Our next literary work is also a short story (fiction). “Young Goodman Brown,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, was first published in 1835 and has been widely read ever since. Hawthorne, like Edgar Allan Poe, is an important author during the age of American Romanticism (1800s). This story is set in the seventeenth century (1600s) in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, more than a century before the United States became a country. 

This story is often described as an allegory: a literary work in which the apparent meaning of characters, places, and events is used to symbolize a deeper moral or spiritual meaning. For example, Goodman Brown’s wife’s name is Faith, which carries the double meaning of religious faith and the name of a woman. The word “Goodman” also has a double meaning: in the seventeenth century, “Goodman” had basically the same meaning as the word “Mister” (Mr.) does today. But also contained in the word are “good” and “man,” implying a good person (religious, spiritual, ethical, moral).

Hawthorne’s story takes place in the village of Salem, Massachusetts, in the same century in which the notorious Salem witch trials happened. In fact, a distant relative of Hawthorne actually served as a judge at some of these trials, a fact that greatly embarrassed Hawthorne. “Young Goodman Brown,” like many of his other works, such as The Scarlet Letter, is a kind of allegorical protest against what Hawthorne saw as the extreme harshness and hypocrisy of the early American Puritans. 

This story shows extreme examples of the duality of human nature, meaning that almost all humans have the potential to be both good and bad. Another way to say this is that no one is entirely good or entirely bad/evil. Part of the message of “Young Goodman Brown” is that we need to come to terms with this duality of human nature, or we will be miserably unhappy during our time on this Earth.

There are several interesting interpretations about what happens in this story, but ultimately the outcome is the same, at least for the main character, who, as the story begins, is a young man, newly married, living in Salem with his wife during the 1600’s. 

Please post your interpretations, thoughts, comments, and questions about this story. The word range for this discussion is 150–250 words. Be sure to put quotation marks around the story’s title, and capitalize the first letter of each word in the title. Re-read your post to correct errors in grammar and punctuation before sending it. 

I have attached the reading, it is pages 1-9.