I think the central preoccupation is what we do when we discover that people are not perfect, that they may not live up to our expectations of them. We actually do not know what happened in the woods, and are left to suspect that nothing may have happened and that it might have been a dream. The fact that we do know is that the Brown who leaves the woods can no longer look at his townsfolks with the same acceptance as he once did; in fact, he becomes isolated from his wife, Faith, and his faith in the goodness of the townfolk, and this leads him to live a miserable life and die an unhappy man.
Stated briefly, Hawthorne's central preoccupation is with accepting the ambiguity that is part of life; there is good and bad in everyone and everything and we have to accept it or be as miserable as Brown.
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