Young Goodman Brown Essay Example for Free

Young Goodman Brown Essay The theme of change and transformation preoccupies the minds of writers through the centuries. They use a change as a technique in order to illustrate transformations of the characters. Both, Raymond Carver and Alice Walker turn to the theme of change in their works but they do it in a different way. Two stories, â€Å"Young Goodman Brown† by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Alice Walker’s â€Å"Everyday Use† approach the theme of change from different perspectives. Alice Walker depicts the way the notion of the hereditary is changed for different generations. She shows how young girl, who leaves her native place for a big city gradually changes and how her perception of her origin and hereditary changes accordingly. In this story two ideologies, presented by Dee and her mother, clash. The author depicts how traditional attitude to the family values and customs, represented by Dee’s mother, is opposed to Dee, who presents a new vision of the history, conditioned by the liberation movement. Dee’s mother does not change and represents the spirit of all generations, who stand behind her. She follows her path and can not accept new attitudes brought by Dee from the big city. Dee does not loose her ties with her native land and her hereditary when she leaves her parents’ house. She only gets new perception of them. Dee changes a lot and her attitudes changes accordingly. Visiting her home, she asks her mother to hang the quilt on the wall in order to manifest her attitude to the history of her people. Her attitude changes dramatically because she did not want to take the same quilt with her when she was leaving her home several years ago. Her mother does not want the changes to occur. She treats the quilt as an element for everyday use. As she states, â€Å"God knows I been saving `em for long enough with nobody using `em. I hope [Maggie] will put them to everyday use! † (Walker, 16). Despite we can see that the mother and her daughter have very different ideas about the ways the memories about their origins should be kept, we still can not reject the fact that they both care about this past. Dee has another vision and her vision reflects the spirit of the epoch and new attitudes brought by the changes in the mentality. Young Goodman Brown was written in the year 1835 by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The story brightly depicts the Puritan society of the seventeenth century. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s style is ambiguous; he doesn’t transmit his message directly. The most mysterious event in the story is Goodman Brown’s journey to the night wood. This journey completely transforms Brown’s personality because in the forest he meets with the dark side of his personality. The Black Mess in the dark forest points not only to the hypocrisy of the society and religious authorities but also to the dark part of the personality. It’s his own hidden dark side, which Goodman meets in the forest. Once the listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of towns-people of his own, men and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met at the communion table, and had seen others rioting at the tavern† (Hawthorne, 114). The author uses the Black Mess to show the part of personality people try to hide not only from others, but also from themselves. New knowledge, which Goodman Brown achieves in the forest will change his perception of himself and other people forever. The changes, which occur to Dee in the Walker’s story reflect her true attitude to the reality and most probably will last for a long time. Works Cited Walker, Alice, In Love and Trouble, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, inc, 1973. Shuffelton, Frank. â€Å"Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Revival Movement. † The American Transcendental Quarterly 44, 1979. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown, 1992 Walker, Alice. Everyday Use. Perrines Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. Comp. Thomas R. Arp. New York: Harcourt Brace College, 1994.