Elizabeth Bowden's The Demon Lover

One night the narrator encounters a red-haired girl standing in the snow without any shoes on, in just a bathrobe. She is clearly distraught and claims that "He doesn't love anyone…his ex-wife, or the one before that…and he doesn't love me" (11). The narrator takes her to the dean's house and thinks that "she is beautiful and she was someone's red-haired daughter, standing in a quadrangle how many miles from home weeping" (10). The girl reminds the narrator of the daughter he once had. Evidence of this when the narrator thinks, "I thought of her as someone's child, which made me think of ours, of course" (21). He suspects that the girl is having an affair with his professor after noticing that she shows up at the professors office and the professor calls her his "advisee" with a sly grin. After witnessing this he calls in

Accused witches were forced to admit to various practices believed to be witchcraft. Details from the French Court of Rieux and the insanity that ensued are jaw dropping by today’s standards. Suzanne Gaudry’s judgement confession was no different, being forced and tortured into confessions including having given herself to the devil, renouncement of God, lent and Baptism. Moreover, Gaudry was also forced to confess that she had cohabited with the devil as well received the devil’s mark on her shoulder and being at dances. Of note however, the judgement confession seems to acknowledge Gaudry having technically only confessed to having had killed by poison, Philip Coine’s horse. Nevertheless, Gaudry’s confession was made

Demon Copperhead By Barbra Kingsolver is about the life of a troubled child named Damon, although he is more commonly known as Demon Copperhead, the book is set in Appalachia, which further explains his name. The book follows Demon through all the trials and tribulations he faces, like foster care, drug abuse, and every friendship and relationship. Demon becomes “haunted” by the things he has experienced, Kingsolver highlights this by the craft moves she expresses in her writing. The circle Demon gets sucked into with the relationships he is in, is one craft move that Kingsolver expresses in her writing. Barbra Kingsovler creates Dori, Demon’s girlfriend.

Imagine living in a city where hundreds of people go missing in just six months. Then, we find out that one person is suspected of killing over 200 people. This serial killer was Herman Webster Mudgett, common alias H. H. Holmes. At the Chicago World’s Fair, when the head architect, Daniel Hudson Burnham, attracted thousands of people to Chicago, hundreds of people went missing and nobody noticed. However, through historical records, letters, and documents, we know that Burnham’s intentions were good. In Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, Holmes and Burnham were polar opposites brought together by the Chicago World's Fair. Holmes represented evil while Burnham represented good. However, they did have two things in common, their negative perspective about women and their need for riches.

Carol Karlsen 's "The Devil in the Shape of a Woman” was written to provide the reader with an understanding of the role of the “witch” in colonial New England. During the early colonial period, pilgrims lived in a male-dominated society and the classical witch hunts were conducted in an attempt to maintain this societal structure. Since these hunts were placed under a religious guise, it was simple for these individuals to act as if they were maintaining the safety and justice of society. Karlsen explains that in many instances, women who were labelled as witches were often females that had managed to acquire great economic and social status and society. In fear of these women, the neighborhood targeted them and called them witches to weaken their power. Independent of guilt, women who were accused of witchcraft could not possibly recovered. If they claimed their innocence, they would be stoned or burned to death because the counsel would decide that they were not being truthful. If they admitted to their guilt, their place in society would be marred and they would be embarrassed for partaking in these evil acts. Through this violence, men have been able to maintain their place in Puritan society. In her book, Karlsen aims to provide the reader new insight into the witch trials, demonstrating the societal, rather than religious causes for this well-known historic tragedy.

Unexplainable singularities are inevitable. Society does not have the solution to every dilemma or anomaly that transpires. Undeniably, two fields of study that still has unidentified surfaces are the human psyche and supernatural activity. Scientists and researchers, regarding the psychology of the mind and supernatural happenstance, uncover new data and statistics every day. A psychological disorder can develop at any junction in a person’s life and encompass peculiar behavior in the way a person feels, thinks, and acts. In the novella, “The Queen of Spades” by Alexander Pushkin there are several key elements that provide the reader with enough data to formulate that the main character’s mental stability triggers the manifestation of the late Countess. Conversely, Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, “The Shining,” demonstrates strong indications of the supernatural.

