Young Goodman Brown

The traveler carries a staff with him while accompanying Brown on his journey through the woods. The staff assumes demonlike supernatural powers as it possesses the ability to help the traveler traverse the wilderness at fast speeds. The staff is described as “twisted,” and when Brown questions how he should meet the eye of the clergy each Sunday if he continues the journey, the traveler “burst[s] into a fit of irrepressible mirth, shaking himself so violently that his snake-like staff actually seemed to wriggle in sympathy” (4). Additionally, when the traveler touches Goody Cloyse with the staff, she immediately screams out “devil!”—suggesting (if not outright affirming) that the traveler is a manifestation of the devil.

The staff is brought to the reader’s attention early in the story because it immediately stands out to Brown. The narrator remarks that the traveler’s staff takes on a living quality of its own: “the only thing about him, that could be fixed upon as remarkable, was his staff, which bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought, that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent” (2). These serpentine qualities suggest the traveler is connected to something wicked.

The snake as a symbol of evil traces back to events in the Bible, when a snake tempted Eve to sin in the Garden of Eden. There is a parallel between the events in the Bible and the story of Goodman Brown. The biblical serpent tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, while the snake-like staff transports Brown and the traveler through the forest more quickly. In both cases, a symbolic snake is used to confirm and advance the curiosity of evildoing.