“Young Goodman Brown” as a Failed Sexual Initiation Rite: An African Reader’s Response

“Young Goodman Brown” as a Failed Sexual Initiation Rite: An African Reader’s Response

Njeng Eric Sipyinyu

English Department, The University of Yaounde 1

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.47772/IJRISS.2025.906000170

Received: 26 May 2025; Accepted: 30 May 2025; Published: 05 July 2025

ABSTRACT

Teaching “Young Goodman Brown” is always a fascinating and challenging experience.  Students question the story’s motive and whether the experiences are real. Brown does not just dream them up, for his journey is real. He leaves the village on one day and returns the next day. Dreams don’t take us out of our sleep in the same way. Then, the question arises as to why Goodman Brown left his wife for the forest. This paper is my response to these questions I have been confronted with over these twenty years. We shall then examine the relationship between the devil and the other characters to make the point that the story is about a failed initiation into sexuality.  Brown marries but is unsure of what to do with his wife. His family invites the couple to be initiated into the sexual experience. While Faith, like Eve in the Bible, is ready for her role as female progenitor, Brown is reluctant and, therefore, is doomed to a life of melancholy.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Critics have for ages responded to Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” from diverse angles. The story’s use of gloomy romanticism, in which the devil represents humanity’s innate wickedness and the forest symbolizes the unknown, is highlighted by Richard Harter Fogle (1952). Many people view Goodman Brown’s trek into the woodland as a journey into his subconscious, where he confronts his potential for sin.

According to David Levin (1962), the story serves as a Puritan allegory. The story is an allegory of the spiritual crises during the Salem witch trials, being reflected in Brown’s loss of faith. Although Faith’s wife’s pink ribbons are commonly interpreted as representations of innocence and purity, their disappearance during the forest ritual raises questions about how brittle these ideals are.

James C. Keil’s interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” examines how Puritan and early nineteenth-century gender constructs impact the story and its themes. Keil examines how masculinity and femininity are portrayed in the narrative, highlighting the societal expectations of both sexes during that time. According to Keil, Hawthorne challenges the strict gender norms of his era by illustrating how they impact moral judgments and individual identities. While Goodman Brown’s journey emphasizes the tension between personal morality and society standards, Faith represents the ideal lady and represents the dichotomy of innocence and temptation.

In her article “My Faith Is Gone!: ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and Puritan Conversion,” Jane Donahue Eberwein offers a perceptive analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story from the perspectives of conversion and Puritan doctrine. Eberwein examines how, within the framework of Puritan religion, Goodman Brown’s journey into the shadowy woods represents spiritual anguish and despair. According to Eberwein, the story illustrates the conflicts inherent in Puritan ideology, particularly those related to an individual’s commitment to their faith and community. She highlights how Goodman Brown’s experiences during his nightmare disrupt his preconceived notions and lead him to endure a profound existential crisis. His understanding of faith undergoes a significant transformation, prompting him to conclude that the moral absolutism of his upbringing may be dangerously oversimplified.

Brown’s voyage is viewed by Nina Baym (1971) as a test of his faith, which he finally fails because he cannot reconcile the existence of evil in the world. Baym contends that Brown’s inflexible Puritan worldview, which cannot consider the complexity of human nature, is the root cause of his disillusionment.

On the other hand, Paul J. Hurley (1969) contends that Brown’s skepticism is a necessary step toward self-awareness rather than just a lack of faith, according to Hurley, Brown’s spiritual death results from his failure to embrace the universality of sin, including his own, despite being forced to face it by his encounter with the devil.

Similarly, David Lyttle (1975) reads the tale as a psychological investigation of loneliness and paranoia. According to Lyttle, Brown’s encounter in the forest might have been a hallucination or dream, reflecting his underlying concerns about his and his community’s moral integrity.

Many scholars situate the story within the historical and cultural context of Hawthorne’s time. Michael Colacurcio (1984) examines the story as a critique of Puritanism, highlighting its harsh judgmentalism and the hypocrisy of its adherents. Colacurcio argues that Brown’s disillusionment mirrors Hawthorne’s ambivalence toward his Puritan heritage.

According to Hyatt Waggoner (1955), Hawthorne purposefully leaves the nature of Brown’s experience open-ended, which he claims emphasizes the story’s central theme: the elusiveness of truth.

John Caldwell Stubbs (1970) draws attention to the moral ambiguity of the story, arguing that Hawthorne challenges readers’ preconceptions about good and evil, as well as Brown’s Puritanism. Stubbs contends that the story invites multiple interpretations, forcing readers to confront their preconceptions about good and evil.

