He believes in the perfect goodness of his wife who seems to radiate pureness, and generally believes in the goodness of everyone else, too. As a result, Puritan communities were profoundly focused on the value and necessity of the appearance of goodness, believing that it was a reflection of inner goodness and therefore a sign of one’s chance of heavenly redemption, and engaged in social policing to determine what counts as “good.” Hawthorne uses the setting to explore the dark side to the Puritan emphasis on the appearance of good.Īt the beginning of the story, Goodman Brown believes wholeheartedly in these Puritan tenets, despite the fact that he himself is at that moment lying to his wife, Faith, saying that he is on an overnight business trip when in fact he is heading off into the forest out of curiosity to attend a witch’s meeting. The Puritans believed that some people are predestined by God to go to heaven, and that those people are identifiable by their morality and piousness people cannot earn their way to heaven by performing good works, but if they are part of the elect, they will instinctively and naturally do good. Hawthorne sets “Young Goodman Brown” in the New England town of Salem, where the Puritans tried to create a religious society with strict morals and pious norms, but also where the infamous Witch Trials took place.
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