism continues to dictate his actions. Hawthorne draws attention to Faith’s pristine pink ribbons to begin to cast slight doubt on Goodman Brown’s supernatural experience in the forest.

The narrator’s question haunts Goodman Brown, and his doubt creates a permanent emotional barrier between him and all other people. Neither the narrator nor Goodman Brown can ever know whether the other Puritans are all actually devil worshippers, whether something sinful in his own psyche made him imagine his experience in the forest, or whether his adventure in the forest was nothing more than a dream, because in order to question Faith and the other members of the community about it, Goodman Brown would have to admit to being tempted by the devil, even if only in his mind. He cannot even speak honestly to his wife and future children, and he fails to truthfully guide his children just as his father and grandfather (might have) failed him. His fear of seeming a sinner makes him a hypocrite for the rest of his life. At the beginning of the story Goodman Brown thought that he could go into the forest and sin a little out of curiosity, and then come back home and continue on with his life. But whether or not what happened in the forest was real or a dream, what it revealed to Brown was that sin could be everywhere and that the logic of Puritanism—in which the appearance of even the slightest sin is dreadfully punished—ensures that all sin gets hidden and makes it impossible to every figure out whether anyone else is a sinner. And so he lives and dies faithless and isolated by his doubts.