<--Pluto, The Black Cat



In Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, Roger Malvin's Burial, a young man and his old neighbor sit, wounded after a battle leaning against a slab of granite Hawthorne compares to a tombstone. Symbolically, Hawthorne conveys that after being blooded for the first time, the young man has lost his innocence, or that his innocence has died and is buried beneath the granite "tombstone" where he leaves his old neighbor at his behest. When Reuben returns home he lies to his wife-to-be, Dorcas, who is Roger Malvin's daughter and tells her that he buried her father when in reality he left him to die. Reuben never returns to the rock to see his father-in-law decently interred. He begins to experience extreme guilt, "but pride, the fear of losing her affection, the dread of universal scorn, forbade him to rectify this falsehood." At the end of the story with the death of his young, innocent son by his own hand, the circle is realized and along with it, retribution is meted out to the guilty party, Reuben. The concern and fixation with death and the gloomy setting of the dark wilderness both play a role in this tale of the loss of American innocence.


The crossover between Hawthorne's Roger Malvin's Burial and Poe's The Black Cat is the surfacing of guilt and the cycle of retribution for ones actions. The protagonist of The Black Cat is a perfectly kind man when the story begins, but as it progresses he takes up drinking and becomes violent. But the reader is supposed to understand that whenever he does something violent, it is the alcohol to blame, not his untarnished soul. When the house is burns down (a Gothic element, ruined building), the reader recognizes that it is the protagonists soul that has been burned down. This story is really about the plundering of a man's soul. Another Gothic element we recognize is the violence, particularly towards women and in this case, towards the wife in the tale. And when he murder's his wife in a rage, it is the alcohol that is acting, not him. Later on, the cry from within the wall is another Gothic element. The haunting, anguished, disturbing shriek coming from within the wall is symbolically his soul crying out against his wrongdoing. In reality the alcohol has torn down all of his defenses and vanquished the humanity he has left and the reader is able to view all of his natural depravity coming to light.