“Young Goodman Brown” continues to captivate readers and scholars alike because of its rich symbolism, psychological depth, and thematic complexity. Whether read as a psychological exploration of doubt, a critique of Puritanism, or an allegory of sin, the story remains a potent commentary on the human condition. Critics have been shy in making what seems to me a clear interpretation. The story is about a neophyte’s rite of passage into manhood. This initiation rite fails probably because Brown is a messianic figure gone wrong.

Brown and Faith

The problem in the story is complex but can be simplified. Goodman Brown can’t have sex with his wife. He is the new Adam and can have sex only when his father, through the serpent, shows him the way. He has been married to Faith for three months. Hawthorne insists on the three months. Faith is not pregnant, suggesting that their marriage has not been consummated, and that Brown is being led into the forest to make consummation possible. According to Benjamin Franklin V, “At this late date, though, few would doubt that Brown goes to the woods primarily for sexual reasons. Support for this interpretation emerges in sexual imagery, as when Goody Cloyse says that “there is a nice young man to be taken into communion to-night,” or when Deacon Gookin says that “there is a goodly young woman to be taken into communion” (79, 81). Other evidence includes the apparent presence in the woods of the governor’s wife and other women, many of them exalted, but all without their husbands. Their companions are “men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes” (85). Brown goes to the woods to not participate in an orgy because he knows little about sex at this point, but to be initiated into the activity that unites all humans and defines them as sinners.

Brown conflates his love for God and his love for Faith, his wife. As Daniel Rogers puts it: “Marriage is the Preservative of Chastity, the Seminary of the Common-wealth, seed-plot of the Church, pillar (under God) of the world”. Brown loves his wife because he loves God. When his faith in God is in doubt, so is his faith in his wife. Thus, he can’t imagine having sex with God, who is conflated with his wife. Brown worships God and worships Faith, his wife. She cannot be defiled by the base act of coition, which must involve her defloration and the mess of resulting bleeding. This blood is probably connected to the blood we see in the latter part of the story in the congregation of fiend worshippers. Is it a collection of numerous blood samples of defloration? Faith is about to be deflowered.  Would her blood be added to the mass of female blood collected over the ages to signal her initiation into the congregation of evil? Her defloration will be an act of violence, for had not God forbidden the eating of the fruit? And would he repeat Adam’s sin and carry the guilt for all the days of his life? Ernest Crawley puts it thus:

We have seen how menstruation is regarded as the result of a supernatural act of violence or rupture of the hymen and here too there is a functional timidity to be reckoned with, as also in the same act at marriage. All these functional ideas focus, as a rule subconsciously, into fear of the other sex, and consciously into vague fear of “spiritual” danger, all originally deriving from the psychological and physical change of the organism at puberty.

Brown is probably terrified by the dangers of defloration and needs help to arrive at that level where he can. Hawthorne allows Goodman brown no kind of intercourse with the rest of his society: social, religious, and sexual. Hawthorne signals Faith’s loss of innocence when the ribbons flutter and fall to suggest her descent into the world of men, sin, and sex.

Brown and the devil

Although critics would like to think of Brown as an innocent young man whom the devil corrupts, we have evidence that it is he who probably contacted the devil in the first place. When he meets the devil at the onset of their journey, the latter’s first utterance is to scold him for being late. Richard H. Fogle holds this view when he argues, “The simple goodman, half-eager and half-reluctant, is wholly at the mercy of Satan, who leads him step by step to the inevitable end” (460). However, Brown’s first meeting with the devil happens before the meeting. Or one should say Brown contacted the devil before their actual appointment. Through what medium did he reach the devil? Did they meet to arrange their meeting, or was there an intermediary? Whatever the case, we have evidence to suggest that the forest meeting isn’t their first. Brown is, therefore, already a devil companion. Who contacted the other? Since the devil is God’s agent, it can be safe to say that the devil contacts Brown only after Brown has failed in a specific duty. The devil serves the role of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The serpent is introduced into the garden only after Adam fails to eat the fruit that would hasten God’s plan. Njeng develops God’s collaboration with the serpent when he argues that:

