Both stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe are written in a gothic style which means they keep a reader in tension and fear engaging in a plot full of drama and tragedy. Both writers were finding major issues of the time and disclosed them within their works. One of the gothic elements described in the stories is the death of the main characters: lady Madeline and Georgianna as death element is an essential part of the plot denouement.
In “The Birthmark” the pursuit of human perfection leads Aylmer to desperation in creating the potion. Aylmer knew it could be dangerous to his wife; however, he still wanted to erase the birthmark on Georgianna’s face. Hawthorne mostly describes death with the intonation, movements, and words of the character: “The fatal hand had grappled with the mystery of life” (Hawthorne 19). Poe, on the contrary, uses details and mystical objects to describe death of the characters or a close end of the castle. Lady Madeline was standing outside the door in “grave-clothes”, after the death of Roderick Usher, the storyteller ran away from the house, and the moon was “blood-red” (Poe 33). Death remains one of the most central gothic elements in both stories, and the authors describe it differently.
The key element of the stories is drama that follows the main idea and the feelings of the reader. In “The Birthmark” a dramatic moment is describing the senseless aim to human perfection. This devotion led Aylmer to the loss of truly essential things in life: pure love, relationship, and care. Focusing on the birthmark of his wife, he forgot that decent feelings do not matter in appearance details. In Poe’s story drama can be described as a deep psychological feeling of Roderick Usher as he suffers from anxiety, depression, and some mental diseases. The theme of madness goes through the plot and follows Roderick untill his death. That is how such a gothic element as death is interconnected with the key element of the two stories – dramatic end.
Works Cited
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Birthmark. Feedbooks, 1843. Web.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Fall of the House of Usher. Free eBook, 1997. Free eBook. Web.