Essay On Symbolism In Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown

Young Goodman Brown: Symbolism
In “Young Goodman Brown”, a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the subject of confliction towards good and evil is constantly brought up initiating tension and a feeling of mysteriousness to the reader. The theme of evil vs. good is raised through symbols like faith and the dark dreary woods, which in turn creates a suspenseful mood throughout the story allowing the audience to question the validity of witchcraft.
Goodman Brown starts out as a man with strong faith before he sets out to venture in the woods. Hawthorne wittingly uses Goodman Brown’s wife, Faith, as a symbol to Goodman’s own faith throughout the story. Goodman’s good faith towards his wife is expressed early in the story when he says, “My love and my Faith” (276) as a reply to his wife’s anxiety. Although Goodman is referring to his wife’s name, it is also an implication of his own faith. His wife is portrayed as a
pure and innocent woman, as is Goodman’s own faith. Because Goodman’s faith is supposedly pure and untarnished, his belief in his strong faith justifies his “haste on [this] present evil purpose” (276) to venture the dark impure woods. He is fully aware of the sinful acts he is about to commit yet he believes that his pure and strong faith will get him back home unsullied.
Goodman, however, soon dismisses his faith when he starts to encounter more characters of the evils in the woods.
The woods, in this case, symbolize Goodman’s fear of the validity of witchcraft and the embodiment of his suspicions and dark feelings he has towards things he never thought about before. Each time he is exposed to something he did not expect, he loses a bit more of his faith. When he “sat himself on the stump of a tree, and refused to go any further” (281), it is a clear indication to the audience that he is starting to lose his faith to the evil woods. In a way, the woods symbolize the outside world –a dark place where lies and disappointments of all sorts take over. When he cries, “My faith is lost!” (283), after he sees his wife in the woods, Hawthorne is suggesting that Goodman indeed has lost his wife, Faith, to the devils, and has also literally lost his own faith towards her and himself. Goodman now believes that his wife’s innocence and pureness was all a lie –that the world is full of evil and his faith is completely
destroyed.
His faith connects to one of the many themes in the story: good vs. evil. His strong faith symbolizes the goodness within him in the beginning. Although he encountered a suspicious and allegedly evil figure in the woods, he expressed his certainty in his own faith by denying the negative facts of himself that he was hearing from the evil figure. However, as he continuously met respectable figures, such as the town minister and his wife in the woods, his faith starts to wane causing him to become ‘evil’. He goes back home now viewing everything and everyone negatively. His affection towards Faith vanishes, and everything she does is interpreted as worthless and phony to Goodman. He withdraws from the world around him and remains in the darkness with his spitefulness.
Hawthorne uses the theme of good vs. evil incorporating faith and the woods as symbols to pose questions about the validity of witchcraft and also the importance of the concept of forgiving. The mistake Goodman made was that the validity of witchcraft outweighed the value of his true faith. As a result, he lived a sorrowful and dark life because he did not learn how to forgive.
Works Cited
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Young Goodman Brown." Tales and Sketches. New York: Library of America, 1982. 276-289. Print.