”Young Goodman Brown” written in 1835 by Nathaniel Hawthorne is said to be one of literature’s most reliable portaits of seventeenth-century Puritan society. The tale appeared for the first time in the April issue of ”New England Magazin” and was later included in the short story collection ”Mosses from an Old Manse” in 1846.
Hawthorne was an American fiction writer, born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804, in a family of Puritans colonists. In that time religion and innocence were questioned. The story ” Young Goodman Brown” was the outcome of his experience through his young adulthood, which was heavily impacted by the historical background of his family. His grandfather from his father’s side, John Hathorne, was a judge in the Salem Witch Trials, bothered Nathaniel so much, that he decided to change his last name by adding a W just to separate himself from the family.
The story opens with the central character, Young Goodman Brown, about to adventure on an evening walk. His wife presented by the name of Faith, begged him to delay his journey. Goodman Brown however tells her that he has some bussines to take care of before sunrise. As he walks down the street blaming himself for leaving his young wife alone at home and promised that after this journey he will stay by her side when times are good or bad. He arrives deep in the forest and meets with an old man, who is actually a disguised Devil, waiting for him. The Devil carries a stuff which resembles a black snake, when he urges Goodman Brown to take the stuff as he follows him, Goodman Brown expresses doubts and intentions of going back home, but the Devil succeded in convincing him to walk with him and to listen to the resons why he should continue.
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Goodman Brown murmurs that his forefathers, good and honest Christians, would never go on such a walk. To his surprise, he founds out that this is not true. His companion tells him that he is well familiarized with the Brown family and that he helped his father and grandfather to commit acts such as punishment of religious dessenters and the massacre of Indians, Goodman is in shock while the Devil bursted in laughter.
The two men then see the old woman who serves as moral adviser, Coody Cloyse. They continue walking throught the forest. When he arrieves and lifts his hands to pray he hears Faith’s voice, his beloved wife, as he calles out for her, she answers with a scream. He realizes that Faith is going to the meeting, and he decides to attend the meeting too. Soon he reaches a clearing with a crude altar surrounded by the “saints” and “sinners” of Salem. While the Devil’s congregation sings an evil hymn rejoicing in sin, Brown waits, hoping that he can find Faith. At a call for the new members he steps forward, and Faith is led forward by two women. A dark figure speaks of sin. He commands the new ones to look at each other and then declares that they now know virtue is but a dream and evil is the nature of mankind. Goodman Brown cries out to Faith to resist this evil.
He never finds out, however, if Faith does resist. As soon as the words are out of his mouth,Goodman Brown finds himself alone in the forest. The next morning he returns to Salem. Everywhere he goes he sees people who attended the meeting, but he turns away from them. He even turns from Faith.
Though Goodman Brown never finds out whether or not he dreamed the meeting in the forest, the experience still has a profound effect on him. After that night, he becomes a stern, sad, and distrustful man. He rejects the faith he once had in his religion and even rejects his own wife. At his death, no hopeful words are carved upon his tombstone. He has lived a life of gloom, seeing sinners everywhere he looked.
Now that we know the plot, I will continue with the main ideea that I want to focus on this paper which is puritanism. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, puritanism is the belief that it is important to work hard and control yourself, and that pleasure is wrong or unnecessary and a puritan is someone who believes that it is important to work hard and control yourself, and that pleasure is wrong or unnecessary. The roots of Puritanism are to be found in the beginnings of the English Reformation. The name “Puritans” (sometimes called “precisionists”) was a term of contempt assigned to the movement by its enemies.
They belived that the Church of England was too similar to the Roman Catholic one and that there should be eliminated the ceremonies and practices that are not rooted in the Bible. Puritans felt that they had a direct agreement with God to enact these reforms. Under siege from Church and crown, certain groups of Puritans migrated to Northern English colonies in the New World in the 1620s and 1630s, laying the foundation for the religious, intellectual, and social order of New England.
Through the reigns of the Protestant King Edward VI (1547-1553), who introduced the first vernacular prayer book, and the Catholic (1553-1558), who sent some dissenting priest to their deaths and others into exile, the Puritan movement–whether tolerated or suppressed–continued to grow. Some Puritans favored a presbyterian form of church organization; others, more radical, began to claim autonomy for individual congregations. Still others were content to remain within the structure of the national church, but set themselves against Catholic and episcopal authority.
As they gained strength, Puritans were seen by their enemies as hairsplitters who in a servile or submissive manner followed their Bibles as guides to daily life or hypocrites, if I can say it like this, who cheated the very neighbors they judged inadequate Christians.
Yet the Puritan attack on the established church gained popular strength, especially in East Anglia and among the lawyers and merchants of London. The movement found wide support among these new professional classes, who saw in it a mirror for their growing discontent with economic restraints.
Not to confuse the Pilgrims with the Puritans, the main difference between these two is that the Puritans did not consider themselves separatists. They called themselves “nonseparating congregationalists,” by which they meant that they had not repudiated the Church of England as a false church.
