Puritan Hypocrisy in Young Goodman Brown

CXL

  Hawthorne sees all humanity as corrupt and wicked, but he is particularly harsh in his denunciations of those who attempt to conceal their wickedness behind a facade of virtue. As he welcomes Faith and Goodman Brown to the Satanic communion, the devil provides an eloquent and detailed description of Puritan hypocrisy:

  “Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness, and prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet, here are they all, in my worshipping assembly! This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds; how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager for widow’s weeds, has given her husband a drink at bed-time, and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youth have made haste to inherit their father’s wealth; and how fair damsels—blush not, sweet ones—have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest, to an infant’s funeral.”

  Of the four specific sins mentioned in this passage, three involve murder: first a wife poisoning her husband, then a young man hastening the death of his father, and finally a young woman burying her child. The three generations killed by wife, son, and mother show the ubiquity, even the universality, of sins that are also capital crimes. Even before this, Goody Cloyse fawning before the devil, and the glee of the minister and the deacon at the corruption and subversion of religious rites demonstrate the hollowness of their claims to virtue.

  Goodman Brown is an Everyman figure, but he is specifically a Puritan Everyman. The Puritans call each other “Goodman” and “Goodwife” or “Goody,” but Hawthorne does not depict anyone in the story as good. For him, the Puritan Everyman is one who hides his evil nature and deeds behind a pretense of goodness, and Goodman Brown quickly learns of his own corruption, along with that of his father and grandfather, his wife, and the entire Puritan community of Salem.