you have hoped that "virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome, again, my children, to the communion of your race." And the assembled worshipers repeat the welcome in a cry of "despair and triumph."

There is an element of finality in the scene. Goodman Brown has traveled to the end of a journey from which he can return but never recover. He stops short of the ultimate step of infernal baptism, which would, of course, bring the story to a much different resolution. As he and Faith look at each other, they cannot make the decision which would allow each to see the hidden springs of guilt in the other: "What polluted wretches would the next glance show them to each other, shuddering alike at what they disclosed and what they saw!" Offered the power to pierce the veil that (as the Reverend Mr. Hooper knew) covers every human personality, the husband and wife cannot bear the idea of spiritual nakedness. Suddenly Goodman Brown cries out, "Faith! Faith! . . . look up to heaven and resist the Wicked One." Faith's allegorically appropriate name allows here, as elsewhere, for a masterful and openhanded ambiguity of effect. Goodman Brown is obviously addressing the image of his wife, urging her to resist the devil. At the same time he is exhorting himself to have faith, to look heavenward, to withstand the infernal eloquence of the Wicked One. And his cry has a miraculous effect; it obliterates the fiery theatrics of the scene along with the entire cast of demonic characters. "Hardly had he spoken" when he finds himself alone "amid calm night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind, which died heavily away through the forest." At the beginning of the scene the minister and Deacon Gookin had escorted Goodman Brown to a "blazing rock." Now he staggers against the same rock and feels it "chill and damp; while a hanging twig, that had been all on fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew."

Assumed in "Young Goodman Brown" is a distinction between dream and reality that one must understand in the terms of Hawthorne's presentation. The question proposed to Goodman Brown is into which of these categories good and evil belong. At the outset of the story, Faith asks her husband to postpone his journey until sunrise and sleep in his own bed that night: "a lone woman," she says, "is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts that she's afeard of herself sometimes." Mulling over the guilty purpose that has brought him into the forest, Goodman Brown recalls Faith's talk of dreams; he wonders if he detected trouble in her face, "as if a dream had warned her of what work is to be done tonight." In the forest he goes through a dreamlike experience, marked by a series of abrupt transitions and sudden apparitions. The devil introduces a further notion of a dream by saying that Goodman Brown and Faith "had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream." Thus, the counterpoised terms, dream and reality, are shown to depend for their application upon one's prior attitude toward the moral nature of the world.

And it is precisely because of Hawthorne's presentation of spectral or counterfeit evidence that such absolute distinctions founder—along with a protagonist (or reader) who would seek to apply them. For, as Levin demonstrates, the tale offers a choice "between dream and a reality that is unquestionably spectral." In the manner of witnesses at the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692, Goodman Brown fails to distinguish between the specter or shape of a person and the person himself, between appearances (fashioned by the devil) and realities (created by God). Hawthorne's language is insistent: Goodman Brown sees "figures," "shapes," "visages" that appear in the guise of those he knows. He hears the voices of invisible travelers (on invisible horses) that, "he could have sworn," sound like those of the deacon and the minister. He gazes at a cloud that hurries across the sky, although "no wind was stirring." At an early point in the journey the devil discourses "so aptly, that his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the bosom" of Goodman Brown than "to be suggested by himself." And of course that is the case if Goodman Brown has internalized the source of evil. Michael J. Colacurcio is surely right in saying that according to Hawthorne's "psychological scheme Brown's suspicion and distrust and the Devil's wiles" are two ways of describing the same phenomena ["Visible Sanctity and Spectral Evidence: The Moral World of Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown'," Essex Institute Historical Collections 110, 1974].

For the devil, of course, virtue must be a dream, evil the only reality. And once Goodman Brown sees the "evidence" for that idea, he can never rid himself of it. It rises within him to cast a shadow over the apparent realities of his life in Salem village that he once took as visible (and comforting) evidence of sanctity:

On the Sabbath day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hand on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant death, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awakening suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.

His spectral experience in the forest has affected Goodman Brown as the most dismal, the most horrible, and, withal, the most intransigent experience of his life. Since he cannot believe in Faith, no other reality can modulate he gnawing gloom of a persistent doubt. He has journeyed into the dreamworld of the forest, into the haunted mind now functioning with the full force of history, and confronted a world steeped in guilt (whether projected by his fantasies or conjured by the devil) that makes his return to the village a pilgrimage into hypocrisy. But just as the experience has been personal, so has the effect. Goodman Brown alone is changed. He alone brings the dark vision of the forest to bear on the moral life of the community. He alone, "from the night of that fearful dream," as Hawthorne says, becomes "a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man."

