A Study of Settings Appearing in "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Daniel Obländer

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Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, grade: 2,0, University of Heidelberg (Ang...

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Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Didactics - English - Literature, Works, grade: 2,0, University of Heidelberg (Anglistisches Seminar), course: Proseminar 2 Literaturwissenschaft: "Poe and Company", language: English, abstract: The setting of a story is just as important as the characters that act within the story. No narration can stand without a setting; the setting is essential and influences every narration. Good settings can give a story its final touch and bad chosen settings can destroy a narration. In historical narrations, the setting is already given and an unchangeable part of the story line. In a fictional story, on the other hand, the setting is part of the fiction and was entirely chosen by the narrator himself. He tries to use the setting in favor of his purposes in order to make the story work. Very often, a setting is selected in order to make a story more authentic or to produce a certain feeling and mood within the reader. However, in my term paper, I will focus on the settings that appear in "Young Goodman Brown". This is a subject that has not attracted as much attention as other parts of "Young Goodman Brown" but is without any doubt a very interesting field of study. In my study I will try to identify the different settings of the story in diverse ways. Thus, it is important not only to describe the settings but also to discuss their meaning; not only for the story itself but also for the people of the time when "Young Goodman Brown" was first published. It is especially interesting to see what kind of reactions Hawthorne tried to generate with "Young Goodman Brown" among the Puritan population in New England of which he himself was a part. The setting of the forest plays a special role in this case and shows us that people of Hawthorne's time had a different connection to their environment and to nature than we do today. The early Puritans who came to New England had a very difficult relationship to their new, wild, and uncultivated environment. Further, it is important to talk about Salem Village, Massachusetts and the witch trials that occurred there. The village and its Puritan population, as well as the witch trials, for which Salem became famous, are important to "Young Goodman Brown." Additionally, the relationship of the Hathorne family to the city of Salem and to the witch trials is an interesting one. This relationship explains a lot about Nathaniel Hawthorne's motivation to write the short story "Young Goodman Brown." The story of Goodman Brown primarily deals with the guilt and the evil that lies within every human being no matter how religious, honest, gentle or truthful he seems to be.