‘Young Goodman Brown’, then, is a highly symbolic and suggestive story about the nature of evil and also the nature of puritanism: once the veil has been lifted, Young Goodman Brown sees evil everywhere, even where it may well not actually exist. (Calling her ‘Faith’, by the way, is an inspired touch by Hawthorne it was a popular woman’s name among Puritans, but it resonates with obviously symbolic significance in this story about faith and sin.) The twist, of course, is that in leaving Faith (his wife) behind, he finds Faith again, in the woodland black sabbath, where she is at first veiled and then revealed to him. Once he has made the decision to go down to the woods tonight he was always going to be in for a big surprise. In other words, Goodman Brown is clearly drawn to the world of sin and witchcraft, as his meeting with the older man with the snake-staff (the ‘serpent’ summoning the satanic snake from the Garden of Eden, of course, which tempted Eve) indicates. The Puritan is as possessed by ‘evil’ as the devil-worshipper they condemn they’re just possessed in different ways. If it’s true that the only two kinds of person who are wholly obsessed with evil are the very bad and the very good (in the sense of being puritanical about making sure everyone else is as ‘good’ as they are), then ‘Young Goodman Brown’ is as much a cautionary tale about being lured over to the ‘dark side’, because even if you don’t end up embracing it, it will already have embraced you. Young Goodman Brown actually resists the initiation in the woodland clearing, involving the blood-baptism, but the story suggests that this doesn’t matter: he has still come to recognise evil and has thus been initiated into its ways. The story is remarkable in its depiction of evil not least because it raises interesting questions about what it means to ‘become’ or ‘know’ evil. Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick, thought ‘Young Goodman Brown’ was ‘deep as Dante’ in its exploration of the darker side of human nature.

Young goodman brown short story