Psychological Obstacles In Gothic Literature

The Psychological Obstacles in Gothic Literature and life

Gothic literature is just not a bunch of stories about ghosts and spirts, they are about the deep problems in everyone’s life. The works of Edgar Allen Poe are the best example of this. Poe’s stories talk about death, psychological issues, and morbid examples of pain. Two of Poe’s more famous works include The Raven and the Black Cat more examples of this are in the book Miss. Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children where the author Ransom Riggs the main character is faced with mental disabilities and the struggle of learning the bleak history of his family. Authors of gothic literature depict the somewhat strange and psychotic lives of disturbed people to address the real issues

Discusses the insanity of mentally complex people. The narrator of the story is a psychopath who is not shaken by the murder of all of his pets along with putting an axe in his wife’s head. He is constantly fighting with his own mind for what is normal and what is the projection of his imagination. After the hanging of his old cat he is paranoid by “the fury of a demon instantly possessed me (him)” (Poe). His mind is constantly being influenced by ‘evil thoughts (that) became my sole intimates” while he was possessed to murder his wife over a cat. This story illustrates the Paranoid Personality Disorder that affects many people. When someone has paranoid personality disorder they are suspicious of others and their motives that they interpret as either violent or

Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children the main character, Jacob, is disturbed by the recent events of his grandfather being murdered by a monster that is unseen by the rest of the world. Jacob is burdened by his nightmares that “plagued (him) by wake-up-screaming nightmares so bad that I had to wear a mouth guard to keep from grinding my teeth into nubs as I slept. I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing it- that tentacle-mouth horror in the woods... “(Riggs 39). In the book Jacob’s medical condition is described as an “acute stress disorder” (Riggs 57) although his actions are anything other than acute; Jacob is constantly stressing about his grandfather’s death and his previous life living with the peculiar children. An acute stress disorder is a mental shock that comes along with a traumatizing event in someone’s life. This disorder affects millions of people and that have to live with the repercussions that come along with this illness. Riggs tells this story through the extreme backstory of a fractured life of the Abraham Portman, Jacob’s grandfather, and how Jacob comes to terms with the information he deals