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Young Goodman Brown Analytical Essay

1206 Words5 Pages

Nathaniel's family history would set the stage for his story in Salem, Massachusetts. Hawthorne's ancestor John Hathorne was a judge in the witch trials during the 1690s. Sigmund Freud believed that dreams originated from suppressed emotions in our subconscious. Reflecting Nathaniel's subconscious, the story of Young Goodman Brown explored Nathaniel's forbidden desire to seek out taboo curiosities. By interpreting his dreams, he's able to unlock his subconscious to reveal his deepest emotions and suppressed desires. Brown displays the characteristics of Freud's ego as he follows the righteous lifestyle of the puritans and rejects the devil's proposal of attending the meeting. The villagers that attended the witches' sabbath would portray the id traits as they ignore the righteous lifestyle and celebrate mocking the puritan church. They are set on fulfilling their desires rather than fit in with society. The town's godly puritan government symbolize freud's superego. Because he tries to link the way people should act to how they truly want to act, …show more content…

Once in the forest at the witch meeting, he begins to realize that the townspeople weren't as godly as they claimed to be. Coming to the woods at night, this introduced his curiosity towards evil and willingness to meet up with the “devil man”. As he came to the realization that those he perceived to be good and moral individuals were just sinners, he becomes betrayed and confused. He begins to criticize those he saw, labeling them as hypocrites and overlooks the fact that he himself had also chosen to go into the woods. From seeking out his curiosity and learning of others doing the same, he focused on other people’s flaws rather than his own. In ¨Young Goodman Brown,¨ the characters Young Goodman Brown and his wife Faith advance a plot illustrating the temptations of evil to recreate Salem’s Puritan

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Ethan Hoopingarner 3/31/2023 Mrs. Manero AC English 2 The short story unit that we have been covering for the past couple of weeks features ambiguity as a central theme in all four stories. Especially in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories “ Young Goodman Brown’s Brown” and “ The Wives of the Dead”, where ambiguity contributes to the complexity of the meaning of the stories. In “ Young Goodman Brown,” ambiguity develops from the beginning of the story, when Goodman Brown takes a journey through the eerie forest, where he encounters a group of people, who may or may not be practicing satanism, which does not make sense to him because Puritans are known for being incredibly strict and highly religious people, but after this encounter, it leads

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In her critique, Carnivalesque Freedom in Hawthorne’s YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN, Selina Jamil proposes that although there in an obvious theme of the human heart’s confrontation with evil, there is also a carnivalesque theme that is exemplified when the use of irony and parody ridicule the Puritan idea of virtue as well as the power of evil itself. Jamil continues that the carnivalesque theme further establishes that the “encounter with evil teaches the average mind to replace naiveté with skepticism.” Ultimately, Jamil states that there is no resolution with the internal conflict of Goodman Brown just like there is no resolution as to whether the “witch meeting” was reality or a dream. If Jamil indeed believes that YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN exemplifies a feature of Bakhtinian carnival, then Bakhtinian carnival concepts should, at the very least, be mentioned. Jamil offers a look at the ridicule of the Puritan idea of virtue and the “power” of evil itself by suggesting that the rituals displayed by Hawthorne “parodically mirror” that of the church; furthermore, the irony found in the “sable form” stating that

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1535 Words | 7 Pages

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1234 Words | 5 Pages

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1297 Words | 6 Pages

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