An allegory is a work of fiction where all the elements are subservient to a single theme by designating them as symbols of abstract concepts in order to portray that theme. The interaction between these symbols creates an explicit statement on human nature or human relationships, usually in moral, religious, or political terms. In “Young Goodman Brown”, Nathaniel Hawthorne creates an allegory that encompasses the whole of this definition. The most obvious example of Hawthorne’s designation of characters into symbols for the portrayal of the theme is in the ames of the story’s characters: Young Goodman Brown, Faith, Goody Cloyse.
The names are either ironic, with Goody Cloyse turning out to be a witch, or literal, with Faith blatently representing faith(Hawthorne 1991, 50). So when Young Goodman Brown speaks of his wife as “Poor little Faith” by which he’ll rise to heaven by clinging to her skirts(Hawthorne 1991, 51), the author is revealing the nature of Goodman Brown’s own faith: fragile and distinct from his own self. The appearance of characters are also acts of symbolism for telling the allegory. Goodman Brown’s companion is identified as the Devil by his walking staff, carved in the form of a snake.
Martha Carrier, the consort of the Devil, is said to be a “rampant hag”(Hawthorne 1991, 57). Deacon Goodkin and the minister ride on horseback denoting their higher social standing, and their conversation reveals to Goodman Brown that evil has infected the highest reaches of power everywhere in New England. And it is no coincidence that the Devil takes the form of Goodman Brown’s grandfather, for it is the Devil that describes how he elped the Brown’s to commit acts of intolerance and genocide against Quakers and Indians. The sins of the fathers, symbolized in the Devil’s appearance, come to disillusion Young Goodman Brown.
Even material objects take on symbolic life. The Devil keeps asking Goodman Brown to take his staff to aid in his walking. And when Goodman Brown does take a maple stick that the Devil fashioned for him, it speeds him down the forest path, bringing him into such a frenzy that “there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown” in his righteous fury(Hawthorne 1991, 55). Time is also symbolized. Young Goodman Brown journeys out at sunset, representing the end of his youth and the coming gloom of his “maturity”.
The symbolism most important to the allegory in “Young Goodman Brown” is that of the natural world. The sky symbolizes “heaven above” to Goodman Brown, and with its darkening by the cloud of “a confused and doubtful sound of voices”, Goodman Brown feels all hope in faith lost. The wind likewise takes on symbolic life in laughing in scorn at Goodman Brown’s indignation by its “frightful sounds- the creaking of trees, the howling of wild easts, and the yell of Indians”(Hawthorne 1991, 55). However, the most significant symbolism of the natural world is in how Hawthorne characterizes the forest.
The setting for “Young Goodman Brown” is around the early eighteenth century, during the Age of Reason, when nature was looked upon as corrupt and vulgar, something to be held subservient to logic. However, during the time of Hawthorne, the Age of Romanticism, nature had come to be see as pure and noble. Hawthorne portrays nature from the viewpoint of the Age of Reason, but the irony of the story is Romantic: Young Goodman Brown’s downfall lies not in the truth that human nature, symbolized in the natural world, is inherently evil, but in that he takes this to be true.
To demonstrate this irony, Hawthorne takes the traditional Puritan view of the untamed New England forest. To them, the forest was not simply a physical wilderness but also a wilderness of the soul: full of darkness, wild beasts, and “a devilish Indian behind every tree”(Hawthorne 1991, 51). To the Puritans, the wilderness was a savage place, that by conquering it and its inhabitants, they had symbolically conquered human nature and ecome more divine. Hawthorne takes this myth and turns it upside down: by seeking to conquer nature, by seeing it as purely evil, Goodman Brown becomes less human.
In the story, the forest is symbolized as a dark mirror image of Goodman Brown’s Salem village. The pious villagers that he has known in Salem become minions of the Devil in the forest, meeting in congregation for a black mass held in a naturally- formed chapel: “At one extremity of an open space, hemmed in by the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit, and urrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting”(Hawthorne 1991, 56).
By mingling with “the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling beasts, and every other voice of the unconcerted wilderness”, the people of the village pay homage to the Devil(Hawthorne 1991, 57). Here, the villagers are told by the Devil to look upon each other and reveal their true character. So the forest, for its chaotic, dark aspect which eludes logic, is symbolized as human nature: “Evil is the nature of mankind”(Hawthorne 1991, 57). This becomes Goodman Brown’s view when he loses Faith, faith in his fellow man.
So, in allegorical terms, in leaving behind his wife Faith to venture out into the forest at sunset, Young Goodman Brown loses his own faith in the goodness of mankind and thus his naive youth, witnesses the dark nature of Man which turns him sour and distrustful of all. As can be seen, everything in the story is subservient to this theme of betrayal of youthful optimism and the resulting descent into matured yet corrupt pessimism. The characters have no real life of their own: they are symbols first and foremost.
