However, the opposite reaction occurs as Young Goodman Brown travels throughout the forest. After stumbling through the dark and fearfully criticizing the townsfolk he sees throughout his journey, he begins to break out into a nightmare driven psychosis. 
The pink ribbon, noted at the beginning of the story as “the pink ribbon in her cap” belonging to his wife, somehow arrived within the sinful forest. Including Faith’s pink ribbon out in the forest indicates her physical presence, or her participation within the forest’s dark ritual nature. 
As mentioned prior, Young Goodman Brown is posited as the faithless, wayward character of the story. 
When he views her ribbon, he understands her as being corruptible too, and morally hits his ‘breaking point.’ His “Faith is gone;” his pure wife too has given into sin, defying his expectations and implicitly forcing him to surrender his own  precarious piety upon this realization. Rhetorically, Hawthorne set this story up to be a reverse Adam and Eve scenario. He angelicizes Faith (the woman) as pious, and Goodman Brown (the man) as susceptible to temptation. However, when the reader finds Faith’s ribbon somewhere within the forest, Hawthorne reveals that Faith too has been corrupted by temptation, long before Goodman Brown considered entering the forest himself. If Faith never entered the forest, perhaps Goodman Brown may have escaped without his own religious piety taken -- but Goodman Brown’s realization that perfectly pure women do not exist leads him to fall.
The story’s final scenes lead Goodman Brown to a clearing among the trees, where he witnesses a ‘ritual’ of the town’s members, including his wife Faith. The ritual’s composure obviously implores a devilish nihilism about the world, with its participants uttering quotes such as “Evil is the nature of mankind”. 
Faith’s silence dehumanizes her character, increasing her potential for metaphor. Her presence manifests purely through Goodman Brown’s cries to deny the devil, for both of their purposes. Again, Goodman Brown projects his own devotion onto her in this scene. Faith acts as a reflective mirror, whose purposiveness derives from her ability to assist Goodman Brown in his own piety. Their tethered marriage is more contingent upon its ability to project piety and validate social norms than facilitate a human relationship.
Faith’s feminine prominence in the story overshadows other women characters, but mentions of women through “Young Goodman Brown” expand upon Hawthorne’s conception of women. 
Hawthorne’s inclusion of a matriarchal figure warning him of his religious crisis continues the theme of women as supposed protectors of male morality. In line with Romantic ideals of women as hopefully moral figures, Hawthorne invokes a protective feminine presence to discourage Goodman Brown from sin. 

Hawthorne’s dichotomous placement of these two figures warrants further analysis. He contrasts a holy female figure, his mother, with two elderly women, one explicitly associated with him in his youth. Through contrast, Hawthorne invites ambiguity to his dilineration of women. While a slight inclusion, the mother’s saving spiritual hand may be considered a concession to true purity within women, a reference to Mother Mary. Death may permit a sense of ‘true morality,’ through literal religious closeness according to Hawthorne. 
