own making. There is of course much more implied by Hawthorne's work then prudence allows me to go into. For example Goodman Brown may well have thought that he was the product of an ancestral and evil spirit seeing all of his ancestry were brutal in nature. The entire account has Hawthorne suggesting that one can sell his soul, unknowingly, to the devil by deliberately entering into a pack with evil - thinking somehow he could escape the consequences of such a contract. In the beginning of the story he believed that he could "after this one night I'll cling to Faith's skirts and follow her into heaven". The moment Goodman Brown set out on his journey with an evil purpose in mind he not only lost his religious faith but his wife, Faith. As if these two words were interlocked. "What thou shalt loose in Heaven shalt be loose on Earth, and what thou shalt bound in Heaven should be bound on Earth." She never looked the same to him from the very first night he returned from his meeting. That seems to be the most sorrowful part of the bargain with his gaining the wisdom of the world. As Christ says in the New Testament, "what have you gain if you gain the whole world but lost your very soul?" The word "Goodman," in the name Goodman Brown, tells us that Nathaniel Hawthorne is more then suggesting that a "good man" can get so caught up, in becoming all that he can be, in the world that he looses his very soul and humanity in the process. ...
