Young Goodman Brown And The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow Analysis

Young Goodman Brown and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow were both written in and about a similar time period. Hawthorne and Irving were contemporaries, and Irving was an inspiration for the writers that followed in his footsteps during his lifetime, including Hawthorne, and the similarities between these two stories are numerous as a result. Both lived during a time where the hypocrisy of Puritan values was very prescient in the minds of philosophers and writers. America was still a young country, and therein, lacked a mythology of its own. The most necessary element to developing a mythology is to have a cultural antagonist. Goodman Brown and Sleepy Hollow are an attempt to establish an American mythos, and tap into the same historical roots: the hypocritical intolerance of Puritanism, and the innate ambivalence and selfishness that came alongside it.
Young Goodman Brown is the more obviously Puritan of the two pieces; the titular Goodman Brown lives in a Puritan community, and is a respected church-going man. His riding companion is the literal Devil, as opposed to Ichabod Crane’s more metaphorical one. The Devil brings him to a gathering of all of his followers, which consist …show more content…
Between his lust for Katrina and her family’s wealth and the fascination with the supernatural that secretly terrifies him, Brom Bones’ final prank on him causes him to flee town and leave behind everything he knows out of fear for what others will think of him. Those in town do not care about Ichabod Crane, or his sudden flight. They accept the mythologized version of what happened to him as fact, sell all of his possessions, and hire a new schoolmaster and carry on as if nothing had ever happened. They initially decided that they did not like him, and so feel nothing after his departure. Ichabod and the townsfolk both put their self-interests before anything