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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