Humans are capable of a variety of emotions, ranging from saintly to pure evil. Society fosters the positive aspects because they are beneficial to our lives. Negative traits are feared due to their relationship as omens of bad fortune and so refuses to openly discuss them despite their ability to exert influence in our lives. Gothic writing, specifically with its emphasis on intense emotions like apprehension, horror, and terror, was the perfect medium used by authors such Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne to explore a fascination with human complexity to uncover the truth it reveals about ourselves.
Edgar Allan Poe openly explores the agony of grief, fear, and despair in the poem “The Raven”. A typical gothic setting, on a dark and bleak December midnight, complete with a dwindling fire, illustrates the desolation felt after losing a loved one. A lone raven enters to antagonize the man and engage the process of grieving. The prophet seems to confirm his worst fear, surely he will never see his Lenore again, thus intensifying his grief. As he accepts this truth, despair sets in as he loses all hope: “And my soul
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All young men, when tempted, will give in, at least a little, resulting in the loss of their innocence. In the story “Young Goodman Brown”, the ill nature of his evening visit to the woods is on full display. He fears the questioning that will subsequently follow and what that will reveal if the catechism teacher discovers his tryst in the woods: “Being a stranger to you, she might ask whom I was consorting with and whither I was going” (1072). The essence of this encounter embodies the rest of the story in that all who have given into temptation know the truth and live with secret guilt. Hawthorne shows us Goodman Brown’s transformational pivot point into sin. Had he listened to his Faith in the beginning, he would have avoided temptation and its