"Young Goodman Brown" is a story of strong faith in God. It begins with a conversation between married couple, Goodman and Faith. Immediately we identify this as a religious story. She is "my love and my Faith", but Goodman must this one night "tarry away from thee." Goodman is leaving his Faith for one night in pursuit of dark and dangerous activities.There is "work to be done tonight" and Goodman is veering away from his Faith to partake in it. As Goodman moves through the forest, he encounters people from civilization that have always been part of his religious life. He meets Goody Cloyse, who admits to being a witch, and accuses his companion to be the devil. Goodman is partaking in the sin of flirting with the devil, flirting with sin that he should not be. As he moves on, he believes he hears Faith and screams a "cry of grief, rage and terror." He does not know what he is doing and has lost his Faith. He becomes the "frightful figure of Goodman Brown" as he arrives on the congregation. He sees all the people that he has trusted over the years, and all of them have given their lives over to the devil. As he is introduced as a new convert, he is brought to the front of the congregation. The leader says that "it shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts." Goodman has heeded the temptation to sin and violated his heart. After this event, which is never revealed to be a dream or a reality, Goodman sees evil in every person that he meets throughout the civilization. He loses all sense of life, and when he passes, "they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom." Goodman gave into the temptation of knowing sin, and in turn spurned God and hurt himself by losing Faith in the Lord.
"Roger Malvin's Burial" is the story of promise and guilt. Roger Malvin and Reuben Bourne are two soldiers that survived a battle of Indian warfare and are both severely wounded. After multiple days of suffering, Malvin tells Reuben to go on, but makes him promise to "return, when your wounds are healed and your weariness refreshed, --return to this wild rock, and lay my bones in the grave, and say a prayer over them." When Reuben recovers and Dorcas, Roger's daughter, asks him what has happened to her Father, Reuben begins to "defend himself against an imaginary accusation." He does not want to reveal to Dorcas that he abandoned her father because of his "selfish love of life against caring for her father's fate." For years he ignores the "deep vow" that he made to Roger, to return the tree that he left him and give him a proper burial. He ignores the promise that he made, and continues with his life, with his friend's daughter, through life. "He regretted the moral cowardice that had restrained his words when he was about to disclose the truth to Dorcas; but pride, the fear of losing her affection, the dread of universal scorn, forbade him to rectify this falsehood." He violates this innate human desire to fulfill the promise to his fellow soldier. Reuben became a "ruined man" and had only one choice: to "seek subsistence from the virgin bosom of the wilderness." Reuben finds the tree where he left his friend Roger Malvin years before and remarks that the tree's "middle and lower branches were in luxuriant life... but a blight had apparently stricken the upper part of the oak." This looks like a manifestation of Reuben sin, an embodiment of his guilt that destroyed the nature around his fallen companion. Reuben's violation of a past promise draws him into accidentally firing at his son, destroying the only good that has come out of him the past fifteen years, and in turn, destroying himself. Hawthorne vividly depicts that one must never resist the human heart. Although all this tragedy occurs, he finally fulfills his vow. What the wounded youth could not do, the "blighted man had come to redeem." With this, his "sin was expiated" and the curse was gone from him.
In Hawthorne's short story, "My Kinsman Major Molineux", a naive, nearly eighteen year old goes on a search for his Kinsman in the city. He is country bred and still does not not know the ways of man. Robin's appearance is described as if he is a child dressed up in grown man's clothing. He was "clad in a coarse gray coat" and a hat that "had perhaps sheltered the graver brow of the lad's father." This hat is battered, and more than likely does not fit his youthful head very well. The appearance we are given makes him seem like a country man out of place amongst the civil world. Robin does not come to the city to start his own life, but to piggy back on top of his kinsman's success. Robin tells us that it was " therefore determined that Robin should profit by his kinsman’s generous intentions, especially as he had seemed to be rather the favorite, and was thought to possess other necessary endowments." After his kinsman's visit to his family a year earlier, Robin became possessed with the idea of being the first born of this kinsman. Robbed of the possibility within his immediate family by his older brother, Robin acts selfishly in searching for the easy way out of the first born. The natural order of the world, at the time, would be to work hard, and subsist on a modest living underneath his father's clergyman salary. The unpardonable sin here is rejecting his natural world with his family in search of a more prosperous life in the city with his kinsman. It becomes worse when he gets swept up in the hype of condemning his kinsman. When he sees the spectacle, Robin "sent forth a shout of laughter that echoed through the street... every man emptied his lung, but Robin's shout was the loudest there." There is evil in the city as well as the wilderness, and Robin allowed himself to be caught up in the excitement without ever defending his kinsman. He will not rise in the world through nepotism, but instead by his own hand, "without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineux."
I like that you point out the conflation of Goodman Brown’s devotion to his wife and his religious devotion, as highlighted Hawthorne’s choice to name her “Faith.” It ties into the idea betraying a human heart has serious ramifications on the soul not only in life on earth, but in the afterlife. With regard to “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” your emphasis on the Hawthorne’s investigation of the nature guilt is spot on. It seems that Hawthorne is using a fictitious example of serious human guilt to try to teach us something about the human spirit, and perhaps learn something about it himself. The instance also reveals more about Hawthorne’s notion of the unpardonable sin in that one can violate the human heart, even when that heart has stopped beating. Also, your comments on the immaturity of Robin in "My Kinsman Major Molineux" brings up some important questions. Are we to forgive his unsavory intentions on account of his naivety? Its also interesting that the character would want to reject his family, given that Hawthorne himself made attempts to separate himself from his ancestors; he added the “w” to his surname in order to separate himself from his John Hathorne, the only judge from the Salem Witch Trials who never repented his actions.
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