ESSAY ON: Comparison of the Dark Themes and Central Characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Minister’s Black Veil”

Number of Pages 4

This research paper: This is a 4 page paper comparing the dark themes and central characters in Hawthorne’s tales “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Minister’s Black Veil”. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories “Young Goodman Brown” (1845, 1846) and “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836) tell of similar characters, Young Goodman Brown and Reverend Hooper, who cannot focus on their own sins but instead can only obsess about the sins of those around them. This brings both characters a great deal of gloom, moral distrust, conflict and isolation until their deaths. The tales use elements of darkness to project the image of sin as seen in Brown’s confrontation with an old man/the devil with an appearance of a great black snake and Hooper’s persistent wearing of his black veil. Hawthorne, said to be haunted by his own preoccupation of the sins of man, tried to distance himself from his earlier darker works as seen in “The Minister’s Black Veil” but the sins of man keep reappearing years later, as in “Young Goodman Brown” suggesting to others that Hawthorne’s inner conflicts and self-isolation remained and were also reflected in his own wearing of dark attire similar to those of the Puritans and the dark characters found in his writing. Bibliography lists 9 sources.


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