Elements Of Gothic Literature

Authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Faulkner have presented gothic literature throughout their writing during the 18th and 19th centuries. Gothic literature is defined as a "distinct modern development in which the characteristic theme is the stranglehold of the past upon the present"(294 Drabble and Stringer).Therefore, to deliver this theme to their readers they used gothic elements to create a "dark" sensation especially in the area of setting. All three authors in their literature portray accursed or decaying settings that are associated to violence, poverty, and human behavior. It appears authors like Poe, Hawthorne, and Faulkner were drawn to this elements of Gothicism for what it revealed about human psychology …show more content…
darkness in his work. In “Young Goodman Brown” which is about a man named Goodman Brown that starts off by him saying goodbye to his wife saying he has to go somewhere for a day. Brown leaves with faith and full of hope that he then promises to himself that it will only be one night because his wife doesn’t deserve him to go dark. Therefore, he gets to a forest that very out of the ordinary events happen that make him return as another man. We can say he return home as a hopeless man. Hawthorne uses gothic elements all throughout the setting of the story to describe his experience in the forest. To start off he uses darkness and gloominess to lets us know the sensation he gets when his walking through a forest. “He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind it. It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveler knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and thick boughs overhead” (Hawthorne 1). He also uses the staff which symbolizes something evil because a witch has it. In addition, there’s a gothic element of supernatural manifestation when he find out that this lady he knew to be a good woman was really the witch with the staff. Hawthorne also …show more content…
One of the most talked about short stories he wrote is “A Rose for Emily". This story is full of gothic elements that make readers very intrigued about what the main characters real intentions are. To briefly explain the short story, it was about a woman named Emely who after her father’s dead starts to act like in a questionable way when it takes time for her to accept he father’s death. Also, in her attempt to everything around her (in her home) remain intact. By the end of the story we start to analyze her state of mind when it’s revealed she even killed her one and only love. And not only that but, shes been sleeping next to the dead body for quite some time. In this story the gothic elements used by Faulkner are grotesque, including a rather foreboding tone at the beginning when they let us know shes dead, as well as decay of herself and the setting of the story. Also, decomposition when both dead bodies presented in the story are kept from burial for some time. In the setting the author describes her house as if it was in a state of decay. Emely opposing to accept change maes the house look even older. In addition, even Emely herself is in a state of decay. Faulkner describes this when he says "a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony