Poe and Hawthorne, Bros.

Gothic-ism in the United States was most prevalent throughout the mid 19th century, a time, furthermore, in which Nathaniel Hawthorne was writing. Though Gothic-ism highlights an externalized fear or queeziness of of all (society, relationships, buildings) it is also a projection of the self onto the outside world. In the story "The Black Cat" the narrator kills his cat, and then adopts a new one. He begins to fear his cat for being, quite possibly, more human than he is. This realization, the modern reader can see, is attributed to the existential shock a slaveholder might suffer upon realizing the fantastical nature of slave-holding in the United States. Mark Twain, who served in the Missouri Militia stated that the cause of the Civil War was in fact the popular reading material of the South-kings queens, duchesses and barons, andserfs. Sounds familiar right? Poe's characters internalize the madness that he paints as external-though, if its important, the madness for Poe was probably mostly internal. Hawthrone's writings to highlight guilt, though in his case, in a less Gothic sense. Hawthorn's stories paint a picture of a man, a guilty man, who is no more culpable than anybody else. Humans are flawed. Done deal. In "The Birthmark" we see a husband's growing obsession with his beautiful wife's birthmark. He eventually has her get it removed, whereupon she dies the next day. The characters that Poe illustrates, in most cases, injure their significant others themselves because they represent something human, empathetic, threatening. To borrow from Jacques Lacan, Poe's characters experience the trauma of the Real, what is left when all linguistic associations fall away from all matter (people, objects, relationships) and all that is left is their indiscernible, and horrifying shape. The reason this would occur in a historiographical sense, is that the popular definition of the South, and it's role in the United States, cannot hold its center. Yet people define themselves by it. With the inevitable end of slavery looming , the works of Poe and Hawthorne predict the madness and guilt, trauma and remorse, respectively.