SECTION 2: PASSAGE IDENTIFICATION - Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown"

Question 1

main characters

Answer 1

• Young Goodman Brown
• Faith (wife)

Question 2

plot summary

Answer 2

Young Goodman Brown has a wife named Faith who has a double-meaning name. He ventures into the forest and questions come up about his religion and there’s a lady with a scepter + the fellow traveler and its staff. Young Goodman Brown goes onto the street of Salem Village and looks around. Young Goodman Brown debates if he was in a wild dream of a witch-meeting. The ending is up to interpretation, however, one can infer that he dies at the end of the story given that it says that “they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.”

Question 3

main themes

Answer 3

• faith
  
  • religion, his wife, and the double-meaning behind her name as it relates to her as a person but also Young Goodman Brown’s religious faith
• darkness and lightness
  
  • the dark figure in the forest, in particular
• the forest
  
  • the vague actions that takes place within it, involving both the dark figure and religion itself
• good vs. evil
  
  • how evil can take over man

Question 4

stylistic traits

Answer 4

• religious
• beckoning tone
• mysterious/ominous

Question 5

literary movement

Answer 5

romanticism