Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown - Goody Cloyse and Catechetical Ministry

“Young Goodman Brown,” Goody Cloyse and Catechetical Ministry

This essay intends to compare the author’s disparaging slur of Goody Cloyse, Puritan catechism teacher, Deacon Gookin and the minister – all of whom are catechists - in “Young Goodman Brown,” with “In Support of Catechetical Ministry - A Statement of the U.S. Catholic Bishops” from June of 2000.

The influence of Puritan religion, culture and education is a common topic in Nathaniel Hawthorne's works. Growing up, Hawthorne could not escape the influence of Puritan society, not only from residing with his father's devout Puritan family as a child but also due to his study of his own family history. The first of his ancestors, William Hathorne, is described in Hawthorne's "The Custom House" as arriving with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 "with his Bible and his sword" (26). A further connection can also be seen in his more notable ancestor John Hathorne, who exemplified the level of zealousness in Puritanism with his role as persecutor in the Salem Witch Trials. The study of his own family from the establishment of the Bay Colony to the Second Great Awakening of his own time parallels the issues brought forth in "Young Goodman Brown." In looking into the history of early Puritan society, Hawthorne is able to discuss the merits and consequences of such zeal, especially the Puritan Catechism of John Cotton, and the repercussions of The Salem Witch trials. Hawthorne sets “Young Goodman Brown” into a context of Puritan rigidity and self-doubt to allow his contemporary readers to see the consequences of such a system of belief.

Hawthorne’s tale places the newly wed Puritan Brown in a situation, where he has agreed with an evil character to participate in a coven, a witch’s ceremony, a devil-worship liturgy. The experience he has at this liturgy easily translates into the dream allegory of Hawthorne’s work and allows the author to use Puritan doctrine and the history of Salem to argue the merits and consequences of the belief in man’s total moral depravity. As Benjamin Franklin V states in "Goodman Brown and the Puritan Catechism," Hawthorne used John Cotton's Milk for Babes as the education source of Goodman Brown. It was the Puritan belief that man must be instructed to realize his own depravity, and therefore at childhood the education began. The child was taught that he was”conceived in sin, and born in iniquity” (70).