Young Goodman Brown and The Fall of the House of Usher

While reading â€Å"Young Goodman Brown† by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I couldn’t help but feel a constant overwhelming sense of dread. The root of this could have come from the story’s dark setting deep within an â€Å"haunted forest† or from Brown’s mysterious â€Å"Devil†-esque companion. While I read, another story came into my mind; the story of the â€Å"Fall of the House of Usher† by Edgar Allan Poe. In Poe’s tale the same heart pounding emotion can be felt as he describes the reunion of two friends within â€Å"the House of Usher.† With the manors â€Å"eye-like windows† and â€Å"sorrowful impression,† Poe wastes no time in setting the Gothic mood. Through their distinct writing styles Hawthorne and Poe establish a common Gothic theme within their stories. In Hawthorne’s†¦show more content†¦When the narrator arrives he discovers his friend has changed significantly over the years and looks sickly. He is introduced his friend’s twin who suffers from catalepsy and through a turn of events Usher convinces his friend that his sister has died and the must entomb her under the house. The setting of this story takes place in the Usher manor a creepy place located in a â€Å"dreary tract of country.† When the narrator first sees the estate he feels â€Å"an insufferable gloom† because of the manors horrible state. With its â€Å"eye-like windows† and â€Å"decayed trees...I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the afterdream of the reveler upon opium.† Poe establishes a Gothic setting through the narrators point of view just like in â€Å"Young Goodman Brown.† The main characters in Poe’s short story are similar to those within â€Å"Young Goodman Brown.† The narrator is a man who believes that he is just visiting his friend from boyhood and trusts his friend Roderick Usher the same way Brown trusted the man he walked with. But Rodrick is mentally ill and as the narrator spends time with him he too goes through a period of mania. In the tale the terrified narrator says, â€Å"I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.† Roderick Usher who is described as,† a cadaverousness of complexion,† is theShow MoreRelatedYoung Goodman Brown Versus the Fall of the House of Usher Essay example1433 Words   |  6 PagesAngela Higgerson Dr. Lewis ENGL 2041 3 March 2010 In both, Nathanial Hawthorne’s â€Å"Young Goodman Brown† and Edgar Allen Poe’s â€Å"The Fall of the House of Usher† the protagonists, Young Goodman Brown and the narrator experience a journey into the subconscious. Both stories have an overlap that blurs the boundaries of reality and fantasy. It is truly the supernatural aspects of these two stories that force the protagonists and the reader to delve into the realm of the subconsciousRead More Comparing Fall of the House of Usher, Young Goodman Brown, and Rip Van Winkle1420 Words   |  6 PagesComparing Fall of the House of Usher, Young Goodman Brown, and Rip Van Winkle In the early eighteen hundreds, literature in the Americas started a revolution of style in upcoming authors. Authors started to look towards nature for symbolism and society as a source of sin. The underlined meaning in most of these stories was meant to leave the reader with a new perspective of their personal lives and society as a whole. Three stories that use this particular technique are Nathaniel Hawthornes YoungRead MoreAmerican Authors: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe1470 Words   |  6 Pageseighteen hundreds. Both were part of the romantic movement the two works that we are going to look at are considered part of the dark romanticism genre. The first work we are going to look at is â€Å"Young Goodman Brown† that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1835 and the other one is â€Å"The Fall of The House of Usher† that Edger Allen Poe wrote in 1839. The works depict the main character on a journey. They also share that the settings are dark or even that there is a persistent evil in the time frame. HaveRead MoreWashington Irvings The Legend Of The Sleepy Hollow And Rip Van Winkle And Young Goodman Walker And Edgar Allen Poe1557 Words   |  7 Pagesand Rip Van Winkle, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown are all Romantic literary writings. They all feature characters who have a psychotic element to them and claim supernatural events have occurred; it’s Ichabod in The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle and his daughter in Rip Van Winkle, the narrator and Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher, and Goodman Brown in Young Goodman Brown. Because of this similarity, these literaryRead MoreEssay on The Battling Psyche1676 Words   |  7 Pagesof the earliest and best known American writers that attempted to explain such a complex matter in their stories are Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe. Both of these authors use twisted fictional stories, s uch as â€Å"The Fall of the House of Usher† and â€Å"Young Goodman Brown† to try to explain the inner workings and struggles of the human psyche. These stories expose the psyche’s continuous battle between right and wrong, reality and illusion, and sanity and insanity, and look into things that affectRead MoreThe Fall Of The House Of Usher2041 Words   |  9 Pagestoday. One of Hawthorne’s most popular short stories include the writing of â€Å"Young Goodman Brown.† What makes Hawthorne so progressive in today’s literary world is the fact that he makes a smooth transition from symbolism to allegory in his writings. Edgar Allan Poe uses a more gothic style of writing that gives his science fiction literature unique character. One of Poe’s more popular stories is â€Å"The Fall of the House of Usher† in which he uses deep symbolism and imagery to tell the story. AlthoughRead MoreThemes In Romantic Literature796 Words   |   4 Pagesâ€Å"The Raven,† there is a man who is mourning the loss of his wife and then goes through a series of agonizing questions to a raven that flew into his house. Then, after many questions answered with â€Å"Nevermore,† the man becomes even more depressed of his dead wife and realises that he himself can’t escape death. Another story, â€Å"The Fall of the House of Usher,† has a man who was chronically depressed, often hiding from light and even the faintest of sound upset him. He was depressed due to his sister reachingRead MoreEdgar Allan Poe And Nathaniel Hawthorne1136 Words   |  5 Pagesshow you what your darkness is. With these two authors, you have a distinctive version of their unconsciousness that they both make their own. Starting with â€Å"The Fall of the House of Usher† by Edgar Allan Poe, you have the house itself being a mind of the unconsciousness Poe was creating. â€Å"I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayedRead MoreAmbiguity of American Gothic Fiction1765 Words   |  8 Pagesexternalized and metaphysical elements as opposed to the boundaries of American Gothic fiction in which were expressed by historical, internalized, racial and psychological characteristics. (Edwards, XVII) In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-tale heart and The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and in Charles Broken Brown’s Edgar Huntly expresse s a transformation of certain gothic conventions to an American setting which are the result of 19th century anxieties. ThisRead MoreNathaniel Hawthorne s Influence On American Literature And The Genre Of Romanticism Essay1472 Words   |  6 PagesHawthorne belonged â€Å"to a family whose ancestral roots were tied to Puritan history, with his family being among the first settlers of Massachusetts and having one of his relatives serve as a judge during the Salem witch trials† (370). Hawthorne, as a young boy, â€Å"had a particular interest in writings such as John Bunyan’s Puritan allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, and by his mid-teens he took interest in British novelists such as Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollet, William Godwin, and Sir Walter Scott† (370)