SOURCE: "Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown'," in The Explicator, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, December, 1969, item 32.

In this essay, Ferguson points out the importance of color symbolism as it pertains to Faith's pink ribbons in "Young Goodman Brown."

Much concern has been expressed about the significance of Faith's pink ribbons in Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," and this commentary has perhaps been initiated in part by F. O. Matthiessen's observation that the author's "literal insistence" on them, as they first appear to Goodman Brown in the forest, damages the effect of what is otherwise portrayed as "the realm of hallucination" (American Renaissance, New York, 1941). More recently, Richard Harter Fogle has attempted to explain this apparent inconsistency by suggesting that the ribbons in this same instance "may be taken as part and parcel of [Brown's] dream," adding that because they vanish into their "shadowy background" their impact is "merely temporary" (Hawthorne's Fiction: The...