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The Importance Of Setting In Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown

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Eudora Welty once said, "Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?" In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” setting is the foundation for the events that Goodman Brown experiences. The setting, some details of which may seem unimportant, results in Goodman Brown’s loss of faith near the story’s end. In addition, Hawthorne uses contrasting settings throughout the story, symbolizing the struggles Brown faces on his journey while highlighting the idea that environment can compel people to travel different paths other than the ones they may have chosen. At the outset of the story in Salem, Brown, only three months married, is forced to part ways with his wife, Faith, for the first …show more content…
Brown began to “roar” running through the forest, as he was “himself the chief horror of the scene” (Hawthorne 334). Running on into the forest, Brown notices “a pulpit, surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame;” Brown had encountered an evil assembly. The evil assembly is a parody of Christian practices that often take place in Church; The burning pines represent the candles that surround an alter. Intrigued, Brown approached the assembly. He listens as a man spoke “in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness,” a voice one may compare to the devil himself (Hawthorne 337). Brown, already overcome by the evil of the woods, surrenders to the devil. Brown’s heart is frosted, even “a hanging twig, that had been all on fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew” and although surrounded by pain and suffering, Brown was no longer affected it (Hawthorne 337). The woods destroy any sense of feeling Brown once had, both emotionally and physically, due to the evils

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