Hawthorne in Young Goodman Brown
Hawthorne prepares the reader for symbolic inference through the setting. ... The time period is established with the description of Goodman Brown as the son of a man who fought in King Philips War. ... Nancy Bunge argues that Hawthorne ``uses history to examine issues of community and individualism explaining both the madness in Salem and much subsequent madness (Bunge 11). ... 4 It could be said that Young Goodman Brown was a result of Hawthornes guilt that he felt because of his ancestors involvement in the Salem witch trials. ... For Goodman Brown, like his ancestors, ``fails to distinguish between the specter or shape of a person and the person himself (Martin 83). ... This fuller understanding of the self as a sinner, rather than viewing the world around him as sinning, is a nineteenth-century phenomenon of Unitarianism5, which Hawthorne seems to struggle with as Narrator of the seventeenth-century story about Goodman Brown.