Many questions and concerns come about when her old husband Roger Chillingworth returns and wants revenge for the “baby daddy” who is Arthur Dimmesdale. The author’s use of The Scaffold as a symbol represents the theme

The critics from psychanalytic perspective claim that the existence of ghosts is the governess’s hysterical delusion. The ghost is the projection of governess's own sexual hysteria, which resulted from the conflict between native romantic impulses and idealistic innocence required by Victorian society (Renner). The inexperienced governess encounters the "handsome," "bold," young gentleman with "charming ways with women" (James, 4) and she

At first, the protagonist talks about the house that she and her husband were to stay at for a short while. She does not hesitate to describe what her first impressions were on the house because she states that it was rather strange building that had a haunted effect from looking at it. Not only this, but she also introduces her husband and physician, John. John is described as a person with “no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures” (Gilman 364). Not only is the narrator consciously observant of her circumstances, but she is able to think for herself and formulate logical claims. For example, Gilman writes about how the narrator is frequently seen as a schizophrenic, possessed, and absolutely insane individual whose mind only continues to deteriorate rather than an individual who understands the situation and can conscientiously create questions and thoughts about what she is experiencing. Greg Johnson writes, “Her experience should finally be viewed not as a catastrophe but as a terrifying, necessary stage in her

Then, the story flashes back to several months prior. This time Anna is in Nantucket trying to collect herself after leaving her husband. The back-story to their affair is given in the explanation of how they met and how they spend their time. The chronology is again thrown out as the storyline makes a jump forward to what was supposed to be their last meeting. Anna expects her lover to understand that she must go back to her secluded world and he must go back to his, but he doesn't seem to want that for them. Anna, since the start of this affair, has been indecisive and confused, but as the story moves she grows out of touch with herself and the rest of the world. She alarms herself when she looks in the mirror. "She returned to her husband and saw that another woman, a shadow woman had taken her place" (181). In contrast, the final even takes place in perfect sequential order, and as a consequence Anna leaves the event with a clearer understanding of herself and the way she relates to the rest of the world. When she leaves her lover for the final time, she is content and no longer confused, she even seems happy. "Suddenly, joyfully, she felt miraculously calm" (190). The confusing sequence of events is wrapped up nicely with the sequential order of the ending, which culminates with a clearer minded Anna.

In Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” reason is shown to be inadequate in explaining the apparitions that appear. The insufficiency of reason shrouds events in mystery, and instills fear and apprehension in both the characters and the audience. There are figures present in each story who represent logic and reason and firmly believe that supernatural elements do not exist, and their attempts to rationalize the anomalies that face them are futile. In Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” reason is insufficient to explain abnormal occurrences, as with Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love,” but while Usher and the narrator’s emotions in Poe’s story are relatively

She realises that she has been living with a stranger, since the whole marriage is a charade to fulfil the expectations of Victorian society.

Cathy Caruth’s “Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Trauma” claims that “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (Caruth 3). This idea of possession is seen in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ulalume” through the narrator’s enigmatic journey toward his dead lover’s grave. Throughout the poem, the narrator unknowingly works to overcome the trauma that is associated with “surviving” the event of his lover dying. The narrator is seemingly able to understand the true cause of his trauma through the use of the paradoxical duality of attraction/repulsion and familiar/unfamiliar contained in the “Uncanny” as described by Sigmund Freud in “The Uncanny.” The narrator uses the information gained from his trance-like walk to realize his

Charlotte Gilman, through the first person narrator, speaks to the reader of the stages of psychic disintegration by sharing the narrator's heightened perceptions: "That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't care--there is something strange about the house--I can feel it" (304). The conflicting

What happens when an individual descends into madness? This process is the focus of both Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain.” Both texts use many structural techniques and literary devices to draw attention to the central idea of insanity. This insanity takes the form of a deviation from what the reader would consider normal. In spite of the two authors’ drastically different writing styles, one element remains constant, the masterful use of punctuation.