What did you like about the story "Young Goodman Brown" and what didn't you like about it?

I especially liked the way Hawthorne revealed that all the righteous people of the village had evil desires which they concealed from everybody else. Young Goodman Brown and his wife Faith are both model citizens who have an ideal marriage. Brown's wife does not realize that her eminently respectable husband plans to attend some kind of devil-worshipping orgy in the forest; and, ironically, he discovers that his angelic little wife is attending the same ceremony and taking a leading role in the proceedings. What I didn't like was the way Hawthorne deliberately "painted over" his own story, so to speak, by raising the question of whether what Brown had observed had actually happened or whether it was only a dream.

Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?

Hawthorne seems to want to be saying that people all have dark sides to their natures. Yet he equivocates. He says it, but he doesn't say it. It is the equivocation I dislike. If the author doesn't know the truth about his own story--who does? Is he afraid to say what he believes?

Guy de Maupassant wrote a similar story. It is titled in English "Was It A Dream." The narrator tells how one night he went to visit the grave of his paramour who had recently died. While he is at the cemetery he sees all the graves open up and the ghosts of the dead emerge in order to change the epitaphs on their tombstones. All of them erase the flattering inscriptions and write the truth in luminous letters. According to the narrator:

And I saw that all had been the tormentors of their neighbors--malicious, dishonest, hypocrites, liars, rogues, calumniators, envious; that they had stolen, deceived, performed every disgraceful, every abominable action, these good fathers, these faithful wives, these devoted sons, these chaste daughters, these honest tradesmen, these men and women who were called irreproachable.

Finally the narrator sees the ghost of the girl he is mourning. She changes the inscription on her tombstone from "She loved, was loved, and died" to the honest truth:

Having gone out in the rain one day, in order to deceive her lover, she caught cold and died.

Maupassant's story is very effective, but, like Hawthorne, he equivocates by raising the possibility that the whole incident may have only been a dream. This is why the story is titled "Was It a Dream?"

Maupassant's story is so similar to Hawthorne's--especially in the way each protagonist makes a shocking discovery about his loved one--that we might wonder whether Maupassant borrowed his idea from "Young Goodman Brown." Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 and died in 1864. Guy de Maupassant was born in 1850 and died in 1893. He would have been about fourteen when Hawthorne died.