Dark Romanticism- Edgar Alan Poe, Walden

Hannah Folwell

Mrs. Bedeker

ENG. 3

9/14/14

Dark Romanticism

The Dark Romantics describe life as evil, sinful, insane, and deceptive, which is more like life today. For example, Tom and his wife in the short story “The Devil and Tom Walker” written by Washington Irving were depicted as greedy and self-centered and would do anything to gain wealth. In addition “The Pit and the Pendulum” written by Edgar Alan Poe describe the things occurring to the narrator as evil and have sinful nature. The people involved in the torture of the narrator are described by Poe to be demonic and evil.

Wealth is the source of every known character in the short story. There are no prominent "good" characters in the story, as each individual strives to achieve some better amount of wealth that they think will satisfy their greedy desires, which then leads them to becoming "evil" by the ways in which they gain wealth. The desire of wealth led Tom Walker's wife to her gruesome and unavoidable murder. This murder did not affect Tom Walker emotionally to any degree, and in fact drove him to want wealth even more. Then Tom Walker's desire for wealth led him to sell his soul to the devil, which is one of the worst sins that could be possibly committed in his time. Later on, after Tom Walker had received his ill-gotten wealth, most of the citizens drove themselves to complete poverty from the desire of potential wealth from spontaneous business gain, which rarely happens in real life and is explained in the following quote. Washington Irving writes, “In a word, the great speculating fever which breaks out every now and then in the country, had raged to an alarming degree, where everybody was dreaming of making sudden fortunes out of nothing” . (Irving 247) Irving expresses the repetitive motif of wealth led to the conclusion of a moral, which is actually the basic theme and plot of this short story. The desire of wealth will always lead to greed, which inevitably ends in a life altering...