Faith! Faith! Look Up to Heaven, and Resist the Wicked One!
Giphy Images.In 1978, I decided that selling men's shoes at Filenes in the Braintree Plaza wasn’t the future I imagined.
I applied and got accepted to Northeastern University, moved to Boston at the end of summer, and made it my immediate goal to earn my bachelor’s degree in education.
I had enough credits from other schools that I was almost through my sophomore year when I started. I began by taking some of the required courses for a degree in physical education. One was an English course, not entry-level either, but a more advanced writing course.
The professor was a young guy in his mid-30s, about 5 foot 9, with medium-length, straight dark brown hair combed to one side, and he dressed casually in jeans, jerseys, and comfortable shoes. He was enthusiastic about writing and tough with grades.
He flunked the entire class on his first writing assignment. After handing back our papers, he paced back and forth in front of the class in a violent rage, making eye contact with each one of us, and told us we were all horrible writers! He said his goal was to teach us how to write a paper by the end of the semester.
We had to buy an inexpensive paperback book, “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and we were told it would be the only book we’d use all semester.
Written in 1835 and first appearing anonymously in The New England Magazine, Hawthorne’s short story was under 5,400 words, and none of us could believe it was the only textbook we needed to buy. You could easily read the entire book in under an hour, even with distractions common to college kids in the ‘70s…
Our second assignment involved reading only one page of the book. Easy peasy, right? No! We dissected each sentence, and because it was written in 19th-century American English, it was a difficult read. Some of Hawthorne’s word choices sent us reaching for our dictionaries.
The story takes place in 17th-century Salem, around the same time as the Salem witch trials. It’s about a young married man, Young Goodman Brown, and his wife of only three months, Faith, names Hawthorne chose for their symbolism. Brown referred to his wife as “A blessed angel on earth.”
Brown was deeply religious and lived a righteous life, avoiding evil.
One evening, before dusk, he kissed Faith goodbye. She was wearing delicate pink ribbons in her hair, and she tried to persuade her husband, “Put off your journey until sunrise and sleep in your own bed tonight.”
He told her, “My journey, as thou called it, forth and back again, must needs be done ‘twixed now and sunrise.”
Before they parted, Brown suggested to his young bride, “Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will come to you.”
Brown entered the forbidden forest where witches were known to conduct ceremonies. While walking through the forest, he encountered an older man who was 'of his own rank', the two resembling each other like father and son. The man carried a staff "which bore a likeness to a great black snake and almost seemed to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent."
The man told Brown he knew his grandfather and father and helped them both with their evil deeds. Brown rejected the man’s implications and replied, “We are a people of prayer, and good works to boot, and abide no such wickedness.”
When they bumped into Goody Cloyse, Brown’s catechism teacher, she was heading in the same direction, on foot because she had no horse to ride. Brown wondered, “Why would Goody Cloyse be so far in the wilderness by nightfall?” The pious old lady was excited and admitted, "They tell me there is a nice young man to be taken into communion tonight…"
She recognized the man with the staff as the “Devil.”
Brown considered ending his journey, but the man prodded him along and suddenly disappeared into thin air. Brown watched as one of his wife’s pink ribbons fell gracefully from a nearby branch, causing him grave concern.
Off in the distance, he saw a fire burning and knew he was getting closer to the altar where witches performed satanic rituals, and decent people became sworn members of the cult and were taken into communion.
Advertisement
Once there, he saw upstanding people from his village mingling with others of lesser moral character. A veiled young woman stood by the unhallowed altar, his Faith, and he was led to stand beside her, pleading with her, "Faith! Faith! Look up to Heaven, and resist the wicked one."
When he awakens, Brown is uncertain whether what he witnessed was real or a dream, and whether Faith resisted. He walked through Salem Village and saw the clergy, the ones present at the ritual, singing hymns and reciting prayers.
Brown’s forced to decide whether good and evil can coexist, and he's confused and ultimately defeated, losing his Faith.
Hawthorne never tells us if Brown’s journey is real or imagined, if he had "fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting."
After the experience, he lived the rest of his life as a distrustful, if not a desperate man. "And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom."
Almost 50 years after I first read this, Hawthorne’s tale still resonates deeply within me. One of my favorite short stories. I received an A- on my final paper, but I never got my degree…