Whereas Faith once represented perfection and the path to salvation, now Goodman Brown looks toward her, with the witches’ fire reflecting in her eyes, and sees only a “polluted wretch.” He looks up into the black sky and cries, "My Faith is gone!" The blissful newlywed bounding out from his happy home in the first scene has become an “unhappy husband,” tragically stripped of Faith and his faith.This area marks your first direct conflict with servants of your ultimate enemy, the King of Shadow.
When Goodman Brown sees his wife participating in the witches’ meeting in the woods, he simultaneously loses his Faith (his wife) and his faith (his religion). When he screams out for Faith after hearing her voice among the throng of heathens at the witches’ ceremony, a pink ribbon falls from the sky. When Goodman Brown sees Faith at the witches’ meeting, he realizes that the ribbons were merely a superficial outward symbol, not proof of actual piety. The pink ribbons that flow from Faith’s cap represent faith and purity Hawthorne refers to them five times throughout the story, each time at a pivotal moment when Goodman Brown is feeling lost or troubled the ribbons remind him of the purity of faith, but also of its shallowness. When Faith begs him not to leave her for the night, Goodman Brown wonders if Faith has lost faith in him he asks, wondering if she’s questioning his fidelity, “dost thou doubt me already, and we but three months married?” Faith remains a symbol of Goodman Brown’s religious faith throughout the story: when Goodman Brown first meets up with the devil, the devil accuses him of being late, which Goodman Brown explains by saying “Faith kept me back a while,” a play on words meant to refer literally to his wife Faith begging him not to leave, and figuratively to his religious faith, which could have stopped him from meeting up with the devil, but didn’t. Goodman Brown’s internal conflict is based on whether to “keep the faith.” At first the struggle is literal: his wife begs him to remain at home and not head off into the woods Goodman Brown’s decision to leave behind Faith becomes a metaphor for his epiphany about religion, which he similarly abandons at the end of the story. Goodman Brown’s wife, Faith, is the embodiment of faith and purity, even in her actual name. By the end of his journey into the woods, Goodman Brown learns that even the purest outward display of faith can mask underlying sin. Goodman Brown’s loss of innocence happens during a vivid nightmare in which he ventures into a dark forest and sees all of the people he had considered faithful in his life gathered around a fire at a witches’ conversion ceremony with the devil presiding from on high. “Young Goodman Brown” is the story of how a young “good” man named Goodman Brown loses his innocent belief in religious faith.
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