evil in literature
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
"Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happenings." This quote applies to the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and Edgar Alan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." Evil, without a doubt, is present in both short stories and impacts the characters strongly.
In Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," Goodman Brown encounters a stranger who is demonic, if not the Devil himself. At the end of their journey, Goodman Brown is horrified to recognize his wife Faith in the midst of a dark ceremony. He cries out to her to "look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one." Goodman Brown tells Faith to resist the Devil, but he does not do so himself. After this encounter, Goodman Brown's life is changed. He cannot function without thinking about evil...