The Woods Symbolism: Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Young Goodman Brown is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne that deals with a late-night meeting between a man and the devil. It serves as Brown’s journey into the depths of the forest, where he believes that he sees many of the members of his community, including his wife, Faith, attending a satanic ceremony. Specifically, the story is often read as Hawthorne’s condemnation of Puritan ideology, as it proposes that Puritan doctrine could strain so much doubt that believers were doomed to see evil whether or not it truly existed in themselves. In this story, the use of symbols is vital to perceive the development of a story’s plot. Therefore, I believe that the woods in Young Goodman Brown are an obvious symbol of the devil’s home.
To start with, the beginning of the story introduces us to Young Goodman Brown when he says goodbye to his wife. He tells her he has to make this trip and that he will be back in the morning. Even though he knew he would commit sinful acts, Brown’s belief in his faith would bring him home safe and untainted. Even so, Brown’s decision to go to the forest was motivated by his curiosity. He wandered into the dark forest which represents the loneliness and confusion of the Godless life, as stated, “It was as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveler knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that, with lonely footsteps, he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude” (8). From this quote, we know something; the forest is terrifying. Trees look like witches; normal night noises sound like a creepy demon coming out to fetch him. The point here is that Hawthorne is confusing the reader with the circumstances at that time. Just like Brown, the dark forest confuses our sense of truth and fiction. In addition, he meets a demon whose identity is communicated to the reader through a snake-like stick he carries. Hawthorne describes the demon as looking very much like Brown himself.
In the second place, the mysterious stranger also talked about how close Christians and all good people are. The forest is indeed a dark foreboding place with Brown walking down. The wood is used to symbolize evil and danger. The path to be traversed is bleak and small, and it is enveloping him as it closes swiftly behind him, displaying the abandonment of his faith. It says, “What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow!” Without a doubt, his statement tells us that his fears and anxieties are real, and his imaginations may be overactive. Despite the visible presence of evil in the forest, Brown continues further into the darkness with the devil as his guide. It symbolizes man’s inability to break the devil’s hold upon him once he has allowed his sins to drag him to a certain point. This is reinforced when Brown sees the townspeople amongst him in the woods and is horrified to see them, his wife, and the preacher included. It appears in the middle of the story, Brown looks at the ceremony and the dark side of Salem Village.
Finally, Brown saw on his journey through the forest, and it was this experience on the Black Sabbath that caused his faith to weaken. When Brown was initially approached by a dark figure in the wood and told that he was late, Brown replied, “Faith kept me back a while” (141). This suggests that he had to compromise even when enters the forest. Brown sees many characters walking towards the meeting place and is surprised to see that many of them are great people, both in religious societies and in government. Here, Hawthorne shows that all people are sinners, no matter how they outwardly appear or what position they hold in society. What’s more, when he found his wife’s pink ribbon in the forest, Brown’s belief weakened even further. In the woods, Brown was amazed by the number of people he saw, and although they were people he had known as God-fearing church members and respected members of the town―he saw they were sinners. He asked himself, “But where is Faith” (146). He now believed that there was no good in this world but only evil and that his faith was almost destroyed.
All in all, there are many different examples of symbolism throughout the story. Many writers like to use symbolism to help readers better understand stories and characters. In this particular Hawthorne story, perhaps the most alluring example of symbolism is the wood itself. Hawthorne naturally uses the magnitude of the journey through the woods as a representation of all the sin and evil that surrounds us in this world. The forest represents a wild and eerie world that stands in stark contrast to the purity and order of Salem. The forest surely embodies the outside world. Yet, they can also symbolize something else.
