GoodMan-Kind
Most people would agree that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” is one that really puts one’s mind to the test and leaves a lot of core concepts up to opinion on what Hawthorne is truly trying to portray. The main character of the story, Goodman Brown, is a man with an average puritan life who embarks upon a journey into the forest. In the beginning, Goodman Brown is faced with a decision to stay home with his pretty, innocent wife, Faith, or to take off on this journey. He has to decide whether to leave behind all that he knows to be true up until this point and discover the truth no matter how harsh it may be or to live in wonder. What he discovers on this journey turns out to be a very controversial matter. Many critics and analysts of this story have debated whether Hawthorne is trying to portray that Goodman Brown discovers that all people truly have some evil in them by nature or whether he is trying to say something about Puritanical societies. Although writers such as Paul Miller have argued that Hawthorne is trying to represent puritanical societies, I would have to disagree and say that he is making a statement about all of mankind since it shows that all people fall into some sort of temptation in life, there are characters that address humankind as a whole, and because there are also many Christian references in his story.
Paul Miller in his essay “Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”: Cynicism or Meliorism?” claims that to represent all of mankind, “Hawthorne himself must be regarded, at the time of composition of the story, as a totally cynical man […]” but if he is portraying a certain segment of mankind, he is “much less pessimistic” (Miller 256). Without actually coming out and saying it, here Miller is trying to convince the reader that Hawthorne must be representing a segment of society by using rhetoric and making it seem impossible for it to be representing all of mankind. However, after using this...