American Literature

The meeting of good and evil, faith and cynicism, is most effectively accomplished in the forests of Young Goodman Brown.  These forests, or wilderness, represent a divergence between the Puritan ideals of the time and the actual behavior of human beings within that Puritan caricature.  In order to support this thesis, that the wilderness functions as a place where hypocrisy and falsehoods are revealed, this essay will examine how Hawthorne used the wilderness to demonstrate the difference between false ideals and actual human behavior and how this wilderness technique might be compared to modern day cyberspace.

Textually, Hawthorne explicitly provides that the wilderness represents a type of confusion in which good and evil become less firm and in which doubts about the truth of people and things consistently arise.  As the story commences, for example, Brown is not yet in the wilderness and he states that there are feelings of guilt associated with having to go on this particular journey.  More specifically, he says that Poor little Faith thought he, for his heart smote him. What a wretch am I, to leave her on such an errand HYPERLINK httpwww.questia.comPM.qstaod101082851(Hawthorne 61).  The errand leads to the wilderness, this is characterized from the very beginning as a dangerous or an unwanted journey, and the statement that Faith is being left behind implies that there is little or no faith in the wilderness ahead.  This loss of faith, as Brown proceeds in his journey, is confirmed later when Browns sense of reality is challenged and Brown finds himself unable to accurately explain the things he sees and hears in the wilderness.  When witnessing the walking staff change into a snake, for example, Brown notes that This, of course, must have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light HYPERLINK httpwww.questia.comPM.qstaod101082852(Hawthorne 62).  Browns faith has been challenged by a seeming impossibility in the forest, and he clings to his faith while it is simultaneously diminished to a certain extant.  In the same, way, his conversations in the forest also function to challenge his beliefs about beloved and admired people.  The devil, challenging Browns positive opinion of Browns ancestors, states I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem and with respect to his father that it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philips war HYPERLINK httpwww.questia.comPM.qstaod101082853(Hawthorne 63).  The wilderness thus functions as the context within which all of Browns beliefs about who and what is good are challenged and ultimately proven to have been illusions.  The Puritan ideals are defeated by the hypocrisies and realities experienced by Brown in the forest.  The wilderness is perhaps the truth, whether truly experienced or dreamed, and it highlights the limits and the hypocries of human nature within the context of Puritan ideals.

One might very well superimpose Hawthornes notion of the wilderness onto the modern-day media and the people and the events which it covers and portrays.  There is a seemingly popular sense that the reality portrayed by the mainstream media is objective and that it is accurate.  People believe the media, much as Brown in the beginning seemed to believe in the virtues of his wife, Faith, and the Puritan ideals of his community.  In much the same way that the wilderness Brown encountered weakened and perhaps destroyed his faith, so too does the information provided in modern cyberspace weaken and perhaps destroy faith in the modern media and governing institutions.  We learn in cyberspace, for example, that wars are fought primarily for oil and money rather than for democratic ideals such as freedom and liberty.  We learn that wars are offensive rather than defensive.  Cyberspace argues, like the devil in Hawthorns wilderness, that Wall Street bankers may be manipulative thieves rather than admirable models of ethical commerce who have experienced temporary ethical lapses.  Cyberspace is in many ways a modern-day equivalent of Hawthornes wilderness in Young Goodman Brown.

In the final analysis, Hawthorne uses the wilderness as part of a personal journey from ignorance to enlightenment in which the Puritan ideals are portrayed as being illusory when compared against actual human nature.  This type of enlightenment and the attendant cynicism that it spawns in Brown might very well be applied with respect to modern cyberspace and how people journeying there for information have become more cynical and have lost faith in certain ideals and beliefs.  Hawthorns wilderness is therefore a universal representation of the human beings quest to distinguish truth from falsehood in a world which seems to prefer misleading and illusory caricatures of reality.