Flawed Characters of Young Goodman Brown, Rappaccini's Daughter, and The Birthmark

Flawed Characters of Young Goodman Brown, Rappaccini's Daughter, and The Birthmark

In many of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories, he creates characters

with either a malicious or evil feature to relay to the reader a more

allegorical meaning. Many would say he targets woman without justification.

Therefore a reader may interpret him to be a misogynist. In the story "

Rapaccinni's Daughter" he uses Beatrice as a carrier of a deadly poison. In "

Young Goodman Brown" he targets Faith as the character who is lost to the Devil.

In the stories "Rappaccini's Daughter," and "The Birthmark," Hawthorne also uses

men as transmitters of evil illicitly. The men involved in the stories have

their own flaws which contribute to the flaws of the women in their lives.

Ultimately, Hawthorne in the cases above can be seen as a misogynist who directs

his maliciousness on only women, yet he also uses male characters as vile

transmitters of evil, therefore he is not a misogynist and targets both sexes

equally.

In Young Goodman Brown, Faith, the wife of Young Goodman Brown is a

character who loses her faith and submits to the Devil. Hawthorne, in this case

directly uses faith as the carrier of a flaw. That is, she does not contain

enough self-control, or faith to refuse the calling of the Devil. Even with the

emotional plea from her husband, "Look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one,"

(1590) Faith cannot resist the Devil's temptation and has "uncertain sorrow,"

(1587) after submitting to him. The character of Faith which Hawthorne

portrays is one of uncertainty and one which has a lack of self control. Faith

is a good example of how Hawthorne uses a woman to symbolize a deeper

significance, in this case, it is to evoke the hypocrisy of the Puritan people,

that is, Puritans are really not as pure as we all think, they also contain evil

characteristics, in this case, exploited at night. We cannot justify Hawthorne's

usage of Faith as misogyny, in that woman were not considered equal in status

to men in the early 16th and later centuries. Also, with the history of

witchcraft during the puritan era, it can be seen appropriate that Hawthorne