In creating Eve a ripe maiden in her prime, God was inviting sex and procreation; that Adam could not respond to the stimulus might have shocked even the creator himself. Since Adam could not break the bounds God had put in place to catalyse their expulsion from paradise and, therefore, to God’s initial wish for mankind, God must do so himself. It is henceforth that the serpent is introduced. In order of appearance, we see an evident improvement in intellection and daring. Adam is obtuse, Eve is epistemic, and the serpent is overreaching. These agents, as put in this order, reflect God’s searching mind for an outlet from the permanence of paradise. God is nothing if his creatures like him are immortal and must put the responsibility for the advent of mortality on his creation not himself. Sexual intercourse between the two becomes possible only in disobedience and their subsequent eviction from Eden. (125)

Brown, like Adam, hasn’t served the purpose of his marriage–procreation and must be shown what he must do. The devil here is conflated in both God and the serpent. He is leading both Brown and Faith to the forest at the same even though Brown is oblivious to the fact. The purpose is to have them eat the fruit, that is, to have them consummate their marriage that has gone sterile.

Goodman Brown escapes his wife (matrimonial bed) to meet the devil. The only plausible reason is that the devil can do something for Goodman Brown and that Goodman can do something for the devil. There must be a mutual interest driving both parties to the meeting. But what is it that takes the young man to the devil? What will push a newly married man to solicit the devil’s help except to learn a skill that allows him to be a better husband? What duties of a husband is Brown failing? Knowing that he is a professed Christian, one can only think that the need is evil. Is it a need his Christian teaching cannot satisfy? The devil is his helper, with a staff ready to assist Brown, who needs the devil, probably his father, to show him the way to manhood. Jane Donahue Eberwein would argue that After all, they would not have been tempted to eat from the Tree of Knowledge had they been satisfied with their existing knowledge. Consequently, one might wish to think of the present pattern as a shift in the emphasis of the conventional interpretation so that the fall’s main lesson becomes an awareness of humanity’s limited knowledge.

Even before the story begins, Brown already has a wavering “faith” in his God and wife. He is losing trust in God and his wife. Two things become conflated in his mind. He wouldn’t have left his home/bed to meet the devil if he had “Faith”. Now, if we have a “double entendre” in the word “faith,” one may argue that Brown has neither a wife nor a belief. Faith, his supposed wife, has not been faithful in her duties to him. He is married but has no wife. Need for a prostitute, perhaps. He leaves her to seek another. Ultimately, Brown will be bold enough to tell us who he is. He will have another woman, since Faith, whom he had only superficially, has failed. When the time comes, he retracts, probably not because he doesn’t want the union with his woman brought to him, but because it is Faith. Think of a man leaving his wife for a brothel only to find his wife there. Terrible. This is the reason why Goodman Brown lives and dies in despair. His shame is abysmal.

Adam’s reluctance to initiate the sexual act may be related to the fear of defloration in some cultures where an elder is sometimes invited to pave the way for the neophyte. Kate Millet suggests this when she argues:

So auspicious is the event of defloration that in many tribes the owner-groom is willing to relinquish breaking the seal of his new possession to a stronger or older personality who can neutralize the attendant dangers. Fears of defloration appear to originate in the fear of the alien sexuality of the female. Although any physical suffering endured in defloration must be on the part of the female (and almost all societies cause her – bodily and mentally—to suffer anguish), the social interest, institutionalized in patriarchal ritual and custom, is exclusively on the side of the male’s property interest, prestige, or (among preliterate) hazard” (67).

Without any prior experience of coition, it is not surprising that Adam needed the help of a stronger, more experienced agent to break the seal that will usher him in.

Hawthorne suggests the adulterous nature of the couple even before the story begins to unfold. Brown has been associating with dangerous people behind Faith’s back. He has arranged a meeting with the devil at night and must spend the night out. On her side, Faith isn’t as innocent. She also plans to depart that night for the forest but does not reveal this to her husband. We are taken aback when we experience her flight through the dark clouds at the climax when Brown is about to make a definitive U-turn. Had Faith not followed the evil woman in the cloud and let her ribbons fall through the branches, Brown might have been saved. It is from this incident that the climax occurs. It is Faith who turns Brown into the devil, and it is she who refuses to heed his denunciations of the devil. This renders Faith the new Eve. “There was the voice of a young woman, uttering lamentations, yet with uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some favor, which, perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain; and all the unseen multitude, both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her onward.”

Brown, father and mother

Brown’s mother is the only member of the devil congregation who halfheartedly warns him against their baptism: “He could have well-nigh sworn that the shape of his dead father beckoned him to advance, looking downward from a smoke wreath, while a woman, with dim features of despair, threw out her hand to warn him back. Was it his mother?” Goodman has no immediate family to initiate him into procreation, inviting the devil, who takes on the shape of his father, to fill the void. Foucault suggests this primordial incestuous inclination when he argues that “… since the eighteenth century the family has become an obligatory locus of affects, feelings, love; that for this reason sexuality is ‘incestuous’ from the start” (108-9). One may rightly argue that the devil is Brown’s father, bent on showing him the duty he must perform, and the protestation of his mother is yet another act of hypocrisy, as we shall see with all of the women in the story.

