Romantics Period
During the 1800s there was a time period known as the romantics. When most people think about the romantics they often think about love and relationships, but that isn’t what the romantics period is about at all. The romantics period was full of dark literature and criticizing of people and ideas. This paper will look at different literature pieces including, The Devil and Tom Walker, Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment and Resistance to Civil Government and how all of these pieces display darkness or criticism.
One of the pieces of literature we look at during this chapter was The Devil and Tom Walker written by Washington Irving. This story gives great examples of critiques that happened during the romantics period. Tom Walker is the main character in this story who is married to a lady who is seen as somebody of abuse in both physical and verbal ways. In the story it reads, “Tom 's wife was a tall termagant, fierce of temper, loud of tongue, and strong of arm.” This is a great example of Irving’s criticism. His view of women are to be very harsh to their husbands and sometimes even
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Heidegger’s Experiment by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This is a story about a doctor who runs an experiment with a group of people to see how they react psychologically with water from “the fountain of youth.” But right before they take a drink from this magical fountain, they make a promise that they will not act the same as when they were young. After promising, they begin to drink the water and quickly they start to act young again. This story shows Hawthorne’s idea of darkness. In the mind of Hawthorne, many people will make promises but won’t stick to them or will go back on their word. This can be seen as a darkness in human nature. Many humans do go back on what they said previously or can’t keep a promise. A lot of literature written during this time period reflects ideas of darkness in human