The most obvious ambiguity in "Young Goodman Brown" (New England Magazine, April, 1835) falls under H.-J. Lang's third classification, . . . the ambiguity of external actions. Was Brown's experience in the forest real, or was it a dream? Certainly, a strong case for this ambiguity could be culled from the implications of the scenic elements, but this is not the ambiguity which I intend to discuss because, clearly, it makes little difference to the ultimate meaning which Hawthorne wished to express. To the reader who asks "[h]ad Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?" Hawthorne answers "[b]e it so if you will."

The ambiguity which is thematically central to the tale is the confusion of good and evil. Beginning with a clearly defined polarity of village and forest, the functional setting reflects the clearly defined separation between right and wrong in Brown's simplistic moral vision. In his uncomplicated schema Faith and Salem represent good, and the forest represents evil. But in the author's system of moral order, the relationship of good and evil is much more complex than this black-and-white paradigm by which Brown seeks to regulate his life. The tale is, therefore, a kind of initiation story in which the child-like innocence of the protagonist is exposed to the ubiquitous power of evil.

When Brown leaves Faith and Salem expecting to encounter evil in the forest, the evil he envisions is a childish concept of an unqualified wrong. Like a child who is irresistibly drawn to a forbidden fruit, Brown evinces an obsessive curiosity about the nature of evil. "[O]f all nights in the year, this one night must I tarry away from thee," he says in answer to the pleas of Faith that he remain safely at home. Yet, like a child, he thinks he can return from his escapade in the forest and take up his previous life in Salem with Faith, unscathed by his encounters in the moral wilderness. "Well, she's a blessed angel on earth; and after this one night I'll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven.'

The events which occur during his journey, however, cause Brown's conception of good and evil to be less rigidly defined as the village becomes less distinctly separated from the forest. Gradually, everyone affiliated with the village—those who personify "good" in Brown's idealistic moral perception—are shown to be tainted with "evil" as they appear in the forest. The presentation of these persons builds in a crescendo of emotional tension for Brown as his idealism is threatened and finally destroyed. He can rationalize the implications of evil in his ancestors, the church, and the Puritan government because they are not a part of his immediate environment. The "black man of the forest" merely mentions their duplicity in order to refute the "scruples," Brown gives as an excuse for not accompanying him deeper into the wilderness. However, Brown feels much more threatened by the concrete and the immediate than by the abstract and the past. The persons presented after this are from Salem and have an intimate relationship with Brown. Consequently, the ambiguity of good and evil becomes more terrifyingly real for Brown as the village population gravitates to the forest. First, there is Goody Cloyse, who taught Brown his catechism; then there are the minister and Deacon Gookin; and finally, at the crest of the crescendo, there is Faith.

Faith's appearance in the forest represents the total breakdown of the division between village and forest, or good and evil. Since this action is a climax in the plot, the accompanying emotive context must be intensified. For this purpose, Hawthorne includes a monstrous scenic inversion which underscores the conjoining of good and evil. When his unrealistic concept of a black-and-white world is threatened by the apparent desolation of so much which he thought incorruptible, Brown searches for some stable division to which he can cling for protection and security. Seeing the night sky with the stars shining through, he thinks he has found a constant in the chaos around him and is reassured in his belief of an ordered moral system. "With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil," he says. But at exactly this moment he sees the cloud and hears Faith above him on her way to the witch communion.

While he still gazed upward into the deep arch of the firmament and had lifted his hands to pray, a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across the zenith and hid the brightening star. Once the listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of townspeople of his own, men and women both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met at the communion-table and had seen others rioting at the tavern. . . . Then came a stronger swell of those familiar tones, heard daily in the sunshine at Salem village, but never until now from a cloud at night. There was one voice, of a young woman, uttering lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some favor, which, perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain; and all the unseen multitude, both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her onward.

The scenic inversion resonates through all facets of the tale, as the excerpt above illustrates. Heaven and earth, "communioners" and "taverners," saints and sinners, Salem and wilderness, Faith and Witchcraft—all are commingled in the chaotic disorder of Brown's night in the forest.

This ambiguity is continued in the inversion motif of the witch-meeting where the scenic images mingling the forest and the village metaphorically signify the merging of evil and good. The dominant image is that of a church service inverted to become a black mass. The congregation is composed of the town members; yet, instead of their faces being illuminated by the soft light of altar candles, they are grotesquely distorted by the undulations of lurid red light from four "blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting" which surround a rock, "bearing some rude, natural resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit." The congregation's song reminds Brown of a hymn sung at the meeting-house, but it is "joined to words which [express] all that our nature can conceive of sin." The satanic leader of the perverse service is similar "both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the New England churches." And the baptism will produce not grace but an intimate knowledge of the blackness in the souls of all men.

This fusion of the two dominant scenic components—the village and the forest—is reflected by less prominent constituents in the scenic presentation, thus unifying the imagery of the tale into a pattern of thematic reverberations. As an illustration, the auditory imagery of the story is rich in sounds which blends the attributes of both Man and Nature. When Brown agonizingly shouts for Faith in the forest, the mocking echoes come back to him "as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all through the wilderness." Or, at the witch communion, "with the final peal of that dreadful anthem there came a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling beasts, and every other voice of the unconcerted wilderness were mingling and according with the voice of guilty man." Or finally—reflecting the fusion in a metaphor created by a single word—the forest is described as being "peopled with frightful sounds."

This ambiguity is more than Goodman Brown can assimilate into his childishly simple view of life. Because the village cannot be the sphere of pure goodness which Brown imagined it and because Faith is not the personification of goodness as he had envisioned her, he is repulsed by them. When he would not accept evil in mankind, when he would not participate in "the communion of [his] race", Goodman Brown lost "his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity" just as much as did Ethan Brand who had made the search for evil his life's work. In the ensemble of characters from the Hawthorne canon, these two represent opposite extremes of false perceptions and misguided attitudes toward "the power of blackness" in the human condition. Brand sees evil as a power by which he can over-reach even the mercy of God; Brown sees evil as a power which forces him to question the very existence of a God. Brown withdraws into the egocentricity of isolation, lives a life of frustration, and dies in gloom because he never accepts the fact that man lives in the forest as well as in the town.