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“Young Goodman Brown”. Identify the Journey. Massachusetts Bay Colony What kind of community?. Warnings: Do not go into the woods alone. Why? Everyone gathered in church. The community was always watching. You cannot be “good” unless the community is watching. Was Hawthorne being ironic?.
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“Young Goodman Brown” Identify the Journey
Massachusetts Bay ColonyWhat kind of community? Warnings: Do not go into the woods alone. Why? Everyone gathered in church. The community was always watching. You cannot be “good” unless the community is watching.
Could read the story as an allegory, but…..Hawthorne is sometimes deliberately ambiguous.Can’t be read as a one-to-one allegory.
Michael J. Colacurciostates that the story offers a profound interpretation of the "persecuting spirit" and of late seventeenth-century Puritanism itself: In "Young Goodman Brown" an entire habit of the Puritan mind is on trial, the protagonist its unwitting yet not quite unwilling victim. . . . [Hawthorne] recognizes the finality of the problem [presented] there: the difficulty of detecting a witch is distressingly similar to the radically Puritan problem of discovering a saint. They stand or fall together. . . ."Young Goodman Brown" shows us that witchcraft "ended" the Puritan world. Its logic of evidence could not stand the Devil's own test of faith (286, 312). (from The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales, 1984, courtesy of Dr. Michael J. Colacurcio)
