Young Goodman Brown Wilderness

In “Young Goodman Brown”, Nathaniel Hawthorne aligns wilderness with a malevolent nature that characterizes both human and non-human life. In contrast to tropes of civilization as a force that combats and subjugates the wilderness, Hawthorne presents the possibility that ideas of an inherently evil nature are pervasive and insurmountable. At the end of the tale, despite Goodman Brown’s denunciation of the demonic mass that is held in the woods, he is never able to repress the wilderness and perceived natural tendency towards evil that subtends pious Puritan existence. Instead, “Young Goodman Brown” offers an ambiguous perspective on the piety of civilization and the evil of wilderness, and casts skepticism on the possibility of knowing which

Upon his awakening, he “staggered against the rock and felt it chill and damp, while a hanging twig, that had been all on fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew” (147). He encounters the stark, realistic features of the forest and is not reborn as someone who worships Satan or God, but as a “meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man” (147), what his fellow townsfolk might refer to as a pagan. Etymologically, the word pagan is tied to the Latin pāgus which means country district, and the connotation of heathen arose from the interpretation of paganus as signifying a person who existed outside a particular community or town, that is someone from a rural area or not of the city (OED, pagan). A separation from civilization is at the root of paganism, and Goodman Brown’s foray into the wilderness provides this necessary estrangement. The possibility of a pagan belief in animism, one that in this case involves everything being inspirited by the devil, leaves Goodman Brown skeptical of the natural and inherent evils of the wilderness or piety of the