The Devil’s staff and its symbolic import

The devil has a staff, Goody has a staff, Brown has a staff, and would one says Faith receives hers as the ultimate staff receiver? The two staffs, one serpentine and the other fashioned from a maple tree, play central roles as phallic symbols. The Devil’s relationship with Goody Cloyse has sexual connotations. The staff is described thus:  “But the only thing about him that could be fixed upon as remarkable was his staff, which bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent”. The two are familiar and have shared evil pleasantries in the past. She immediately recognizes him: “Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship indeed?” She asks for the devil’s arm like a woman will ask from a lover. But the devil won’t give her his hand in marriage as the saying goes but will give her his staff or one may say his dick: “But now Your Good Worship will lend me your arm, and we shall be there in a twinkling.” To which the devil replies: “That can hardly be,” answered her friend. “I may not spare you my arm, Goody Cloyse; but here is my staff, if you will.” The devil won’t give her his hand to lead her into the meeting grounds as she would wish but throws his serpentine staff between her legs, enabling her to fly to the grounds. The association of the devil, Goody Cloyse, and the staff as a phallic symbol all unite to suggest that Brown and Faith are being taken into a sexual initiation. She is on her way to the fiend worship and plays the central role of dragging Faith to the altar. She takes the staff to have her take hers from Brown. Brown’s is a new staff that has to start new things: “And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate that he seemed to fly along the forest path rather than to walk or run.” He grasps the staff as though he already knows the use of it. Hawthorne does not say he grasps “the staff” but that he grasps “his staff”. Brown is picking up this staff for the first time and how can it, a newly devil fixed staff become Brown’s? This can be said to be Brown’s only if we read the staff metaphorically. Brown has now decided to pick up his phallus and follow the rest of humanity in the endless cycle of birth and death and rebirth, albeit only temporarily for he will fail when it is time to use it. This is the second staff mentioned in the story. The first serpentine is given to Goody Cloyse and it helps her move swiftly to the grounds. She uses the staff as witches use their broomsticks and has earlier complained that her broomstick was stolen most likely by Cory, a famous witch. The serpentine stick she takes from the devil serves her as a broomstick, and she sits on it, vanishing directly to the venue and arriving before the rest. The association between goody Cloyse and a sexual encounter with the devil is suggested in the staff that she accepts and uses as a substitute for her stolen broomstick.

We thus have three couples in the narrative– the Browns, the Devil and Goody Cloyse, and Brown’s father and mother. Brown’s parents are of the past to witness their resuscitation into eternity through procreation. They have been invoked to encourage the reluctant couple, hoping that the fate of an extinct lineage doesn’t follow the Brown family. Why will Hawthorne refer to Brown’s father twice and his mother once except to suggest they are there to help the couple repeat their act of procreation? Brown has no siblings and may die childless if nothing is done and though he is oblivious of this, his parents are not. This brings to mind the anguish of Poe’s Roderick Usher, who fears lest he be the last of his ancient family. Goody Cloyse and the fiend are there to emphasize the immorality associated with sex. And, of course, Brown is there to suggest a possible aversion to life itself.

Faith and the Devil

Faith knows more than the story allows us to comprehend. She protests against her husband’s journey but stays by the road corner as though to ensure he goes. Her protest is not genuine, as we shall see in the next meeting with her in the cloud. She has an insight into what is going on: “Methought as she spoke there was trouble in her face, as if a dream warned her what work is to be done tonight”. Deacon Gookin knows that Faith has been invited to the meeting, and Goody Cloyse knows that Brown has been invited. In Deacon Gookin’s own words, “there is a goodly young woman to be taken into communion” suggests that he had prior knowledge of the re-marriage between Faith and Goodman Brown.

Hawthorne plays with the name Faith by assigning it multiple meanings. Critics have suggested the link between the name and Brown’s faith in God but have rarely touched on Faith’s faith in perpetuating humanity through reproduction. Something which Brown shies away from, and Faith must collaborate with the elders to make it possible. When Brown leaves her for the forest, her protestations are pretentious. She does not mean what she is saying. She waits and watches him until he is safely gone, probably fearing that he may recant and come back to his already cold bed. Proof of her knowledge is witnessed when she overtakes Brown on the way and reaches the demonic grounds before him. Again, she demonstrates her hypocrisy as she tries to protest her mission, even though Hawthorne suggests that she does not wish her protests to be respected. “Methought as she spoke there was trouble in her face, as if a dream had warned her what work is to be done tonight.” Faith probably knew of the couple’s invitation and kept it private.