It is difficult to say precisely why Goodman Brown leaves Faith to spend his night in the forest. As we have seen, she asks him to put off his journey and tarry with her; he replies that this night of all nights in the year he must tarry away from her. He does not say what his purpose is, but conveniently uses her term: "My journey, as thou callest it, forth and back again, must needs be done 'twixt now and sunrise." And he chides her for doubting him when they are but three months married.

But he does go on his journey with a guilty conscience, leaving Faith with her pink ribbons behind. His heart tells him he is a wretch to leave Faith, "a blessed angel on earth," on "such an errand." He resolves that "after this one night" he will "cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven." Clearly, Goodman Brown wants "this one night." His journey into the forest can be defined as a kind of indeterminate allegory, representing man's irrational drive to leave faith, home, and security temporarily behind, for whatever reason, and take a chance with one (more?) adventure onto the wilder shores of experience. Our protagonist becomes an Everyman named Brown, a "young" man, who will be aged in one night by an adventure that makes everyone in this world seem a fallen idol. But our protagonist is also, and specifically, a seventeenth-century Puritan, a "young" man only three months joined to Faith, whose belief in the value of visible moral evidence becomes inverted rather than discredited. He has made a covenant to meet the devil, who has come from Boston to Salem village in fifteen minutes for the occasion. The simplicity of Goodman Brown's statements to the devil help to measure the extent of the change he will undergo in the forest. "Faith kept me back awhile," he says to explain his tardiness; "That old woman taught me my catechism," he remarks of Goody Cloyse ("and there was a world of meaning," Hawthorne writes, "in that simple comment"); finally, when he beholds a pink ribbon fluttering down from above he cries out, "My Faith is gone." At that frenzied and faithless moment he embraces the devil's premise that evil constitutes the only reality in the world.

Faith has been Goodman Brown's last resource. But the process of consigning people to the devil—or of instantly crediting reports of their wrongdoing—has its genesis in his brittle commitment to the world in which he lives. He has learned with some wonder that the devil knew his father and grandfather. With amazement he has heard the devil claim that the governor and council are firm supporters of his interest. And quickly he dissociates himself: the governor and the council have their own ways, he reasons, "and are no rule for a simple husbandman like me." That Goody Cloyse consorts with the devil—who momentarily assumes the figure of Goodman Brown's grandfather and thereby demonstrates his mastery of appearances—is a blow that strikes closer to home. Again Goodman Brown dissociates himself, this time with the vehemence necessary to cast off one who has earned his respect: "what if a wretched old woman do choose to go to the devil when I thought she was going to heaven: is that any reason why I should quit my dear Faith and go after her?" He even decides to return to Salem Village and applauds himself greatly for his resolution; then, "conscious of the guilty purpose that had brought him hither," he hides when he hears the sounds of horses approaching. The discovery that Deacon Gookin and the old minister are likewise part of the devil's brotherhood shakes him deeply, although his conviction depends on the flimsiest of aural evidence: Goodman Brown cannot see them nor discern "so much as a shadow." The point is that he immediately believes in their perfidy and looks "up at the sky, doubting whether there really was a heaven above him."

Once again, Goodman Brown dissociates himself from persons he has reverenced. Bereft now of saintly company, of father and grandfather, of governor and council, of Goody Cloyse, Deacon Gookin, and the minister, he can make one final resolution: "With Heaven above, and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil." Gone is all sense of community. Already having doubted the existence of heaven, Goodman Brown stands alone, crying out "in a voice of agony and desperation" for a Faith he has deliberately left behind. At that point (let us note Hawthorne's language carefully) "something fluttered lightly down through the air, and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon." From a heaven he already doubts comes "something" that this man shouting for Faith sees as a "pink ribbon." Since the pink ribbons of her cap are intact the next morning when Faith bursts into joy at the sight of Goodman Brown, what we have here is best seen as a final, Faith-testing, instance of spectral evidence. Having converted "something" to a "pink ribbon" by an ultimate projection of his guilt, our protagonist is at first "stupefied," then "maddened with despair." He speaks the obvious truth when he says his Faith is gone. He reveals his virtual solipsism when he concludes that "there is no good on earth."

As he rushes through the "haunted forest" to join the devil's congregation, Goodman Brown becomes "the chief horror of the scene." "In truth," writes Hawthorne, holding out the possibility that we might have been witnessing a specter undone by spectral evidence, "there could be nothing more frightful" in the forest "than the figure of Goodman Brown" (my italics). But Brown at the beginning and end of the tale is presented as a character, not a specter. He has (in a far more serious way than Wakefield) deliberately left his place in the moral universe and returned with a perspective that converts everything to evil and hypocrisy. From his dream vision or spectral adventure in the forest, he has received a paralyzing sense that the brotherhood of man is possible only under the fatherhood of the devil. His vision is absolute, unalterable; it turns his world inside out and compels him to live and die in a gloom born of his inverted sense of moral reality.