Why is Faith afraid at the beginning of Young Goodman Brown?I know she doesn't want him to leave because they have only been married for a short while,...

's
wife, Faith, has two very good reasons to fear her husband's absence during the night.

The couple are, as far as we know, good Puritans, even though Goodman Brown is about to
take a walk on the wild side and explore the dark side of the Puritan belief system. One of the
tenets of Puritanism is that Satan can and does appear in physical form in order to tempt the
righteous into sin. After all, the 1692 witch hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts, which culminated
in the execution of nineteen women and one man in 1693, was based largely on what is called
"spectral evidence"that is, the theory spirits of living people who have become
witches can cause harm to other villagers and livestock while their physical bodies go about
their normal life. More importantly, Puritans also believe that Satan can attack them in dreams
while they are sleeping, because their religious defenses are weakened during sleep.

When Faith implores Goodman Brown to postpone his walk in the forest until daylight,
she is responding to two fears. First, as any villager in seventeenth-century Massachusetts
would know, the forest is a very dangerous place, especially at night, because of Indians. Many
villages, even through the eighteenth century, were palisaded against potential Indian attacks,
and attacks on Puritan settlements occurred on a regular basis. Faith's plea is partially based
on her fear that Goodman Brown will become a victim of violence. Second, she understands her own
jeopardy if left alone:

pr'ythee, put off your journey
until sunrise, and sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and
such thoughts, that she's afeard of herself, sometimes. Pray, tarry with me this night, dear
husband, of all nights in the year!

Faith is articulating
her dread of being left alone at night because she knows she is susceptible to an attack by
Satan in the form of a dream that could turn her away from her Puritan belief system. Her danger
may also be enhanced because, as she alludes to "of all nights in the year," this
night might be All Hallow's Eve, a night when Satan has additional power to tempt a young
Puritan woman who is alone.