Like Eve in Genesis, Faith probably had contact with the devil earlier than her husband and accepted the invitation into the forest more willingly than her husband. We have three agents operating in both stories and performing actions that are similar. In the Genesis we have god, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. In “Young Goodman Brown” we have God, brown, Faith, and the Devil (bearing his serpentine staff). If Faith is fashioned after Eve as the critics believe, then she knew about the witch meeting before Brown and survives it much better. She will go on to live a fulfilled and happy life by the side of an emaciating and gloomy husband. I suspect Faith’s offspring are not Brown’s because Brown cannot sire. Faith was not pregnant before the journey to the forest and could not have been pregnant by a doubting Brown who wouldn’t touch her in bed: he rejects her welcome kiss in public as he returns from the forest as she “almost kissed her husband before the whole village” once more displaying her libertinism. And in response, “Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face” passing without a greeting. This signals an end to any intimacy that might have even slightly existed between the couple, for from henceforth, he shrinks from her breast, signaling a physical divorce from her. “Often, waking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away”.  By shrinking from the bosom of Faith, refusing any contact with her breasts and chest we realize that reproduction can hardly proceed from a relation as strained as this. One can suspect that the children and grandchildren that follow his hearse are not his descendants but those of some unholy relation and that Brown had to liv through a long experience of adulterous births. One may as well make analogies between Adam and Young Goodman Brown. In both situations, a father figure leads them to that dark center in the middle of the forest to show them the duties of the often-forbidden secret duties of the unconscious. In Brown’s case, the father spirit form takes the aspect of an ancestor; in Adam’s case, the devil is the agent of the father, and why not a simulated figure of the father? In both cases, the naivety of these characters disallows them from savoring the juices of forbidden fruits. Faith knows far more than Brown; she leaves for the forest later than him and arrives earlier. Like Eve, Faith can embrace the ostensibly dark callings of the deity. Brown recants when his duty is most urgent and becomes an enigma living on the fringes of his society and dying in the gloom. He fails in the initiation rite, perhaps because he does not have the wherewithal to confront his fears. Crawley explains the process the neophytes must undergo as strenuous: “The dangers of the taboo state, that is, the disabilities of the old life and the responsibilities of the new, are neutralized by various means. Tests of endurance are gone through, fasting and purification; candidates are beaten, sometimes to increase their strength, at others to get rid of the dangerous substance of taboo; they are fumigated and purified, secluded and concealed (04).

CONCLUSION

To underscore the argument that Brown’s story is that of a foiled sexual initiation rite, the dark preacher’s sermon centres on sexual activity. He invites them to embrace the sexual debauchery of all and sundry and accept their oneness with the experience of sexual sin. All those they had formerly revered as role models are here exposed with one common denominator –sex. In his sermon, he demonstrates the practice as integral to society, starting with elderly men and women, and then extending to boys and girls.

This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds: how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager for widows’ weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste to inherit their fathers’ wealth; and how fair damsels–blush not, sweet ones-have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest to an infant’s funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places–whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest–where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot. Far more than this. It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power–than my power at its utmost–can make manifest in deeds. And now, my children, look upon each other.”

After his lengthy elocution, the dark shape is about to bind them in the universal human practice of sin when Goodman Brown rejects it and awakens the next day—thus failing in the initiation process. However, Faith accepts it and continues to live a normal life. One might say that Brown is gay. Brown is easily seduced by the devil who comes in the shape of his grandfather. He goes on a date with the man who at the climax of the story gives him a staff symbolizing the phallus. His intimacy with the devil is like the intimacy Goody Cloyse has with the same devil. Both of them accept staffs from the devil meant to serve them in their sexual rites. His character suggests a queerness that transcends normalcy. He marries to conform to the strict puritanical theocracy of his time but fails to fulfil his husbandly responsibilities. Goody Cloyse has good reason to refer to him as “the silly fellow,” which can be interpreted as “the foolish fellow” or “the ignorant fellow.” Cloyse says this on her way to the ceremony meant to enlighten “the silly fellow” and make him “unsilly.” He refuses enlightenment and is condemned to live a life of darkness right up to his dying day.

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