26 pages • 52 minutes read
Young Goodman Brown
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: Puritan New England and the Salem Witch Trials
Hawthorne uses Puritan New England as the setting for his stories to address politics, community, and government in an emerging nation. Puritanism was the driving force of 17th-century life. It was characterized by individual responsibility to uphold God’s word and salvation through integrity. Puritanism also viewed the Bible as a literal authority and human beings as born sinners, and held that no prayer would ensure salvation.
Hawthorne’s prominent Puritan ancestors were among the first settlers in Massachusetts, including a judge in the Salem Witch Trials. Several characters and events in “Young Goodman Brown” are taken directly from Hawthorne’s ancestry. When the traveler reveals that he helped Brown’s grandfather whip a Quaker woman in Salem, it mirrors Hawthorne’s great-grandfather William Hathorne, who ordered a whipping of a Quaker woman. Hawthorne later changed the spelling of his name from Hathorne to distance himself from his ancestors’ violent past.
Several of the characters, including Goody Cloyse and Deacon Gookin, are based on individuals who were accused of being witches or who participated in the Salem Witch Trials. While many individuals believed they were carrying out the work of God by identifying evil and eliminating it from their society, Hawthorne uses real historical events to criticize the misconception of purity of religious belief during the rise of Puritanism in America.
Literary Context: 19th-Century American Romanticism
Notable 19th-century American authors, including Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, answered the call establish a uniquely American identity through the creation of a national literature.
In the years following the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, American nationality was vulnerable. The emerging “American” literature was not taken as seriously as its much more richly established British counterpart. Uncertainty about an “American” future and a continued intolerance of race and culture encouraged early 19th-century authors to comment on the evils of their culture and the vulnerability of the human psyche within their texts. The resulting literary movement is called the American Renaissance, as literature was experiencing a rebirth in the early to mid 1800s.
Whereas Irving addresses the changing American culture during time of war in “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), and Cooper the interactions between the colonists and indigenous cultures in his Leatherstocking series (1823-1826), Brown’s “Young Goodman Brown” comments on the impossibility of Puritanism existing in America as a developing nation. Fiction during this time developed themes by relying on the power of imagination, conflicts centered on social and political life, dream sequences, and supernatural characters—all of which feature in “Young Goodman Brown.”
Unlock all 26 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Nathaniel Hawthorne
