Dark Romanticism

Nathaniel Hawthorne
The main reason for him to be considered a Dark Romantic or against Transcendentalist would probably because of the man his great grandfather was. I can see how that would make him believe that not all people are good. The difference between him and Poe or Melville is that nothing really bad happened to him exactly or at least that I read. He just knew that his Great Grandfather was very bad man so he believed people weren’t all generally good and people are generally bad.

Herman Melville
If anyone saw what Melville saw it would be hard for him or her to believe in the Transcendentalist philosophy. He saw human beings eating other human being. When you see terrible things it can effect the outlook you have on life severely. Even though the cannibals we’re probably doing what they were raised to do, and what they thought was right, when a man that’s taught his entire life not to do those things, it would really change him.

Edgar Allan Poe
Poe is the only one on the list that had bad things happen to him. I know there’s no such thing as luck, but if there were, then he would have had the worst luck. He probably believed not only were people bad, but that god wasn’t too great either. Transcendentalist believed god spoke through them. Well Poe had so much taken away from him he probably either hated god or didn’t believe in him. Someone who loses everything isn’t going to see the good in anything, probably not even themselves. He wrote stories about people who got more and more evil, he probably was using himself as an example

I think I would fall somewhere in the middle between the Dark Romantics and the Transcendentalist. In my opinion the are no absolutes. No one is all good or all evil. What makes people different is that some of us choose to do the right thing and that some of us don’t. So I guess I believe that what you do or see in your life determines what you are and what you believe.

The Black Cat
I thought this was a pretty good story. I see why it’s said that Poe’s stories demonstrate a person’s descent into darkness. It demonstrates well how the Narrators anger go worse and worse. He starts out just hitting the animals, then kills Pluto, and then kills his wife. He just gets worse and worse until he finally gets caught always like it when a story wraps things up well. He killed Pluto, and then after killing his wife, the only reason he got caught was because of the other cat. I’m sure were supposed to believe the new cat is a reincarnation of Pluto or maybe just another cat that knows what he has done.

I can defiantly see how this is against Transcendentalism. They believed god did things through them and made them good. The story says that the character is bad and he just can’t control his anger. "I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket ! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity." This definitely sounds more to me like something evil was taking over. What he does is not something that god would want someone to do is help them do.

"But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan." That’s definitely not something the transcendentalist would believe burying an axe into his wife’s brain is something an evil person would. This is saying that this guy is not a good person. He’s a murderer, which is something that I doubt a Transcendentalist would ever write about. How could they that someone that would kill there own wife would be a good person or be part of god. I’m sure this probably really pissed transcendentalist off because it was saying that their beliefs were completely wrong.