All of them allegories and mixture between dream and reality, surrounded by familiar landscapes to the author. Hawthorne's main two novels are The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, and The House of Seven Gables, published the following year. They became an immediate success.
When you see the title of this short story "Young Goodman Brown", you can infer some things from it at first sight. That, for example, it is about a young character and that he seems to be a "good man". It help us to create a first image of the main character Young Goodman Brown. This matches perfectly with the main theme of the story, which is, as we will develop with much detail, the personal experience of a your believer confronting the evilness for the first time.
In fact, Young Goodman Brown is the main character of this story. He is a inhabitant of the Puritan town of Salem. He has recently married "Faith" three moths ago, a very pure and innocent woman. They love each other very much. One day he decides to leave his wife "Faith" in order to attend a meeting with an estrange man at the forest. We don't know what moves to this character to leave the security of his home and to enter the forest almost at night. The estrange character seems to be the devil himself personifying Brown's grandfather. As the story develops, Brown watches what seems to be an ironic representation of his so pious neighbours meeting in order to conform something like a black mass in the deep forest. He is shocked to see all the people he believed to be good puritans behaving like evil wizards and witches, as part of a secret demoniac sect. What is worst, even his pure wife and his dead family are part of this black mass. When all seems to be lost, he awakes alone in the forest. Then he has a personal doubt: Was it true or not? He doesn't know it. He cannot discern the reality. So when he comes back home, he is very suspicious of Salem's people and his own wife.
