Young Goodman Brown

9 Pages 2210 Words

In 1835, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “Young Goodman Brown,” using analogies and historical chronologies to make the story of a young man traveling in the woods who meets up with the devil and sees the fate of the townspeople he loves and lives with. Far from a simple story, Hawthorne utilizes his own ancestry and a brilliance all of his own to teach a moral lesson to the reader and instill a sense of virtue. The story told is one of peril and fright, but the message given is one that can leave you with a positive impression and an awareness of your own self.
Hawthorne’s fascination with seventeenth-century Puritan society can be attributed to his own ancestry. His great-great-great-grandfather came from England in 1630 with John Winthrop’s great migration, the first of his family line in America, and helped with the settling of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He settled first in Dorchester then later moved to Salem where his influence among the Puritan’s only grew. A close friend of Winthrop and other prominent officials in the town, William Hathorne, rose to the office of speaker in the House of Delegates and became a major in the Salem militia (Stewart, 1). He boldly defied Charles II in declining to return to England, along with Governor Bellingham, to dispute the accusation of “the colony’s persistent insubordination to royal authority” (Turner, 60). However, despite his heroic American traits, William Hathorne’s infamy lies in the prosecution of the Quakers and his brutality in his sentencing. Hawthorne wrote about him in “The Custom House”:
The figure of the first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home feeling with the past….He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was lik...