SOURCE: “The Problem of Faith in ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 74, No. 3, July, 1975, pp. 375-87.

In the following essay, Levy discusses the role of faith in “Young Goodman Brown” and contends that Hawthorne's intent is to depict the sin of falling into despair once faith is gone.

Few of Hawthorne's tales have elicited a wider range of interpretations than “Young Goodman Brown.” The critics have been victimized by the notorious ambiguity of a tale composed of a mixture of allegory and the psychological analysis of consciousness. Many of them find the key to its meaning in a neurotic predisposition to evil; one goes so far as to compare Goodman Brown to Henry James's governess in The Turn of the Screw.¹ The psychological aspect is undeniably important, since we cannot be certain whether “Young Goodman Brown” is a dream-allegory that takes place in...