The Ghastliness Of Young Men

The article on the fantasy within the novella reveals the debate of the governess’s mental state during her time with the children. The debacle that can be depicted within the work can be surrounded through the idea that her fantasies represent the point in which she is at her most anxious. When her anxiety reaches a certain peak, the ghost then appears. This can especially be seen just before the first sighting, when she says, “I was giving pleasure-if he ever thought of it! - to the person to whose pressure I had yielded” (38). The pressure she is experiencing allows her mental state to bring out the fantasy aspect of the apparition. Using Zacharias’s article, the audience can see the fantasy is a mechanism that is used by the governess and

Many interesting stories were told in the Eighteen-forties. Among many, there are “The Birth-Mark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe. In spite of the fact that these two stories are unique diverse and in contents and background, interestingly, there are some similarities between the two stories. This essay will be explaining some differences of these two stories as well as the similarities of the two stories. This essay will first explain the similarity of how the main characters was depicted and the effect it has on the readers. Secondly, this essay will demonstrate the difference between how the authors give descriptions. Last, this essay will illustrate the authors’ writing style in these two particular stories and how their style made the stories more interesting.

Within the two works of literature, “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and Miss Peregrine’s home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs, the authors ingrain the gothic element of mystery into the story. Within Riggs’s novel the protagonist, Jacob finds his grandfather in the woods and he has immense

Just as in Poe’s, this story places significance upon the appearance of the house and its surroundings. The Dorsets host parties for each generation of children in their neighborhood. Enhancing further the evidence of gothic style found in Taylor’s story, the parents’ curiosity is overcome by a feeling of horror concerning the types of events that unfold during those parties. The parties also act as points of isolation for the children and the Dorsets. Except for the people who attend the party, no one knew the explanation or the necessity for the annual event. The presence of curiosity and secrecy help to support the gothic basis for this story.

Within the novel characters act in selfish and unsympathetic manner in order to perceive a good reputation towards others. Reverend Parris stumbled across his daughter Betty and the other girls dancing in the woods conjuring the devil. Betty faints when Parris sees them,

The narrator goes to a man’s house he knows little of and stays with him while he is sick. This situation strike most people as abnormal, but the narrator proceeds to go anyways. Also Roderick’s sister, Madeline, has an unknown sensory illness with the same symptoms as her brother. Later and on she is found to be dead and Roderick and the narrator bury her in a tomb inside the house. The situation is very odd, for one why would a person bury someone in a house, with a strange man he has not seen in years.

Henry Summersett’s Mad Man of the Mountain, uses gothic elements to engage and entertain the audience. Gothic style literature thrives on characteristics such as: “emphasis on portraying the terrifying,” as well as “to deploy perfect techniques of literary suspense” (Punter 1). Roncorone’s descent into madness exhibits all these elements to keep the reader on the edge of their seat, wanting more. The suspense and melancholy settings will inflict fear in the audience, causing a rush for the reader. It not only exhilarates the reader but, it gives them a distraction from their life and stimulates their imagination.

Edgar Allan Poe was a famous writer from the 19th century whose works ranged drastically. Some of his stories were of love such as “Eleonora”, or detective cases like that of “The Purloined Letter”, but what really stood out the most was his tales of supernatural events, insanity, retribution, and death. Poe’s horror stories fascinated the people of the 19th century and readers today with their gruesome and grotesque scenes such as cats being hanged, humans being buried alive, and corpses being mutilated. His tales of psychological darkness and insanity will be analyzed to fully understand the fascination invoked by them, to understand Poe’s maniacal characters, and whether these characters were truly wicked or if society forced them to this point.

Ghosts, the devil, and big scary monsters keep us up at night. But, there are many other gothic elements that contribute to the creation of gothic literature. Ms. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs contains a profuse amount of gothic elements, many of which are found in older gothic short stories. Some that share these elements are “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” which has characters who have a fascination with the past, “A Rose for Emily” which has mystery surrounding a certain place, and “The Masque of Red Death” which the plot is based on the bloody deaths of people.

