Dark Romanticism in "The Minister's Black Veil"

I preferred "The Minister's Black Veil" by Nathaniel Hawthorne much more than "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe. I believe the psychological aspect of the story and the way that it depicts Dark Romanticism is much more affective than the doom and gloom found in "The Pit and the Pendulum."

The main affect felt by "The Minister's Black Veil" was the way that humans are inherently evil by nature. Each one has all kinds of dark secrets and things they are ashamed of, which is what the pastor is trying to prove by wearing the black veil. His veil is used as a symbol of the evil and sins that separate people from one another, which is a characteristic of romanticism, specifically Dark Romanticism in that it talks about the evil tendencies of humans rather than goodness (Hawthorne).

Not only are humans naturally evil, but they are also prone to hiding their evil and closing it off from the rest of the world because they are ashamed. Most people are too afraid to do what the pastor did, which is showcase his sins and sadness to the world in the form of his veil. By doing this he took responsibility for his sins and the way they separate a person from the people around them if they are ignored and never addressed (Hawthorne).

The last thing I saw out of the story was that humans are naturally prone to judging each other rather than looking at their own faults, and they are scared by things that they do not want to address because they hit home way too closely. While yes, the pastor did wear his sins upon his face quite literally, the truth is that every person is just as guilty as he was. The people of the town knew him and his character, and they knew that he was a very good man, yet they chose to shut him out of their lives because he actually took responsibility for his sins and that scared them (Hawthorne).

The truth is we all have our own black veils. Whether they are deep dark secrets of things we have done it our past or simply evil thoughts we have entertained at times, we all possess them. The fact that we all possess them should teach us to be understanding of one another and the fact that we all have our faults. But instead of doing that we all choose to hide our own faults and point fingers at others in order to take t he attention away from ourselves. In this way we all suffer our own form of personal torture as the things that bother us slowly eat us up inside. If only we could all stop acting so high and mighty and admit that none of us are perfect, the world would be a much happier place. The fact that the pastor, one of the most holy men in that town, was the one able to step up and acknowledge that he is a sinner says a lot about our society. All of these dark truths that are revealed about society through this writing is a classic example of Dark Romanticism (Hawthorne).

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "The Minister's Black Veil." Glencoe Literature. Comp. Jeffrey Wilhelm. American Literature. Ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill. 2010. 280-289. Print.

Journal 24

I believe on a certain level every person wears a mask at some point in their lives. As humans we have an inborn desire to fit in and become like other people in order to be accepted. I believe a significant amount of this happens during the middle school years. When people are in middle school their hormones are just starting to act up and they are very confused about life in general. It is easy to become wrapped up, during these vulnerable years, in the things society would have you believe are important. When you are in middle school all you really want is a place where you truly belong.

When all you want is to belong, there is a high probability that you will change yourself in order to achieve that goal. People change themselves in all manners of ways in order to fit in with a particular group. Some change the way they talk, the way they treat others, or the way they dress. Sometimes these changes that people adopt for acceptance are valuable and important changes, but most times I believe they are harmful and destructive changes. Unless the person you are aspiring to become like is a truly good example, usually someone older and wiser than you, most likely you will find that their influence has a negative impact on your character. Because the truth is, if someone cannot accept you for who you are then they are not a good friend anyway.

Generally people begin to develop into the person that they will become as they go through high school. Most habits are formed in these years, which is why it is extremely important for one to create a solid foundation during these crucial years. Occasionally people still try to become something they are not after they have passed these years in order to fit in with a group at work or in one's neighborhood, but generally the time of pretending is grown out of by the time one reaches an age of maturity.

Dark Romanticism in The Pit and the Pendulum

There are just a few main, distinguishing characteristics of dark romanticism that I found repeated over and over when researching the topic. These are as follows: dark romanticists believe people are naturally prone to sin and evil, they believe the world is dark, decaying and mysterious, they believe that nature reveals truth about the world but that when nature reveals things about life they are mysterious and evil, and dark romanticists didn't ignore evil, but they acknowledged it and the horror of it. I also believe an aspect of dark romanticism is exploration of the darker side of the spiritual realm and the way that it clashes with our own in points that we can see on certain occasions. The belief in the evil and supernatural is very evident in some works of dark romanticists.

The Pit and the Pendulum, written by Edgar Allen Poe, a distinguished dark romanticist, is a clear example of many ideas of dark romanticism. The first place in which this is showcased is in the mood as the story opens. The feeling of the story is immediately set with the foreboding words of the first sentence: "I was sick, sick unto death, with that long agony, and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me." So already, as the story opens, the narrator has managed to settle an air of depression and hopelessness upon the scene. Later in the same paragraph the narrator describes his judges as though the very lips on their faces were some great symbol of evil and finality. Through these examples the author has illustrated the characteristic of the horror of evil(Poe).

