Brown sees the initiation of a new "soul" into the devil's dark group, and this symbolizes the disintegration of Brown's own soul. He may not have "danced with the devil" in the forest, but the devil has still corrupted his soul. Another critic notes, "The devil, in the form of doubt and duplicitous thoughts, has done his work within the heart and soul of Goodman Brown, even if the physical details of the story are merely a reverie. Hawthorne removes the mask of piety from his characters to show that the real devil is the one lurking within each individual" (Maus 76). Indeed, Brown allows the devil to take over his life and ruin it just as effectively as if he had signed over his soul and received something in return. Hawthorne writes, "A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become,...
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