As we continue to read this novella we must notice the governess’ wild and unnecessary use of elaborate adjectives to describe the simplest of things. Her style of writing in itself is quite romantic and poetic, full of metaphors and oxymorons. However sometimes her choice of words is so prompting we must take a closer look into perhaps a double or triple meaning. When she first sights the ghost of Peter Quint on top of the house she is able to describe his position with amazing precision in note of the fact she was some distance from him and her sighting was quite brief. She comments “he stood at an angle, tall and erect… he fixed me with a hard gaze” and when yet again she confides in Mrs Grouse she gives a very elaborate description commenting on his “tight red curls, pale face, long in shape, small tiny whickers, darker arched eyebrows and the fact that he had no hat”. The governess even uses phrases such as “the intercourse of our conversation added to the intensity of our meeting” in description of everyday things such as normal conversation. The governess certainly has deeper meaning behind most of her words.

Poe’s descriptive writing highlights the narrator’s developing suspicions, the intuition in action, and eventually, the source of his instincts coming to light. Poe describes a nearly tangible scene of a “gloomy” and “tempest[ous]” environment that easily spawns fear in the narrator’s mind (Poe 320). The author’s vivid depiction of the physical surroundings of the narrator clarifies his thought process and the conditions leading to his fear. The narrator infers that something was wrong from the ambience of what he could see around him. Subsequently, Poe communicates the speaker’s active portrayal of the man “uplift[ing himself] upon the pillows” in a sudden and fearful fit, followed by his “pacing rapidly to and fro” nervously (Poe 320). Poe’s precise description is rooted in his acquaintance with this feeling of inexplicable fear, a characteristic shared with even one

At first, the erratic, ambiguous, and disorientating narrative style of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ seems to lack consistent symbolism, and can be understood as a convention of the gothic genre. Macabre texts often employ unreliable narrators to convey readers down circuitous paths littered with false steps and red herrings, in order to postpone, and perhaps even prevent, arrival at singular interpretations of stories. In ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, the narrator suddenly and ambiguously reveals facts about the house and its inhabitants, and couches his observations in ornate and turgid language. These features seem superfluous, but force readers to collude in the mysterious, entertaining and infinite game of engineered interpretation that the gothic genre revels in. Nevertheless, a second reading of the text reveals uncanny similarities between the narrator and Roderick– both men ultimately share a belief in “the sentience of all vegetable things” (185), possess the power to distort the distinction between art and reality, and suffer from “a morbid acuteness of the senses” (181). This suggests that the malady plaguing the surviving branches of the Usher family has infected the narrator. Therefore, the perplexing, and oftentimes infuriating narrative style of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ reflects both authorial manipulation essential to create a suspenseful gothic tale, and also unconscious manipulation by the mentally disturbed narrator (itself a gothic

A quintessential example of a Gothic work filled with vivid imagery, haunting undertones, and complex tropes, Edgar Allen Poe grafts various ideas and thematic elements to examine how and why human beings devolve into mental derangement and illness. The preternatural, psychological, and natural discourses are covertly in use and offer a space for the figure of the vampire to function as a didactic motif throughout the story. The protagonist Roderick and his twin sister Madeline, who exhibit the characteristics commonly associate with literary vampires, suffer from strange maladies due to the incest that had taken place throughout their family history (Poe). The vampire as a threading trope in this story functions as a corollary to humans in

“The Fall of the House of Usher (1939)”, arguably Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous short story, is a tale centered around the mysterious House of Usher and its equally indiscernible inhabitants. These subjects are plagued with physical and mental degradation – the Usher siblings suffer from various abnormal ailments and unexplained fears, while the house itself seems to be tethering on the edge of collapse. The gothic elements in the story are distributed generously, and the plot is increasingly ridden with the supernatural as it progresses.

He himself had declared it to be a ‘romantic’ genre along with gothic interests and it being a carrier of Puritan History of England. For the obvious reasons this novel deals with issues concerning the times of mid-1850 wherein Hawthorne has juxtaposed “poverty and riches”, “aristocracy and democracy”, “youth with age”, “greed with unselfishness”, “complex with simple”, “appearance with reality”, “pride with humbleness”, “the isolated with un-isolated” (Dillingham, 59) all these parallels are supported by detailed characterizations of almost all main characters in the text. Hawthorne has provisioned and facilitated his characters with an independent backbone with which they support his themes and carry them on their own shoulders. The text in its romantic narrative fashion has been well-crafted to involve various themes which Nathaniel Hawthorne wished to include in this 1851 published Gothic work. It will not be incorrect to put forth the view that Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables is a representative of the era and society of that time. He has accurately projected the concerned subjects of that time and how they used to affect the humans of that period. The juxtapositions too are echoes of the society and mirror the basics of whatever contrived into being the fundamentals of that society. Therefore, the themes of this text are majorly colored by the real world of that period and the