The Puritan migration was overwhelmingly a migration of families (unlike other migrations to early America, which were composed largely of young unattached men). The literacy rate was high, and the intensity of devotional life, as recorded in the many surviving diaries, sermon notes, poems, and letters, was seldom to be matched in American life. Puritanism gave Americans a sense of history as a progressive drama under the direction of God, in which they played a role akin to, if not prophetically aligned with, that of the Old Testament Jews as a new chosen people. Perhaps most important, as Max Weber profoundly understood, was the strength of Puritanism as a way of coping with the contradictory requirements of Christian ethics in a world on the verge of modernity. It reccommended moderation within a psychology that saw worldly prosperity as a sign of divine favor. Such ethics were particularly urgent in a New World where opportunity was rich, but the source of moral authority obscure. By the beginning of the 18th century, Puritanism had both declined and shown its tenacity.
In ‘Young Goodman Brown,’ one of Hawthorne’s most admired and critically discussed stories, he probes the psychology of Puritan Salem’s witchcraft frenzy to offer insights into the moral complexity of human nature. A dark, penetrating tale, as ‘deep as Dante,’ according to Herman Melville, ‘Young Goodman Brown’ reveals Hawthorne at his best–skillful writer of symbolic allegory and astute interpreter of Puritan history.
Nancy Bunge comments on Hawthorne’s knowledge and use of Salem history in Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Study of the Short Fiction: ”[Hawthorne] did not write out of ignorant fantasies about the Puritans. ‘Young Goodman Brown’ not only presents the issue of the Salem witch trials, but a number of its characters have the names of Salem residents charged with witchcraft, and its major action takes place in the noisy pasture of the period designated as a witches’ gathering place. (historical documents of the witchcraft trials). Hawthorne does not simply provide a record of the time, he uses history to examine issues of community and individualism explaining both the madness in Salem and much subsequent madness (11).” (courtesy of Twayne Publishers, New York, 1993.)
It’s not surprising that Hawthorne was drawn to the witchcraft episode. His family history gave him a personal connection to the tragic events of 1692. In The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne Margaret B. Moore points out: ”As for Hawthorne’s ties with the persecution of the witches, they too [like his ties with the persecution of Quakers] are based partly on his paternal ancestors, in particular on John Hathorne (1641-1717), the third son of Major William and Anna Hathorne and an important merchant in Salem. . . . John Hathorne was also the famous ‘witch judge’ blamed by many, such as Charles Upham, for playing a major role in the witchcraft trials in Salem and Salem Village in 1692. According to his descendant [Nathaniel], John Hathorne ‘inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street burial-ground must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust’ (37-38). (courtesy of University of Missouri Press, 1998).
In seventeenth-century New England, most people shared a strong belief in witchcraft, and in the ‘Wonders of the Invisible World,’ Cotton Mather recorded the hellish workings of witches and the Devil against the Puritan experiment.
The origins of the belief in witchcraft and ‘specters’ went back to Europe, where, by some estimates, five hundred thousand people were executed for witchcraft between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Prior to the Salem outbreak of 1692, almost three hundred people had been accused of witchcraft in New England; more than thirty had been hanged (‘witches’ were not burned in England or the American colonies).The flair up of accusations in 1692, beginning at Salem Village (now Danvers), spread to many other communities in Essex County, Massachusetts and was the worst and most dramatic episode of witch hunting in colonial America. When it was over, twenty people had been executed, nineteen hanged and one, Giles Corey, pressed to death. More than a hundred people had been jailed, and several died during their imprisonment.
Both men and women were accused, imprisoned, and executed for witchcraft prior to and during the Salem hysteria. In colonial New England, however, almost all accused ‘witches’ were older women, who tended to be independent and nonconformist. An interesting study from this perspective is Carol F. Karlsen’s ”The Devil in the Shape of a Woman” (W.W. Norton, 1987).
Generally, historians have seen the Salem witchcraft hysteria as significant because it was the last time in American history that accusations of witchcraft would lead to execution. The episode and its aftermath also marked the end of Puritan authority in New England and, with dawning rationalism, the belief in devils striking out from some ‘invisible world.’
Works Cited
- (Definition of puritanism from the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press) https://dictionary.cambridge.org/
- ‘Young Goodman Brown .’ Short Stories for Students . . Encyclopedia.com. 10 Jan. 2020
- ‘Religion & Historical Background of Young Goodman Brown.’ StudyMoose, 13 May 2016, Contributor: The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Contributor: The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Article Title: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Website Name: Encyclopædia Britannica, Publisher: Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., Date Published: noiembrie 06, 2019, Access Date: ianuarie 17, 2020
- http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/page/11398/
- Article Title: The Puritans, Author: History.com Editors, Website Name: HISTORY, Access Date: 17 ianuarie 2020, Publisher: A&E Television Networks, Last Updated: July 30, 2019, Original Published Date: October 29, 2009
