Young Goodman Brown

Based on Wikipedia: Young Goodman Brown

The Night That Shattered a Man's Soul

A young husband tells his wife he'll be gone for just one night. She begs him to stay. He doesn't. And when he returns the next morning, something in him has died forever.

This is the premise of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1835 short story "Young Goodman Brown," a tale so psychologically devastating that Herman Melville compared it to Dante's Inferno. Stephen King calls it one of the ten best stories ever written by an American. What happens in those dark woods outside Salem Village continues to haunt readers nearly two centuries later.

A Walk into Darkness

The story opens at dusk in Salem Village, Massachusetts, during the late 1600s. Goodman Brown—"Goodman" being the Puritan equivalent of "Mister"—has been married to his wife Faith for only three months. Her name is no accident. She literally embodies his faith, complete with the pink ribbons in her hair that Hawthorne uses as symbols of innocence throughout the story.

Faith pleads with him not to go. She has dark dreams, she says. Premonitions. But Brown insists the journey must happen tonight. He promises to return by morning and be a better man afterward.

He won't be.

In the forest, Brown meets a strange older man who looks eerily like himself—as if he's gazing at his own father or perhaps his future self. The man carries a walking staff carved to resemble a black serpent. In Puritan symbolism, this is about as subtle as a neon sign flashing "THE DEVIL."

But here's where Hawthorne starts playing with our expectations. The stranger doesn't tempt Brown with wealth or power or pleasure. Instead, he simply walks and talks with him, revealing uncomfortable truths. He mentions helping Brown's father burn an Indian village during King Philip's War—a real and brutal conflict from the 1670s. He claims to have been present when Brown's grandfather whipped a Quaker woman through the streets of Salem.

The pillars of Puritan virtue that Brown built his worldview upon begin to crack.

Everyone You Trust Is in These Woods

As Brown ventures deeper into the forest, he encounters people he knows. There's Goody Cloyse, the elderly woman who taught him his catechism—the religious lessons every Puritan child memorized. She's hobbling through the trees, complaining about the walk. The devil tosses her his serpent staff and she vanishes.

Then Brown hears familiar voices ahead on the path. The minister and Deacon Gookin, the most respected religious leaders in Salem Village, are discussing the evening's ceremony with eager anticipation.

Brown hides. He prays. He tries to resist. But then he hears his wife's voice somewhere in the dark canopy above him, and a pink ribbon floats down from the sky.

Something breaks in him.

"My Faith is gone!" he cries, and the double meaning is unmistakable. He runs wildly through the forest, laughing, no longer resisting, rushing toward whatever waits at the heart of this darkness.

The Ceremony at Midnight

What Brown finds in the clearing is a kind of anti-church service. A flame-lit altar of rocks. The entire town assembled. Every person he has ever known and trusted, gathered for what appears to be a Satanic initiation.

The congregation sings familiar hymns—the same tunes from the village meetinghouse—but with lyrics praising sin instead of salvation. A dark figure presides, and he delivers a sermon that inverts everything Brown has ever believed.

The figure tells the assembly that they need no longer hide their true natures. The elders who preached righteousness? They whispered temptations to young women in their households. The virtuous widows who buried husbands? They hastened those deaths along. Every secret sin, every hidden evil, every betrayal concealed behind the mask of Puritan piety—all of it stands revealed in this midnight gathering.

And now there are two initiates to welcome: Goodman Brown and Faith, his wife.

They are brought forward together. This is the moment of choice. The figure invites them to look upon each other and see the wickedness that was always there, to embrace the truth of human nature, to join the congregation of sinners who have stopped pretending.

Brown looks at Faith. She looks at him. And in one final act of resistance—or perhaps desperation—Brown cries out: "Faith! Faith! Look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one!"

Instantly, everything vanishes. The fire. The congregation. The altar. Brown finds himself alone in the cold, quiet forest.

The Question That Destroys Him

Hawthorne refuses to tell us whether any of it actually happened.

This is the knife he twists. When Brown walks back into Salem Village the next morning, the minister and Deacon Gookin are there, offering blessings. Goody Cloyse is teaching a child. Faith runs to greet him with joy, her pink ribbons in place.

Did he dream it? Did he hallucinate? Was it a genuine supernatural vision? Or—and this is perhaps most disturbing—did the devil show him a truth about human nature that he wasn't prepared to accept?

It doesn't matter. Brown can never look at any of them the same way again.

He flinches when Faith embraces him. He walks past the minister without accepting the blessing. He pulls children away from Goody Cloyse. For the rest of his long life, he moves through Salem Village as a ghost among the living, seeing nothing but hypocrisy and hidden sin in every face.

He becomes exactly what he feared finding in the forest: a man without faith, without love, without hope.

The story's final line is devastating: "And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave, a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession... they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom."

Why Hawthorne Wrote This

To understand "Young Goodman Brown," you need to understand the weight Nathaniel Hawthorne carried.

His great-great-grandfather was John Hathorne—note the spelling—one of the judges during the Salem witch trials of 1692. John Hathorne never repented his role in condemning innocent people to death. Unlike some of his fellow judges who later expressed remorse, he went to his grave insisting he had done God's work.

Nathaniel Hawthorne added the "w" to his family name in his early twenties, a small but telling act of distance from that legacy. But he couldn't escape it. The guilt of Salem seeped into nearly everything he wrote.

"Young Goodman Brown" isn't just a horror story about a man who might have attended a witch's sabbath. It's an indictment of the Puritan worldview itself—the belief that humanity is fundamentally depraved, that only God's arbitrary grace can save a chosen few (the "elect"), and that everyone else is damned from birth.

