The Importance Of Romanticism In Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown

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Puritans believe that human nature is pre destined, something decided by God before birth. This viewpoint has been present since the early 1600’s but is not the only side to this coin. Romanticism beliefs are quite the opposite, evolving in the 19th Century, focusing on human emotion rather than a sacred belief. Romanticism also states that humans are inherently good, as opposed to the Puritans predestined beliefs. Nathaniel Hawthorne the author of Young Goodman Brown was born into the romantic era. He uses this birthright to press different ideals of the Romantic Era into that of a Puritan setting. These ideals are secularity and the emergence of free will. Young Goodman Brown is written with the idea of a comparison between the two vastly different time periods, and how Young Goodman Brown questions himself and defies the nature of predestination through his actions, through alertness, confusion, defiance, and acceptance.
From the beginning of Hawthorne’s story one does not get that much background information about his main character, Young Goodman Brown. He lives in Salem, so naturally the assumption is the time period of the Witch Trials; Goodman has a wife named Faith, they are in love from what Hawthorne describes their relationship as, which …show more content…

And it is arguable that he never achieves this emotion at all during his life. Goodman never accepted what happened that night, but did accept something else. Throughout the course of his life, Goodman Brown became more and more skeptical not just of what happened that night, but religion in general. Daily religious actions stopped, he didn’t pray and didn’t believe what was taught in church. In this sense Goodman Brown matured, he realized the flaw in his original ideas and evolved into a more modern era, of Romanticism. Young Goodman Brown realized his full potential and understood that it was more than blindly following the Puritan

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