Can it be viewed as an allegory?

You can view it as an allegory because religious faith may
be viewed as both constructive and destructive, and therefore the allegorical journey
suggests the moral laxness and ambiguity into which people sometimes fall. The lesser
characters belong both to Brown’s journey into evil and also to his later life. Thus
Deacon Gookin and Goody Cloyse meet Brown on the street as he returns to Salem
(paragraph 70), and immediately they embody the theme of Brown’s hatred of hypocrisy. At
this point the narrator presents these characters as virtuous, however, and in this way
Hawthorne emphasizes Brown’s distorted vision. Ironically—and irony of situation is a
major aspect of this story—Brown becomes evil while pursuing good and what he supposed
to be godliness. For these reasons together with a number of others, the forest journey
justifies the claim that it is allegorical.