Secret Violence: The Gothic Element in Poe and Hawthorne

In both Poe's "The Black Cat" and Hawthorne's "Roger Malvin's Burial," the protagonist's ruin is brought about by the harboring of dark secrets. The narrator of the "The Black Cat" remains uncommunicative to his wife about his newly violent attitudes towards their household creatures. He hangs Pluto the cat in secret, and carries the knowledge of that act unspoken within him. These pent-up feelings of anger and perverseness eventually result in him murdering his wife. The ultimate manifestation of this secrecy is seen in how he disposes of his wife's body, carefully walling it up in the cellar, a secret from the world.

Similarly, Reuben Bourne holds the real circumstances of Roger Malvin's death as a deeply-kept secret. This dreadful knowledge transforms his personality, making him irritable and neglectful in his duties. I think the overwhelming guilt he feels comes not from failing to stay with Malvin and bury him (we agreed in class that Reuben didn't actually do anything wrong in those circumstances), but in never disclosing the full truth to his wife Dorcas and the community at large. 

In both cases, the truth eventually reveals itself, though against the protagonists' own will. The violence of both acts cannot stay hidden, and, in accordance with the gothic style, eventually seeps out to see the light of day: in the murderer of the black cat, he involuntarily hits the wall where his wife is interred, and in Reuben Bourne is  led back to Roger Malvin's bones by his own unconscious. In the gothic works, truth all wins out in the end.