Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” is a staple when it comes to teaching symbolism. The title character leaves his wife, Faith, at home before entering a dark and gloomy New England forest. There, he first encounters a man with a walking stick on which is carved a serpent that appears to move. The man, dressed in “grave and decent attire,” seems to be expecting Young Goodman Brown, aware that he would be venturing into the woods at night. He informs him that he is late to which the protagonist replies, “Faith kept me back awhile.” When the “pious and exemplary dame,” Goody Cloyse, comes along, Young Goodman Brown is tested even more because, while she had taught him his catechism, she is bound for the same nocturnal ceremony he is. When Young Goodman Brown finds his wife’s pink ribbon “caught on the branch of a tree,” he cries out, “My Faith is gone! There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, Devil; for to thee is this world given.” He throws up his hands in surrender, and “the road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness.” Interestingly, while the forest then erupted in a cacophony of terrifying sounds, Hawthorne is quick to point out that Young Goodman Brown himself was "the chief horror of the scene.” Darkness, in other words, became him. Indeed, as Hawthorne writes, “The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man.” The climax of the story happens when he eventually discovers the diabolical ceremony where dark-clad worshipers – members of the community, perhaps even the dead – appear to be engaged in some black mass. The scene is nightmarish. And then a dark figure with a booming voice, proclaiming, “Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness.” And then Faith. His wife. They lock eyes. And he cries out, “Look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one!” But in an instant, it all stopped. The next day, he wanders into the village only to behold those he saw at the ceremony behaving as if nothing had happened. He wonders if he had dreamed of these events, but the jaded feelings persist. He lives the rest of his life an unhappy man, for as Hawthorne writes, he “was borne to his grave a hoary corpse ... they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.” It is hard, after reading this short story, not to be reminded of what might be called fair-weather Christians. Individuals in this category only believe in God when life is going well. When life takes those inevitable downturns, then pops up the cringy question: Is there a God? He becomes jaded about the world around him, surely wondering how a good God would allow such wickedness. He distrusts everybody, including his wife, living out the rest of his life, soured by the knowledge that the devil does, indeed, operate in this world. He lost his faith, but we should wonder what kind of faith he had to begin with. Was it mature in the sense that God exists, is in charge, and sometimes lets evil occur or was it immature in that God can only exist if there is no evil? Young Goodman Brown is, arguably, a tragedy. A man is faced with a decision – to believe or not to believe – and chooses the latter. Even so, the tragedy is not centered on the protagonist alone. A more robust and, I hasten to add, fair reading of the short story includes us. Hawthorne’s short story is less an indictment of one man and more of a cautionary tale for his readers. Evil exists, and like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a hundred years later, “[t]he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart.” We are all Young Goodman Browns, and sometimes, the temptation to step into the dark woods is a bit too much. Thank God for grace and for the sun that rises.
