Woman as an Occasion for Disillusionment in “Young Goodman Brown”

In several of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories, “Young Goodman Brown” in particular, the female character seems to be the occasion for the disillusionment of the protagonist. Young Goodman Brown desires order and predictability because he wants control over his existence. However, intangibles such as emotions, the future and especially his mortality provoke anxiety in Brown, because they are unpredictable and not concrete. If Brown could control the intangible, he could establish order and predictability in his world. Woman is the ideal substitute for the intangible, for she is mysterious, and yet she is concrete and subject to control particularly because of the conventions of the marriage relationship. For Brown, then, to master woman is to master the intangible.

Young Goodman Brown is a newlywed Puritan who leaves his wife, Faith on what he terms “an errand,” which the reader later learns to be a meeting with the devil. Brown believes he can face and resist the devil. Initially, his wife, Faith, begs him to stay, and Brown patronizingly soothes her only to discover her as one of the devil’s converts. Ultimately, Brown holds Faith most culpable for his disillusion with the supposed elect of his community.

When Brown sets out on his journey, Faith confesses her fears to Brown as she attempts to convince Brown to stay home. She explains, “A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts, that she’s afeard of herself” (133). The prospect of an evening of isolation causes Faith to be anxious; the loss of her husband’s companionship deprives her of a predictable world, but her discomfort is of no concern to Brown. Instead, reassuring his wife from the doctrine of his theology, Brown tells her to “say thy...

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... sinner. Hawthorne seems to suggest that man’s desire to define God in concrete terms is futile if not arrogant. Brown may hold responsible Faith, or the intangible or God or whomever he likes, but the end result is the same; Brown is the agent of his downfall, and Faith remains unchanged. His wife is aptly called, for her name means, “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see,” according to Hebrews 11:1. This certainty about the unseen is precisely what her husband desires her to represent. Yet his attempt to make Faith a concrete representation of that which is spiritual was only a fool’s errand, for finite man cannot order his world such that tomorrow is predictable and secure any more than he can control an infinite God.

Works Cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, “Selected Tales and Sketches”. Penguin Books, Inc., New York,

NY, 1987.