Good And Evil In Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown

Knowledge of Good and Evil A young man embarks through the woods, at night, to keep a date with destiny. His destiny is to ‘know’. When he leaves the woods the following morning, he departs with the knowledge of evil. This story, “Young Goodman Brown”, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne as a retelling of the Bible story of Adam and Eve, uses rich and powerful setting to discuss the human struggle against hypocrisy and man’s need to ‘know’. Hawthorne uses the complexities of New England’s Puritan roots as a backdrop for his story. The first line of the story reveals that the tale is set in the Puritan town of Salem Massachusetts (Hawthorn, 148). In this story, Goodman, the main character, dares to question his rigid Puritan faith. He looks to an appointment in the woods to settle his doubts concerning his faith as is revealed through his thoughts concerning his wife faith whom he has left alone

Goodman hoped that once he had appeased his curiosity he would be able to return to a pious and faith filled life. He stated,” With heaven above and faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!” (Hawthorne 152). This story shows, however, that knowledge is like poison and the evil so detested by the Puritans was already rooted in the hearts of even the most respected of saints, as the devil’s monolog in the center of the story reveals: “’There . . . are all whom ye have reverenced from youth . . . Yet here are they all in my worshipping assembly! . . . Depending upon one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived? Evil is the nature of mankind.’” (Hawthorne 154, 155). Through this connection between the Puritan ideals of holiness and the unholy nature of mankind to favor sin, the story depicts the human struggle against the hypocrisy of legalistic