The way the world is decaying and mysterious is illustrated when the narrator awakens in a dark, disgusting prison. Upon further exploration he deduces that he is in a circular prison with a deep pit in the center which it is intended for him to fall into. At one point rats enter his prison and attempt to eat his food. This disgusting filth and these vile living conditions show the decaying and mysterious nature of the world(Poe).

The prison the narrator is in is very inhuman in the way it punishes him. The pain inflicted upon him is both physical and mental. He is tormented both by the grotesqueness and unhygienic nature of the prison and the prospect of falling to his death or being sliced open by the scythe, physically, and he is tormented mentally by the constant, slow descent of the scythe and eventually the slow progress of the walls of the prison as they push him inwards towards the pit. The combination of these many torments, rather than a slow, quick death, prove that humans are naturally evil and prone to do bad things to one another(Poe).

The tale of the pit and the pendulum is both a horror story for the ages and a lasting example of the era of dark romanticism. As described above, the fundamental ideas of dark romanticism are all represented within the short story. It is truly a classic sample of the genre that is dark romanticism.

Works Cited

Poe, Edgar Allen. "The Pit and the Pendulum." Glencoe Literature. Comp. Jeffrey Wilhelm. American Literature. Ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill. 2010. 263-273. Print.

P. Pendleton Cook on "The Raven"

Personally I was just really annoyed by the author of the analysis I chose. I thought he was trying to make himself sound smart by using big, flowery words, and I thought that he was basically just a huge fan of Poe who tried to write this analysis as a form of hero worship towards Poe rather than as an objective and intellectual essay. He backed up his observations with points, but it still came off as annoying.


One particular quote I found annoying:

"Notwithstanding the extended publication of this remarkable poem, I will quote it almost entire—as the last means of justifying the praise I have bestowed upon it(Cooke)."

First of all, I do not think it is necessary to quote virtually the entire poem in order to justify your like of it. It is perfectly acceptable to take out certain excerpts that you think particularly demonstrate your point and end there. Secondly, I think it is kind of irritating when people automatically jump in and give their stunning reviews of something at the beginning of their analysis. Personally I just do not find this a very professional way of going about the matter. I would have been much more willing to accept the author's opinion if he had simply stated his point in his thesis and then went about proving his point. As it was I was basically annoyed from the first minute I started reading and that probably gave me a biased opinion towards his points in that I was more likely to disagree with his ideas.

I think the author read way too much into the poem. He even mentioned at one point that he thought the word napping was a particularly fantastic and life-altering word chosen in the first stanza. Personally I thought that this was a bit much. If Poe were around he would probably tell that guy it really was not that big of a deal, he just wanted to convey the idea that he was taking a nap. Sometimes I think that analyzers tend to get so wrapped up in what they are doing that they tend to see things that are not even really significant or there in the first place(Cooke).

The author goes on to use such words as "exquisite" and "phraseology", leaving you wondering if he really has any idea what he is talking about at all or if he just likes to sound smart to other people. There was a lot of fluff and talk but he did not really end up saying very much(Cooke).

The author even went on to quote such mysterious people as "Mr. Willis" and "Miss Barrett", two people to which he gave no credibility or reason in which to believe them except that they gave him their opinions on the subject and they were positive(Cooke).

I found myself constantly thinking "prove it" to the claims he made about how wonderful certain aspects of the poem were. To put it simply I was thoroughly annoyed.

Selected Bibliography
Cooke, P. Pendleton. "Edgar A. Poe," Southern Literary Messenger (January 1848). Reprinted in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966): pp. 21–23. Quoted as "Review of 'The Raven'" in Harold Bloom, ed. Edgar Allan Poe, Bloom's Major Poets. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 1999. (Updated 2007.) Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= BMPEAP21&SingleRecord=True (accessed November 22, 2010).

Analysis of The Raven

The poem is pretty easy to understand literally. It starts off with a man sitting by himself on a lonely night, reading a story and trying to forget his sadness over his lost wife, Lenore. Soon he hears a rustling in his curtains and convinces himself that it's just a visitor at his door. So he went to check the door and realized that there was nobody there. So he just stood there by the open door for awhile whispering his wife's name and hearing it echoed back to him. Then he went back inside and soon he heard a tapping. He convinced himself it was just the wind hitting the window. Then he opened the shutter and in flew a raven and sat on a statue in his room. He started talking to the raven and it said "Nevermore." Then he was confused because the word made no sense in the context of the conversation but he also doubted that this could be the bird's name. Yet the bird continued to repeat that single word over and over. So he sat and pondered why the bird would possibly be saying this word over and over and while doing so also thought about his lost love. Then the air began to feel thicker in the air and so he thought the bird must have been sent by God or a devil of some kind and he shouted all kinds of accusations at it but it still just said nevermore again and again. He then asked the bird, believing it was a prophet, if he would ever again be able to hold his love, and yet again the bird said nevermore, so he became very angry and told the bird to leave but it just sat on its perch.

