Nathaniel Hawthorne, an American writer, was born in Salem, Massachusetts on July 4, 1804. His widowed mother raised him until she sent him to school at Bowdain College, where he decided he wanted to become a writer. This dream of his finally came true in 1837, when he first established himself as a writer.

Hawthorne was a man strongly influenced by his Puritan heritage. He was a man of very strong opinionated, but sometimes changing beliefs. At first, Hawthorne seemed to even share some of the same beliefs of the great Transcendentalist, Ralph Emerson. He joined a Transcendentalist community called Brook Farm, but later decided he had different views and left Brook Farm. He then decided to become an anti-Transcendentalist.

To truly grasp why Hawthorn became opposed to Transcendentalism, one must observe what Hawthorne found erroneous with the School of Thought. Transcendentalism philosophy addresses God not as a person, but rather as a spiritual force, which encompasses everything and everyone. The spirit does not originate from a single divine being but instead streams throughout Nature. This causes a person to become involved with divine potentials. Each individual p

Hawthorne got many of his viewpoints from his Puritan ancestry. His relatives were prominent Puritan judges in New England; his grandfather even supervised the Salem witchcraft trials. Hawthorne thoroughly adopted John Calvin's central theory of Puritanism. As Henry James stated it in this manner, "Hawthorne found the necessary darkness...in his Puritan heritage... and [would] capitalize on the darkness latent in America's Puritan history and heritage" (James 13). However, it is not totally accurate to say that Hawthorne spoke from a Puritan era, because Puritans maintain that society must be terrorized by the natural evil of sin and that certain people were capable of salvation. Hawthorne went even expanded this idea to say that a purification of a society was basically impossible. Hawthorne also found a problem in Transcendentalism for the fact that they refuse to acknowledge the noticeable existence and domination of evil. Hawthorne believes one should acknowledge the evil and confront it directly.

Goodman Brown has a meeting with the Devil in the forest deep within his soul. He believes that his "Faith" will always be there for him and that he and his friends are "people of good prayers...and abide no such wickedness" (Hawthorne 1238). However, he soon finds out that this is not always the case. He tries to bring virtue into a world of vice, and realizes he is up against an unbeatable force. Basically, Goodman Brown has a kind of revelation and realizes he must accept that all things can be deceptive and that the truth is hard to find. Having this knowledge, he pretty much loses all of his "Faith".

This approach is very autonomous because

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Approximate Word count = 1126
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)