The Puritans who settled New England believed in what theologians call "total depravity." This doesn't mean they thought everyone was as wicked as possible. Rather, it means they believed sin had corrupted every aspect of human nature, including our ability to choose good over evil. Only God's intervention—unearned and undeserved—could save anyone.

This creates a particular kind of psychological trap. If you believe you're one of the elect, you must constantly scrutinize yourself for signs that you're not. If you believe your neighbors are elect, discovering their sins shatters your entire framework for understanding reality. And if you believe humanity is fundamentally corrupt, then learning that corruption exists everywhere shouldn't surprise you—but somehow it still destroys you.

Goodman Brown falls into all three traps simultaneously.

The Allegory Beneath the Story

Literary scholars have spent nearly two centuries arguing about what the forest journey actually represents. The most common reading is that it's an allegory—a story where characters and events stand for abstract ideas—about the loss of innocence.

Brown enters the forest as a naive young man who believes goodness is real and virtue is possible. He emerges as a cynic who sees evil everywhere and trusts no one. In between, he encounters what theologians would call "the problem of evil": if God is good and people can be saved, why is there so much wickedness in the world?

But there's a deeper reading too. Scholar Jane Eberwein argues that the story is really about what happens when someone who believes they're chosen by God discovers that everyone—including themselves—might be damned.

Brown has been married for three months, and that matters. In Puritan theology, sexual desire was complicated. Marriage legitimized it, but some Puritans worried that enjoying married life too much was itself a form of sin. Brown's journey into the forest might represent his guilt about his own humanity—about having desires, about being a creature of flesh, about not being the pure spiritual being he imagined himself to be.

When he sees his neighbors in the forest, he's really seeing himself. The devil doesn't corrupt anyone in this story. He simply reveals what was already there.

The Ambiguity That Makes It Art

What distinguishes "Young Goodman Brown" from a simple morality tale is Hawthorne's refusal to resolve anything.

Was the forest gathering real? If it was, then Brown was right to distrust everyone, and his isolation is tragic but justified. If it wasn't—if the whole thing was a dream or a hallucination or a trick of the devil—then Brown destroyed his own life by believing a lie.

But Hawthorne offers a third possibility that's even more unsettling. What if the devil showed Brown something true about human nature, but Brown drew the wrong conclusion from it?

The dark figure in the forest doesn't claim that sin makes people worthless. He claims that everyone sins, including the people we admire most. This is actually a fairly standard Christian belief—that all humans fall short of perfection. The question is what you do with that knowledge.

Brown could have returned from the forest with humility. He could have thought: "My neighbors are sinners, just like me. We're all struggling. We all need grace." Instead, he returned with contempt. He held himself apart, judging everyone, trusting no one, loving nothing.

The real horror of the story isn't what Brown saw in the forest. It's what he became afterward.

A Story That Refuses to Die

When Hawthorne first published "Young Goodman Brown" in 1835, he didn't even put his name on it. The story appeared in The New-England Magazine attributed only to "the author of 'The Gray Champion.'" Hawthorne was notoriously self-deprecating about his work, and he later claimed this story made "not the slightest impression on the public."

He was wrong.

Edgar Allan Poe, himself no stranger to dark fiction, called Hawthorne's short stories "the products of a truly imaginative intellect." Henry James praised "Young Goodman Brown" as "a magnificent little romance." Herman Melville—who would go on to write Moby-Dick—said the story was "as deep as Dante."

The tale has continued to resonate through American culture in unexpected ways. Stephen King, the modern master of horror, cites it as inspiration for his award-winning short story "The Man in the Black Suit." The Library of America included it in their anthology American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny—the only Hawthorne work in the collection.

It's been adapted for film, radio, stage, and even music video. In 2015, Brandon Flowers of The Killers made a video for "Can't Deny My Love" that reimagines the story with Flowers as Goodman Brown and actress Evan Rachel Wood as Faith. Comic artist Kate Beaton satirized it in her webcomic "Hark! A Vagrant," poking fun at Brown's hypocritical moralizing.

Why does this story from 1835 keep finding new audiences? Perhaps because its central question never gets easier to answer: When you discover that the people you trusted are flawed—that everyone is flawed, including yourself—do you respond with compassion or contempt?

Goodman Brown chose contempt. He lived a long life after that night in the forest, but by any meaningful measure, he died the moment he stopped believing in the possibility of goodness.

The Devil's Best Trick

There's an old saying that the devil's greatest trick is convincing the world he doesn't exist. Hawthorne suggests something more insidious: the devil's greatest trick might be convincing a good person that goodness doesn't exist.

Brown enters the forest as a man of faith. He encounters evil—or the appearance of evil—and instead of integrating that knowledge into a more mature worldview, he lets it destroy everything he ever loved. He becomes cold, suspicious, joyless. He loses his wife not to the devil but to his own inability to accept that she, like him, might be imperfect.

Faith remains faithful. She greets him with joy when he returns. She walks beside him to his grave decades later. But Brown can never see her innocence again. The pink ribbons mean nothing anymore.

This is the tragedy Hawthorne draws from the Puritan obsession with sin: not that people do evil, but that the knowledge of evil can poison even the most loving heart. Brown doesn't become a sinner in the forest. He becomes something worse—a man incapable of love, incapable of trust, incapable of grace.

The story ends with Brown being buried without a hopeful verse on his tombstone. But the real death happened that night in the forest, when a young husband decided that darkness was the only truth and love was just another lie.

Hawthorne leaves us with an uncomfortable question: What would we have done differently? And the honest answer might be that we don't know. That's what makes "Young Goodman Brown" not just a story about Puritans in the 1600s, but a story about anyone who has ever discovered that the world is darker than they believed—and had to decide what to do with that knowledge.