Similarities Between The Devil And Tom Walker And The Fall Of The House Of Usher

In gothic literature, such as “The Devil & Tom Walker” by Washington Irving and “The Fall of The House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, certain elements are used to create some sort of effect on the reader. No matter what the author may be writing about when creating gothic literature, they will use things such as the supernatural, women being in distress, mystery, tension, personification, and/or suspense with the intent to scare the reader. In these two writings, the suspense is made clear, everything being written about prior to the main point is to build up to the situation. In “The Fall of The House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, there are many moments where the narrator describes things, such as the house, or Rodrick Usher, to create a sense

“The now ghastly pallo of the skin, and the now miraculous luster of the eye, above all things started and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheaded, and as, in its wild gosamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.” By saying all of this, the narrator is implying that there has been a drastic change in Rodrick Usher, and he looks incredibly worse than he previously did. In “The Devil & Tom Walker”, the same kind of strategy is used. Whenever Tom was walking through a swamp to get to his neighborhood quicker, he describes the way it looks. “One day that Tom Walker had been to a distant part of the neighborhood, he took what he considered a shortcut homeward, through the swamp. Like most short-cuts, it was an ill-chosen route. The swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high, which made it dark at noonday, and a retreat for all the owls of the neighborhood. It was full of pits and quagmires, partly

In “The Fall of The House of Usher”, by Edgar Allan Poe, it is made clear by the near end of the story that Usher accidentally buried his sister alive. In paragraph 47, the narrator quotes, “As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust– but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emancipated frame.” This quote explains what the narrator saw whenever Rodrick's sister, Madeline Usher, made it known that she was in fact, not dead. She had been buried alive and had blood on her white clothes, which showed that she had been desperately trying to get out of the coffin she had been placed into. In “The Devil & Tom Walker”, Tom and his wife get into a bit of a disagreement about the deal he had been presented with. His wife wanted him to make the deal, but he did not want to please her, so he decided against it. This made his wife upset, and she traveled into the forest to go find the mysterious man. Hours later, Tom starts getting worried and travels into the woods to look for his wife. He does not find her, and instead, he finds her apron, strung