Examples Of Dark Romanticism

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Dark Romanticism would never be the subgenre, or, daring greatly, I would call it even a concept, it has been since the turn of the 19th century. The cornerstone of its development lays within the landmark literary works by three Goliaths of American Literature: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Despite how unpeopled that niche or art might be, not a single merit can be taken from it. The recipe for making a Dark Romantic type of literature is as simple as it seems: firstly, fill a hollowed basin of one 's ill imagination with gloomy thoughts, mingle them very well, add some religion to it for a better taste, then bake this fiendish dough in a blaze of psychological games played with one 's sick mind and at length sprinkle …show more content…

The most important symbol is the forest in the direction of which young Goodman Brown is heading. Obscure and mysterious, it is associated with hell, and indeed, the guide on the man 's itinerary through the woods is Devil himself, looking like Goodman 's ancestors and pretending to be his friend. The forest is opposed to the village, where the man 's wife, Faith (a symbolic name, as well, but the meaning is on the surface, there is nothing to explain), is waiting for him. She fails persuading him to give up the upcoming venture, which the young man uptakes only out of curiosity, according to Hawthorne. In the fiendish woods the Devil approaches to young Goodman Brown and succeeds in tempting him to keep up with the journey. The Devil 's staff looks very much alike to a snake, which makes the whole scene look like a Biblical one, when the serpent manages to make Eva taste the forbidden fruit. The blaze on a clearing stand for the hellfire and is opposed to the water used during the baptism procedure. Finally, Faith 's pink ribbons are the most flabbergasting as a symbol, but seem to be hard to notice when reading. It turned out that colour pink means purity in Dark Romanticism. The whole story is hemmed in by this tiny detail, so I assumed that young Goodman Brown 's journey to the powwow is simply a fiction, his dark fantasy. However, Hawthorne was not so merciful to grant his readers with any clues, thus sentencing them to bewilderment once and for