Young Goodman Brown

In his short story, "Young Goodman Brown", Hawthorne introduces the reader to an interesting and persistent double entendre. Goodman Brown has a wife that is named Faith and given the religious context of the story this is a very interesting and clearly deliberate choice for a person's name. What makes this choice interesting is that it is not always clear which meaning of "Faith" the author wishes to assert. When the word/name is first used, it is on the first page when Goodman Brown states, "My love and my Faith, of all the nights in the year, this one night must I tarry away from thee." At first it would seem as though clearly Goodman Brown is merely referring to his wife, but after reading the story in its entirety, this sentence can be interpreted as "Faith" meaning to have faith and also as foreshadowing. As foreshadowing, it is clear that by the story's end, Goodman Brown has very clearly lost his "Faith" as he becomes fairly reclusive and very on edge around the townspeople. He no longer takes the sermons or religious piousness of others seriously and is skeptical of his wife, Faith.

Throughout the story, there are several more occasions where Hawthorne has Goodman Brown bring up "Faith" and it is an open interpretation as to wether it is the name or the word that the reader should take as the true meaning. Also, where the author could have had Goodman Brown say "my wife", he always had him use his wife's name. Furthermore, in the statements that Goodman Brown makes regarding "Faith", the context is nearly always ambiguous. For example, shortly after leaving his companion in the woods Goodman Brown begins to pray while looking up at the sky. He proceeds to say, "My Faith is gone! There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name." Hawthorne would possibly have the reader believe that Goodman Brown was referring to his wife, given that in the previous paragraph the narrator states that a pink ribbon (which the wife wears) has fallen into Goodman Brown's hand. However, the context of the aforementioned sentence could be taken either to mean that his wife was gone, or his actual faith was gone.