Sleepy Hollow - Hawthorne

This weeks readings were both stressed the obvious dark sides of gothic literature. The settings are apparently dreary and designed to induce horror in the reader. There are also more morbid designs of the antogonists than in the previous novels or stories.

In sleepy hollow, the setting is a "Dutch-like" community that is isolated by in a peaceful location. This "peaceful" location is portrayed in a sense that the peacefulness is more like isolationism than a place that one would venture on vacation. It states that the isolation prevents these people from living as most people do during this time. This sets the tone for the novel being in a "haunted castle of home" although this is now not a castle, but an entire town that is "haunted". As for morbid designs, the past novels we have read deal more with rape/being caught by some supernatural being. This instead puts a headless horseman as the antagonist that runs around scaring people or killing them. In previous novels, we have not had a character run around and kill people with no apparent motive.

Young Goodman Brown has a similar setting. It is set in the woods along a path that is dark and he constantly fears things being behind and around the trees until he finds the devil. The devil as a morbid character is obvious, but the devil has never been introduced directly as a character before (at least in the novels we have read). This devil tires to steal the soul of the character. In my personal opinion, while rape and imprisonment are bad things, stealing ones soul is far more morbid than previous actions.

Although these books/stories are far different from the previous novels we have encountered, they still fit into the gothic in their own ways, and no one can deny that they fit in this genera.