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Everyone Sins In Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown

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Everyone Sins
In the story “Young Goodman Brown”, Goodman Brown goes on a faith changing path. Goodman Brown is a Puritan with certain views about religion, human nature, and sin. Brown goes in to the woods to meet with the devil, but he tells everyone that he is on an errand. He makes the journey at night and sunset represents the line between good and evil. Young Goodman Brown’s journey shows the readers how the pink ribbon, the staff, and the forest relates to the Puritans beliefs and of how they are hypocrites.
The first symbol is the pin ribbon that Faith wears. The pink ribbon is a glowing symbol which shows that Faith has a little good and bad in her. It takes red and white to make pink. Red symbolizes the devil and evil while white represents purity and innocence. Goodman Brown sees Faith as innocent and childlike, but she had sinned “in spite of her pink ribbons” (Hawthorne 1). From her outward appearance, Faith is the most innocent sinless person. On the inside she has some hidden sins. This is opposite of what Puritans believe. They thought if one was good and innocent in appearance then their inside was the same. Faith shows that even the nice people have sin. (Hawthorne 1)
The next vivid symbol is the devil’s staff. The staff shows that loss of innocence to …show more content…

It shows that Young Goodman Brown is going into a place “dreary and darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest”. (Hawthorne 1) The Puritans believed that the devil lived in the woods, because Indians live in the forest so Puritans would not enter the woods. Young Goodman Brown is journeying into sin and darkness; a place Puritans normally wouldn’t go. He is even proud to say that his relatives had not been in the wood, but the woods can be seen as the dark side of a person. Young Goodman Brown finds out that the family he had looked up to had done some evil things in these exact woods. Once again proving that appearance is not what is on the

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