"Young Goodman Brown", by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a story that has a lot of allegories. "Young Goodman Brown" is a moral story which is told through the corruption of a religious leader. In "Young Goodman Brown", the Author conceals many symbols in the body of this short story and for each symbol, we can apply Freud's theory on it. In addition, the author describes the psychological moment of Goodman Brown a lot as well as uses "suspense" to hold the attention of readers.
This is the story which has many important symbols. The author endows each symbol with an allegory-meaning. .
At the beginning of the story, the author set a symbol which goes throughout the entire story---"pink ribbon". The pink ribbon appears at every change of young Goodman Brown's emotion. For instance, "The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon." After this sentence, the author describes young Goodman Brown's feeling strongly. "Young Goodman Brown cried "My faith is gone."(Faith is another important symbol; I will talk about it later) He yelled "There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given."" Right here, we can see that the id won over the superego. And the ego disappeared because the id was no long against the reality and got satisfied. .
Faith is the other symbol that I want to talk about. The author doesn't just give the random names to the characters. The names in "Young Goodman Brown" all have special meaning. Not only Faith is a woman's name but it also means young .
Goodman Brown's own faith. Here is the example; ``Well, then, to end the matter at once,'' said Goodman Brown, considerably nettled, ``there is my wife, Faith. It would break her dear little heart; and I'd rather break my own.'' Faith in this story is something that between id and superego. I consider that superego is Goodman Brown, id is his fellow-traveler.
