And after a long ride, I am done with the thesis for Hawthorne and Poe. This has been thus far the most challenging reading yet, filled with so much symbolism it made it hard to decide what to write about. You can read about the different stories I read and studied here, here, here and here. For the thesis, read on.
Unlike most Romantics who looked to nature for answers, both Poe and Hawthorne looked inward at the human condition and decided there was no reason to be optimistic about humanity, thus they were dubbed ‘Dark Romantics’. Both felt that the human condition was inherently evil, as shown by the narrator in ‘Tell-tale heart’ and Rappaccini in ‘Rappaccini’s daughter. Even when the characters blamed something else for their actions, as in ‘Black Cat’, the authors convey that human nature in itself is fickle and cannot change, as in ‘Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment’.
Both authors also warn against the blind pursuit of passion – The painter’s wife wastes away while he is too engrossed in making a perfect likeness of her beauty in ‘Oval Portrait’, while the narrator in ‘Birthmark’ loses his wife trying to remove her birthmark through his passion – science.
In terms of style as well, both writers embrace the gothic style of storytelling. ‘The Raven’ and ‘Oval Portrait’ show Poe’s dependence on gothic styles to set up mystery, while ‘Artist of the Beautiful’ has touches of gothic setting to support an existential struggle. There is a lot of symbolism used by both authors to achieve exaggeration. While Hawthorne uses descriptive passages with complex sentence structures, Poe prefers formal diction with unusual and complicated syntax which is traditional in Romanticism.
Poe also seems to aim for a single effect – there is a single psychological effect or issue that the narrator displays, as in ‘Tell-Tale Heart’ or ‘Black Cat’, but Hawthorne’s stories do not possess this singleness. Stories such as ‘Rappaccini’s daughter end with ambiguity, marking the lack of tightness in its composition.
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