In Nathaniel Hawthorne's story, "Young Goodman Brown,"
Brown discovers, to his horror, that the woman who taught him his catechism (Goody
Cloyse) is in league with the Devil, and he is horrified and
disheartened.
At this point, Brown sits down on a tree's
stump along the forest's path and refuses to proceed with the Devil any farther on their
journey.
The argument Brown presents to the Devil is that
even if Goody Cloyse had been responsible for teaching him about his faith while he has
all along believed her to be a good woman of God, what would possess him now to abandon
his wife, Faith, to follow the old woman instead?
If
Brown's speech here is figurative, he may be arguing with the Devil or himself, but
"Faith" may not refer to his spouse, but to his belief in God, and his determination is
not to stray from the "straight and narrow" path that leads to heaven. His argument
would sound a great deal like a parent's admonishment, "If Johnny decides to jump off of
a bridge, does that mean you will do it too?" He is saying,
"no."
Brown may mean that just because a woman he believed
had a strong faith fails, and chooses to "traffic" with the Devil, it does not mean that
he will turn his back on what he believes simply because the old
woman's faith was not strong enough.
The irony is that at
the end, Brown does almost the same thing. He may not intentionally join the Devil, but
he does turn his back on Faith and his religion, and in this manner, the Devil may be
thought to have "won" anyway.
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