Gothic Fiction Research Paper

Gothic fiction is the type of literature that create nightmares. It operates in dream-like landscapes and figures of the subconscious imagination. Its fictional world gives form to nondescript fears and impulses common to all mankind. By using a combination of materials, some torn from the author's own subconscious mind, and some the stuff of myth, folklore, fairy tale, and romance. Gothic fiction gives shape to concepts of the place of evil in the human mind. Authors such as Hawthorne, Irving, and Poe use the written word to paint these gothic images in the minds of their readers.

In gothic stories violence is very common as it is supposed to inspire fear. In the short story, The Devil and Tom Walker, Tom says “Instead of his wife, he found her apron hanging in the branches of a tree near the Indian fort, with only a heart and liver tied up in it. According to tufts of hair and footprints at the scene, it seems she'd at least put up a fight against Old Scratch” (Irving 327). Tom finds his wife’s organs and clumps of her

In Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment, he has the ability to use the fountain of youth to make people become young again and then switch back. The room where he worked was filled “Yet, by a strange deception, owing to the duskiness of the chamber, and the antique dresses which they still wore, the tall mirror is said to have reflected t the figures of the three old, gray, withered grandsires, ridiculously contending for the skinny ugliness of a shriveled grandam” (Hawthorne 3). In The Night Circus, the story weaves back and forth between different levels of reality and it is hard arrives without warning. No announcements are made. The tents arrive in an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Reves, and it is only open at night” (Morgenstern 231). In this case, some enter different levels and are not able to get