Response 8

“Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne is another gothic story that we have read and discussed in class. To me it’s main gothic theme is temptation and betrayal. I say this because in the story Brown knows all these people from the village and he seems to have a lot of trust in them since they are the people that have been in his life the whole time. While he feels that he knows everyone well he ends up going to the forest and seeing all the people he thought he knew well practicing a ritual for the devil, even his own wife is there. The part where it shows the devil as his father really shows betrayal because the only people you can really trust 100% should be your parents but even his father is foreign to him. Temptation is a big theme in this story because it shows how far a human can last without falling into to. The part where the devil is trying to give Brown the staff the devil starts explaining how Brown wouldn’t have to walk and everything would be fine. At first Brown was hesitant but after being hit by the reality that everything he knew was a lie he just took it without thinking. I really enjoyed this story because it kind of reminds me of the movie inception, and it makes you think that the world really tries to test you with these kind of events.