After his experiences with the old traveler, having witnessed Goody Cloyse and Deacon Gookin flying through the air, and the black mass in the forest, Goodman Brown loses his faith.
In the forest, when Brown hears his wife Faith "uttering incantations," he cries out to her, but hears only a scream and sees her pink ribbons fluttering down to the ground. He cries out,"My Faith is gone...There is no good on earth, and sin is but a name." Once so confident that he was among the elect and certain that with faith a man can reach heaven, now after one night in the forest primeval, Goodman experiences disillusionment, and he becomes "a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative" man, who now knows man's dark side. When his family prays, Brown merely mutters and scowls at his wife. His death sees "no hopeful verse" carved on his tombstone, "for his dying hour was gloom."
Clearly, Nathaniel Hawthorne's story counters the conversion narrative of the Puritans. Hawthorne himself perceived a darkness in Puritanism as he was haunted by guilt because of his ancestor who had participated in the Salem Witchcraft trials. Thus, as a writer, Hawthorne probed into the darkness that lay in the human heart and the incertitude of Puritanism in which it is difficult to know whether one is saved or damned.
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