Now that I understand the story completely in my own way, I can see that Brown really just walked away from his religion on his own when he walked away from Faith that night. He knew exactly what he was doing and he took the chance anyway, and it caused him to lose his religion entirely. He also lost that strong adoration he had for his wife in the beginning of the story.
As Brown walks through the woods with the stranger he met there, he keeps saying he should go home. This is either him thinking that he might not be able to last in the face of evil or just a reminder to himself what he went there for and that he eventually does need to fight through it and go back to his faith. That is what it seems at first, but as they progress through the woods and Brown learns that his own father was a sinner, and he sees all of these holy people from his town on their way to a witches meeting, his faith I religion starts to falter. He continues saying that he should go back, yet he keeps going forward.
Through the conversation between Brown and the stranger, Hawthorne gives hints that the stranger is actually the devil himself. It’s ironic that just before Brown saw him he said “what if the devil himself should be at my very elbow.” Brown claims that he is a religious man and that he can’t be converted to the path of evil, yet here he is conversing with the devil. Once he finds out he decides to stay put and not to continue on, making us think that maybe he does have a strong bond with his faith in religion, but something happens to make him go on.
Every prominent member of town that Brown sees on his way into the woods represents the breaking down of his faith in steps. First it is his catechism teacher, who represents a small part of where his faith stood, then the deacon and minister, who are supposed to be representatives of the lord. At these sightings, Brown’s faith is ruined because it is the fact that he saw these specific people that made him stop praying in church, and finally losing his religion all together.
Hawthorne put a strong attention to detail in this story, and it is very important as we find out when a pink ribbon falls in front of Brown, the same pink ribbon described as Faith’s in the beginning of the story. This symbolizes that Brown’s Faith is being taken away from him and he feel like he has to go to the meeting to get her back, and that his faith’s purity is being compromised. The fact that he shout that his faith is gone and there is no good on earth compromises this and shows that Brown has lost his faith already and he knows that he will never get it back, but he goes deeper into the forest anyway. When Hawthorne describes the meeting and Brown’s faith being there, what Brown says to his wife means that he is actually trying to resist the dark side himself.
As Brown is living out the rest of his days he scorns everyone else and distrusts everyone, in the meantime he forgets that he needs to repent his sins as well. The fact that nothing was carved on his grave shows that he stopped paying attention to his own faith and stopped keeping up with his religion because he was looking too closely at others’ sins, and that is why “his dying hour was gloom.”
Hawthorne never says if Brown’s encounter in the woods was dream or reality. I believe that it was a dream and that it was only there to show the transition in the main character from being an avid believer to a skeptic. He did not so much as lose his faith in religion entirely, but he now believes that no one else has faith and he can only see their sins. He has lost faith in everyone around him, including the pastor, his wife, and the rest of his family.
Considering that Brown lived in Salem, where a lot of witch trials went down, we have to consider the fact that he was surrounded by these events and there were new witches to be burned everyday. As a lot of people around him were being tried and burned, it probably seemed to Brown that everyone was in league with the devil, and he most likely felt that he was the only one that still kept his faith in religion.
These events are probably what caused Brown to have that strange dream, and since it felt so real to him, he believed that it was and ended up losing his faith too. At the beginning of the story Brown believed that his forefathers were all very good men who held religion high, but when he finds out that the devil was in all of them, it probably made him think that if his family, who he held so high, were all sinners, then everyone must be.
Symbolism plays a large part in this short story, and not just in the way Brown’s wife was named “Faith.” If you go through the story and really pay attention to the details you will find a lot of other things. The stranger’s staff in the woods starts out as a guide for the old man who is feeble, and using it as a cane, but soon it turns into something that nearly everyone is afraid of, a snake. In the end it says that Brown shrinks away from the bosom of his wife at night, because that is when the evil in her can be seen. That is when kids see monsters in their closets and robberies happen, and that is when Brown sees Faith’s sins the most.
Looking at it now I realize that Goodman Brown’s name is repeated over and over throughout the text. I believe that it is supposed to show the regularity of this man. He could be any man in the world. He was just a simple husband and master of his household, with the common name Brown, which we could probably find a thousand listing for in the directory today. He represents all of mankind, and shows that all of humanity is going through this struggle between good and evil. This was especially true for the time of Brown’s existence. People were being accused of being witches, and people were burning them at the stake with no proof, and no one knows who was right, but everyone had an idea. Just as Brown had the idea that his faith was strong until he saw that everyone sins, and it deeply disturbed him.
Young Goodman Brown gave himself over to the devil when he said “come devil, for to thee is this world given.” He was basically confirming what the stranger in the woods, or the devil, told him earlier, that evil is in the nature of all mankind, and he did confirm it in his mind and it drove him to be a distrusting, dark and dreary man for the rest of his life. Even to his wife who he loved and cherished so much before the events of that night.