There is a set rhyme scheme used that is something like A, B, C, B, B, B. I don't know if it is considered a poetic device but he also uses a lot of repetition in the way the raven is speaking to convey an ominous sort of feeling. There is also an allusion to the time period because he is sitting there reading a book that was actually written during Poe's time period. So in a sense he was adding publicity to whoever wrote the book.

The figurative meaning, I believe, is that the raven is the depression in his life that he can't quite let go of. It is sitting there in the corner of his room watching him all the time, no matter what he tried to do to stop it. When he reasoned with it, when he spoke to it kindly, when he screamed at it,when he yelled at it, despite anything that he did to it it still hung over his head like something he could never be rid of.

Journal 24

There have been several times in my life when I became anxious or scared because I thought I heard something I really did not hear.

One specific time was when I was about ready to go to sleep and I was reading a book. Now my room is in the basement and nobody else is down there so it can be freaky all because of that, let alone when you start to freak yourself out. So anyway there I am reading and it is around 11:30 at night and all the sudden I swear I hear somebody tapping on my window. I have one of those egress windows in my room so I thought maybe somebody was tapping on it from the outside.

I live in Salem Estates and there have been a lot of robberies lately, so I was already kind of paranoid about that. So then when I heard the tapping on the window I thought somebody was trying to get to me through that window. Nevertheless, I told myself that I was just hearing something and went back to reading. About a minute later I swore I heard it again. But once again I went back to reading my book. Then I heard it again and I got really freaked out that time. I started thinking about all those horror movies where people just ignore it when they hear something sketchy and then they end up dead. So I ran upstairs and told my parents what I heard. My stepdad went outside to check it out and came back a few minutes later and said he did not see a single thing out there. Still, I was scared so I decided to spend the rest of the night upstairs in my brother's room. Around 1 in the morning I woke up and decided I had to go back down to my room because otherwise I wouldn't have my alarm to wake me up, but I was too scared to go by myself. So I woke my brother up and made him go with me.

Obviously in the end nothing ended up happening to me and it was all in my head, but nevertheless it was still really scary.

Analysis of Analysis of Walden

The author of the analysis starts out by talking about how Henry David Thoreau showed the true principles of Transcendentalism through his works, specifically his most noted work, Walden.

I agreed with the author's point of view that through the account of his stay at Walden Thoreau set an example for other Transcendentalism believers through his display of self-reliance, frugality, economy, a personal relationship with nature that lives in every human, and environmentalism. The author points out that through his journey to Walden he sought to separate himself from society, because one of his core beliefs was that society was destroying the world because it was taking away people's individuality.

The author makes a good point in the second paragraph when he talks about the way Thoreau worked to eliminate excess in his life and not waste anything. The author points out that he built his cabin for a mere $28.12 1/2, but that the point of this endeavor was not to preach the idea of hard labor, since Thoreau did in fact build the cabin himself. But rather the idea of what Thoreau went through was that if you do not live in excess and spend a lot of money daily, there is no reason why you should even have to work hard on a daily basis. You could simply work a little bit each day and never worry about your money running out or having to work too hard to finish it. I think the fact that the author caught this is very important because many people might think that his purpose was to show that hard labor is important, not to teach that living without excess is key.

The author points out a lot of symbolism that he found in Thoreau's writings in the third paragraph. He discusses the way that some of his writings in which he described journeys that he took were not only acccounts of journeys through areas and guides to where beautiful things are, but rather they were also guides through his own spiritual journeys to find enlightenment by being in the midst of natural, beautiful things.

Thoreau also uses the seasons and times of year that pass by at Walden as symbols of journeys taken by the individual throughout his or her life. They go through the journey of spring and new birth and life all the way to winter when everything dies, and then back to spring where everything is alive anew. The author does a good job of proving how much Thoreau really reflected Transcendentalism and the beauty of nature through his works.

The author also discusses the difference between Thoreau and other Transcendentalists by showing that Thoreau truly wanted to commune and live within nature in order to better understand it. Other Transcendentalists, however, such as Emerson, were interested in exploring the subject but not by physically placing themselves wholly within nature itself.

I thought it was a very good analysis with many valid points that proved that Thoreau was a true Transcendentalist and also explored many of his theories and ideas about life.

Works Cited
Wayne, Tiffany K. "Walden." Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2006. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=1&iPin=ETRA402&SingleRecord=True (accessed November 15, 2010).