Gothic Elements Research Paper

756 Words2 Pages

The darker aspects of books, movies, plays, and other performances that tell a story can also be known as gothic elements. Juicy material such as the supernatural, violence, and death are considered as gothic elements. These elements can be found in the works of countless authors writing such as Horacio Quiroga, Edgar Allen Poe and more recently, Ransom Riggs. Therefore, the works of these authors contain gothic elements that can be related to one another. Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs shares similar gothic elements with Edgar Allen Poe’s works The Black Cat, The Raven, and Horacio Quiroga’s work The Feather Pillow. The first work that shares a common gothic element with Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children is The Black Cat. The gothic element which the two works share is violence. In the Black Cat, the narrator gets angry at the cat for trailing him and so he “deliberately [cuts] one of its eyes from the socket” (Poe …show more content…

Their shared element is pain and grief. In the Raven, the narrator cries for “respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore” (Poe 5). The narrator is longing for a suspension of his grief of Lenore, whom the narrator was in love with but had passed away, hence the grief. A similar scene takes place in Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children. In a private room with Miss Peregrine, Jacob reveals to Miss Peregrine the news of Abe’s passing. Suspecting an eavesdropper, Miss Peregrine opens the door to the room, revealing Emma “crouched on the other side, her face red and streaked with tears” (Riggs 152). The reader can infer that she is grieving for the loss of Abe, however it is soon revealed that Abe and her “were admirers” (Riggs 153). Just like the narrator in The Raven, Emma is grieving the loss of a loved one; the narrator’s Lenore is Emma’s Abe. The two works both show the gothic element of

Open Document