Examples Of Allegory In Young Goodman Brown

In his short fiction, “Young Goodman Brown,” Nathaniel Hawthorne demonstrates how a man isn’t depraved by nature. In fact, the story becomes an allegory of the power of reason and how it can destroy a person’s life, if one only trust on reason alone. Through his tale, Hawthorne is speaking to his intended audience, the Calvinist Puritans, whose belief of predestination, Hawthorne disagrees with. In his attempt to shed light into the past transgression of the Puritan community, regarding the witch trials, Hawthorne is trying to make their wrong doing known through his story. In this story, the main character of the story, Goodman Brown is a representation of the Puritan community, who becomes blinded by his own reliance on reason which leads

Through the use of a dream allegory, Hawthorne presents the story to the intended audience in order to create a conscious of the influence that absurd reasoning can have on an individual. The narrator implies that “Goodman Brown [could have] fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream…” (Hawthorne 354). Therefore, Brown would’ve most likely have been dreaming everything that occurred that night. However, despite this, Goodman Brown became “a distrustful, if not a desperate man” (Hawthorne 354). Hawthorne reveals that not only has Goodman Brown lost his faith in others but has also become an unhappy man who lives in a desperate sadness until his “dying hour” (354). In Narrative Structure and Theme in “Young Goodman Brown”, Norman H. Hostetler, expresses the belief that Goodman Brown “still has no concept of his own nature.” (224). In Hostetler’s point of view, “ [f]or him, evil is still the province of the devil” and is not aware of the evil that exists within him and has finally consumed his soul. In addition, Goodman Brown’s dream is intended not only to open his eyes unto the evil of the world; it is also supposed to reveal to him, that just as there is evil within everyone in his community, there is also evil within himself. Through Goodman Brown, Hawthorne is showing how reason alone can’t save an individual and instead, only serves as a faster path towards that individuals own destruction. In the end, this dream allegory is a message to the Calvinist-Puritan Community. In his “Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’: An attack on Puritanic Calvinism”, Thomas E. Connolly explains that “the doctrine of the elect and damned…condemns [them] to hell.”(375). Therefore, Hawthorne’s work a mirror that intends to reveal the wrong ideology that the Calvinist Community holds and how that ideology ultimately brings destruction to the individual who tries to reason