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The Devil And Tom Poe Gothic Elements

Decent Essays

Effective Gothic Elements Gothic literature is a style of writing dating back to 1764, some of the most important elements of this writing style are of an eerie setting and mental decay, stories that made great use of these elements are: “The Raven”, “Black Cat”, “The House of Usher”, and “The Devil and Tom Walker”. The authors use the gothic element of eerie setting so that they can enhance the mood of the story and of mental decay to highlight what the conflict in the characters’ lives is causing. In Poe’s “The Raven”, Poe’s “The Black Cat”, and Irving’s “The Devil and Tom Walker”, there is a heavy focus on the element of mental decay; this gothic element is used in these stories to accentuate what is happening in these characters’ lives and the toll it takes on them mentally. For example, in “The Raven” the man is dwelling on the past with a constant feeling of “Sorrow for the lost Lenore” (Poe 426). Whom is presumably his lamented wife. These thoughts drove him to insanity, causing him to start hearing a raven constantly mocking him with “croaking (of) ‘Nevermore’” (Poe 439). On the other side of the spectrum, in “The Devil and Tom Walker”, Tom Walker’s wife was not only very alive, but instead of being described as a “rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore” (Poe 436) she is depicted as “tall termagant, fierce of temper, loud of tongue and strong of arm” (Irving 325), additionally, “his face sometimes showed signs that their conflicts were not confined to words” (Irving 325). Tom Walking was described to be just as atrocious as his wife; although he has not always been that way, but over the years, Tom Walker’s home conditions were so terrible “he didn’t even fear the devil” (Irving 325). Coming back to the concept of obsession with a dead entity, there is “Black Cat”, in this gothic masterpiece, the narrator “one morning, in cold blood, slipped a noose about [his cat’s] neck and hung it to the limb of a tree” (Poe 2) and he did this for no other reason than to fulfill his own “Spirit of perverseness” (Poe 2) to commit such a taboo act. In doing so he became obsessed with the cat, when he went back to the ruins of his house once engulfed by flames, he found that on the one standing wall was

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