Innocence And Allegory In Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown

In “Young Goodman Brown”, by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Désirée’s Baby”, by Kate Chopin, the main characters, Goodman Brown, and Désirée lose some sort of innocence in their stories. Both characters go through troubling situations in which their minds are shattered from what they have seen and heard. The characters go through a certain experience and as a result they lose this innocence which becomes their downfall. In both stories, the authors use different literary elements such as symbolism and allegory.

In “Young Goodman Brown”, Hawthorne never reveals if what Brown saw was real or not. It does not matter now to Brown though. What he experienced in the forest changed his perception about people and everything that he knew. That night in the

Because she is adopted, no one truly knows the heritage of her. In the story she meets a man and later marries him. She and her husband, Armand, have a baby later on. One day she sees one of Armand’s slave fanning her baby, and notices some resemblances between the two. She notices how her baby is starting the experience traits of someone who would be Black. She confronts Armand, telling him to look at their baby and asked what it means. Armand responds saying that the baby is not white and automatically assumes that Désirée is not white as well (Chopin 3). She responds back saying that her skin is much whiter than his and responds saying that she is as much white as La Blanche, who is a mixed raced slave. She writes a letter to her mother asking what to do and her she responds saying to come home to her (Chopin 4). When she comes back to Armand and gives the letter, she asks if she should go and he responds saying yes. She leaves the room and gets her baby from the nurse and they later drowned in a bayou. Later on Armand begins burning anything of his marriage and his baby. He begins burning letters as well, and in one letter it reveals that Armand’s mother was a Black slave. Towards the end of the story Désirée begins to feel afraid of what might happen to her and the baby fearing that there was a chance that both of them were Black. Her innocence as a white person soon falls apart when Armand immediately