Rather than an initiation into manhood, Brown’s is an initiation into evil. When viewed as a bildungsroman, it is one of the bleakest in American fiction, long or short. Although his meeting with the devil is clear, the results remain ambiguous and perplexing. Brown’s journey to the forest and his exposure to life-shattering encounters and revelations remain the subject of speculation. Undoubtedly one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most disturbing stories, it opens as a young man of the town, Goodman Brown, bids farewell to his wife, Faith, and sets off on a path toward the dark forest. “Young Goodman Brown,” initially appearing in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) as both a bleak romance and a moral allegory, has maintained its hold on contemporary readers as a tale of initiation, alienation, and evil. Analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown
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