obsessive interest.

The Puritan values that inspired Hawthorne's close observation of people and events contributed to his genius as a writer. For, his Puritan gloom determines the dark atmosphere of many of his narratives as well as the overriding shadow of Calvinism which generates a certain pessimism about man.  It is this mixture of objectivity and Puritan gloom which creates the ambiguity that is present in "Young Goodman Brown."  Did Brown witness Faith give herself up to the devil, or did something happen within his heart?

The setting of Hawthorne's challenging story is a result of the tremendous historical influence of the Salem Witch Trials.  Even in Hawthorne's time, the nineteenth century, New England was yet reeling from the guilt of ancestry about such a hysterical time period, while at the same time it rebelled against the Calvinistic morals that were so constrictive. Goodman tells his wife he is going into the forest primeval "just this one night" because he wishes to challenge the devil, challenge the Calvinistic belief in the depravity of man.  Yet, as the traveller in the person of the old man with the serpentine staff hints at his recognition of the darkness of Goodman's soul, Brown claims his innocence and goodness.  Certainly, Hawthorne, whose ancestor  served as a judge in the Salem Trials, examines this dichotomy in his story with Goodman Brown as the personage who represents the conflict of guilt and rebellion.  Indubitably, art imitates life in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown."

New historicism in literature examines both the historical context of the author writing their work of literature and the historical context of the critic. For example, new historicism might observe that Harriet Beecher Stowe, in the context of her own time, was considered radically sympathetic to Black people in Uncle Tom's Cabin, while in today's context the book is considered racist.

In terms of organizing your paper, it would be easy to first discuss "Young Goodman Brown" in the historical context of Hawthorne's time period (the early 1830s, when the story was written), then to discuss the story in the context of twenty-first-century thinking.

"Young Goodman Brown" is a work of historical fiction, set in the seventeenth century but written in the nineteenth. Such fiction always uses the past to comment on the present. Since the story focuses on the damage of overly rigid religious thinking, which cannot accept that even good people have faults, you might explore if Hawthorne found similar rigidity in the religious world of his own day or too much rigidity in 1830s political debates, such as about slavery or states' rights.

A modern reading, in contrast, might explore the rigidly negative ways Indigenous people in the story are depicted. Hawthorne leans into negative stereotypes, in lines such as Brown seeing at the woodland ceremony:

the Indian priests, or powwows, who had often scared their native forest with more hideous incantations than any known to English witchcraft.

Hawthorne, in the context of his times, may have meant to critique the use of moral absolutes in judging other white people, but we might critique Hawthorne for his judgments of Indigenous people.