Background
The story is set during the Salem witch trials, at which Hawthorne's great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was a judge. According to American literature scholar James Mellow, Hawthorne was plagued by guilt by his ancestor's role, wrote the story to vindicate his grandfather by featuring two fictional victims of the witch trials who were witches and not innocent victims of the witch-hunt. It was also this ancestral guilt that inspired Hawthorne to change his family's name, adding a "w" in his early twenties, shortly after graduating from college.
In his writings Hawthorne questioned established thought—most specifically New England Puritanism and contemporary Transcendentalism. In "Young Goodman Brown", as with much of his other writing, he exposes ambiguity..
Read more about this topic: Young Goodman Brown
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“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
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—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)