Lloyd-Smith reinterprets Moby-Dick to make this point convincingly. The dungeons and endless corridors that are a hallmark of European Gothic are far removed from American Gothic, in which castles are replaced with caves. ![]() This perspective and its underlying hold on American society ripened the blossoming of stories like Rachel Dyer (the first novel about the Salem witch trials), " The Pit and the Pendulum", " Young Goodman Brown", and The Scarlet Letter. Notions of predestination and original sin added to the doom and gloom of traditional Puritan values. The dark and nightmarish visions the Puritan culture of condemnation, reinforced by shame and guilt, created a lasting impact on the collective consciousness. ![]() Puritan imagery, particularly that of Hell, acted as potent brain candy for 19th-century authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Also, one cannot ignore the contemporary Gothic themes of mechanism and automation that rationalism and logic lead to. A tendency such as this flies in the face of higher reason and seems to mock 18th-century Enlightenment thinking as outlined by Common Sense and The Age of Reason. It is not uncommon for a protagonist to be sucked into the realm of madness because of his or her inclination towards the irrational. The inability of many Gothic characters to overcome perversity by rational thought is quintessential American Gothic. Elements specific to American Gothic include: rationality versus the irrational, puritanism, guilt, the uncanny ( das unheimliche), ab-humans, ghosts, and monsters. ![]() American gothic fiction is a subgenre of gothic fiction.
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