The forest is where all the respectable people of the town go to vent their evil while outside of the forest, they seem like they are pure and good. Hawthorne adds to the symbolism by personifying the trees "which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through" as Brown "walks alongside a dreary road." Hawthorne uses the characters of the story also to represent good and evil. The names of the main character and his wife are ironic. Faith, in the literal context of the story, is Goodman Brown's wife. In the connotative sense, Faith represents Brown's actual faith in God and goodness of humankind. She is a symbol of Brown's faith who then becomes tainted by evil. The pink ribbons in Faith's cap represent purity, white, tainted by the evilness of the devil, red. He believes that his wife, Faith is good. Although the devil shows Brown that his father, the deacon, and the rest of the townspeople turned to evil, he will not go with the Devil because of his thoughts of Faith. There is a certain point in the journey when he asks where his Faith is, at this point, he is symbolically seeking his own faith in goodness, or the righteous path and is wondering why he is on this path with the devil. Toward the end, when he sees his wife among the others in the woods, a participant of the ceremony, he loses faith. He wakes up and is left miserable, alone and distrustful of all the villagers including his wife.The main character's name, Goodman Brown, is ironic because for all his "goodness" and faith in his beliefs, he becomes the one person in the village who personifies evil. In the end of the story, the event changes Goodman Brown's life and, whether it was reality or a trick played by the devil in Brown's dream, the effect it had on him lasts the rest of his life. Brown doesn't trust anyone, He doubts everyone, and sees evil in everyone. He becomes "stern, sad, darkly meditative, and distrustful." Brown would not participate...
