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American gothic Literature

Part 1: American gothic Literature

American gothic refers to texts or films with a sense of fear that the reader risks

inheriting over time as they continue to engage with the material. The audience also feels

enclosed in space when engaging with gothic material. The origin of the feeling is supernatural

and mysterious occurrences as they happen. Gothic literature has some dark past to bring about

the aspect of claustrophobia. Also, gothic texts are filled with a touch of romance. Horror

literature, on the other hand, is designed to induce feelings of horror to the audience by scaring,

frightening, and disgusting them. While some gothic stories may contain fear, it does not always

have to be the case, but a horror piece must contain elements of fear which marks the significant

differences between the two genres. Gothic elements that will be addressed in this piece include

horrific scenes, supernatural, extraordinary, and macabre events which create the atmosphere of

suspense and mystery as the main characteristics of American Gothic Literature.

In the story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find; O'Connor explored the self-certainty that

characterizes man that makes him arrogant (O'Connor 14). The horrifying part of the story is the

massacre that The misfit conducts which leads to the death of the entire family and the

description of the graveyard as that which was gapped like an open mouth sends fear to the

reader and arouses suspense as death is about to occur (O'Connor 208). The story is typical of the

Sothern Gothic Genre because it is full of irony. From the title, the reader might be expecting a
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good man to be found by the end of the story, but no good man is found throughout the story.

Also, the start of the story is marked with predictions of a good day ahead such as naming the

day as a good one for driving yet in the end, people die, and it is a sad day indeed.

Spunk contains supernatural elements, which is part of the Gothic Literature. When

Spunk kills Joe, he sees a black cat and what comes to his mind is that the panther is Joe seeking

for revenge (Hurston and Brodsky 3). The mystery is much evident in the story when Spunk is

about to marry Joe's wife, he battles with his conscience and starts to imagine things. Spunk's

death is also mysterious because he falls off from a log to the saw which injures him fatally

causing his death. As he is about to die, he accuses Joe, who had long died of having pushed and

killed him for revenge. Such is not bound to happen when death occurs in the real world. The

theme of death makes the story a gothic piece because the deaths occur in terrifying means.

Sweat is full of suspense, another element of Gothic Literature. In page 3, a description

sends fear to the reader when Hurston states, "Just then something long, round, limp and black

fell upon her shoulders and slithered to the floor beside her." Such a description leaves one

wondering what is about to happen between Sykes and Delia. Another instance of suspense is

when the narrator says, "The rattling ceased for a moment as he stood paralyzed. He waited; it

seemed that the snake waited also. Also, the use of snakes in the story is an element of gothic

Literature because generally, snakes arouse fear in many people.

In The Fall of the House of Usher, the description of the house is dull and scary. The

surroundings are dark, shadowy, and black. The narrator terms are as a “mansion of gloom”.

Gloom forms an element of gothic pieces. Additionally, mystery forms a larger portion of the

story through the characters given. For example, Madeline suffers from an infection that is

characterized by "gradual wasting away of a person." Furthermore, the symptoms of the illnesses
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are like those of death. Perhaps the most horrifying scene of the story is when Madeline is buried

prematurely and emerges from the grave approaching Roderick. Also, based on how the home is

isolated, it is disturbing that the family does not get to interact with the rest of the world (Poe).

Part 2: The Role of Madness in American Gothic Literature

Madness exists in the minds of people and is intangible. It is due to this aspect that

madness ends up terrifying people who suffer from it and those around them. In Gothic

Literature, madness has a place of bringing about mysterious concepts of the issues at hand.

Madness is irrational; thus understanding it is quite impossible.

In The Yellow Wallpaper madness convinces the unnamed woman that she is free and

that there are other women in the yellow wallpaper that are confined in there. It is also due to her

madness that she sees things that are not there, such as people creeping outside which her

husband tries to correct. Her irrational thinking makes it difficult for those around her to

understand her. It is the reason why her husband hurts her without his knowledge. It forms the

mystery of Gothic tales they are incomprehensible. The story is mostly narrated by the mad

woman, and her description of the house with which that is supposed to inhibit for the summer

makes the atmosphere tensed. For instance, she says that there is something "queer" about the

ancestral hall, and this opens up the mind of the reader to something unusual about the place. In

essence, the imaginations of the mad woman make the reader imagine that the house is haunted.

The Haunting of Hill House is a modern version of American Gothic Literature. In the

film, dark colors are used for the theme, which is a significant element of gothic pieces.

Additionally, the theme of fear versus insanity dominates the film. Eleanor is a victim of the

haunted house, due to its dull aesthetics; it slowly draws her into insanity. Insanity in the film is

used to promote the Gothic elements whereby the characters are trapped in the haunted house
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and lead to their psychological demise. Eleanor is the most affected character who had initially

found a family in with the rest of the people in the house only to scare them at night and make

friends with the pirates in the house. After learning the history of the house, the family learns

that they have been isolated from the rest of the world and turning back from the reality would be

close to impossible. Therefore, madness plays an eye-opening role whereby human beings find

themselves in compromising situations that require some different form of thinking to save them

(Jackson).

As with the initial definition of madness, it is incomprehensible, and its cause is not

easily understood. The aspect of madness is well represented in The Shinning film. The main

character becomes mad, and the leading cause of the situation is unknown. Thus the statement "I

became mad became insane, with the long intervals of horrible sanity”. Just like in the Haunting

of Hill House, the character finds some comfort in the mystery of life that is experienced with

one not being in their normal state. The Shinning also shows that there is a dark aspect of the

character that becomes mad, and it is what the environment takes advantage. For instance, Jack

claims that a ghost let him out of the closet which hypothetically cannot happen. Such an

occasion makes the viewer question his mental state even before he came to the hotel.

Agreeably, madness in Gothic Literature is used to reveal that every other person has some bit of

incomprehensibility, and only the suitable environment can bring that out (Kubrick).

Finally, madness in Gothic Literature is used to show the difference between

imaginations and reality to show human nature. For instance, Emily in A Rose for Emily cannot

take the fact that her father is dead, and this is how readers get to know that she is mad. Emily

also isolates herself, and nobody visits her, which creates the suspense of what takes place in

such isolation. When Emily finally dies, and her door is broken to know what she had been
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hiding, a skeleton is found with which she had been sleeping. Like other pieces, madness in the

piece shows how human beings seek happiness in weird places that others view as abnormal.

Therefore, normal and madness remains relative to those surrounding a person. In addition to

the use of madness to bring out gothic elements in the piece, the author engages other elements

such as death, decay, and mystery to bring out the gothic aspects.
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Works Cited

Faulkner, William, John Carradine, and Anjelica Huston. A rose for Emily. Paderborn, De:

Verlag F. Schöningh, 1958.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The yellow wallpaper. Project Gutenberg, 1999.

Hurston, Zora Neale, and Françoise Brodsky. Spunk. Zulma, 1993.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Sweat. Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Jackson, Shirley. The haunting of hill house. Penguin, 2013.

Kubrick, Stanley. "The Shining ." YouTube, 12 Jan. 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?

v=5Cb3ik6zP2I. Accessed 7 June 2019.

O'connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find: And Other Stories. Houghton Mifflin

Harcourt, 1955.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The fall of the house of usher. Langworthy & Swift, 1903.