End of Semester

This class has changed my idea of reading. I use to just read a book and just read the words and follow the story. After this semester I learned a sense of higher understanding of what the authors are trying to say.

The only thing I found trouble with is the old english writting styles but I understand you cannot take that out because it is the backbone of gothic and where it started from. Reading Fight Club would have been fun but in the summer it is so pressed in time it was nice to have the last week off from reading to study and write the paper.

good man and emily

in a Good man and Emily stories there is the gothic feel with the grotesque characters. In Emily in you have this lady who thinks to much of herself and is above others and never marries. The story does not show what exact reason just that she and her family turned away all the young men. Throughout the story you have people saying poor emily and giving you the hope something good happens to her and she finds someone. Then in the end it shows the man she loved had died in her house and she had been sleeping the bed as the dead man, so you get the feeling of liking her and then having strange and odd thoughts that she was insane because of her actions during the story. In a good man the Misfit was a character you wanted to hate because he killed everyone but then when he was telling his story about his family and how he does not remember doing anything wrong you get the idea that he might be a good man. Then he went ahead and killed the family it all turns into hating him again. These did have the gothic feel in this way and it did put a little fear into the readers with the killings and the decaying body that the lady slept in the bed with.

Poquelin

The south is going through many changes in that the society is forming from all plantations to towns, roads and neighborhoods popping up. This is a huge change from the plantation owners owning all the land you could see and grew cash crops for their money. This change was not liked by all in the story, but well liked by the new members coming into the area for are coming from other countries who do not want to own a plantation or work on one but start a new town like the northern towns are. The old creole families especially Jacques does not want to change, but he does not have a normal reason because he does not use his land as others would have he and his brother let it decay. This subject brought on the story because if it was not for the uprising of the change of the south to urbanize then no one would have worried about Jacques and Jean and their mysterious ways. If the roads and neighborhoods would not have wanted to come through their land than this story would not have any appeal. But this mystery brought on the idea that Jacques is hiding something and therefore is a witch and does magic, he does throw a lot of curses at people that did not help his case. When it did turn out he was hiding something it was nothing anyone expected it turned out to be his brother was not missing but a leper. So all the changing in Louisiana brought on the discovery of the the reason Jean was missing for seven years.

Grapevine

I liked these two stories because to me there were easier to read than the others we have gone over. The language is different than some would like to read but I liked it because I grew up around a bunch of cajuns and could here every word pretty well in my head. The story of Henry was fun with the story of the bewitched land and that if you ate the grapes you would be killed within the year. If the story would have just started out with Uncle Julius then there would not have been the white people who are curious on the land and without them the readers might not have found the story less appealing to read if it was just a crazy story of magic and beliefs of blacks in the time. Without the care of the white family to get the land they wanted to make them succeed the book might not have sold and therefore the way the story was written to sell I would imagine.

Our Nig

This story is a lot different than the other novels we have gone over so far. It is a fiction but has the feel of a non fiction. The other ones were meant to send a message about society and to spread fear in the writting, Wilson's story scares the reader through testimony. I think she wrote it just to be able to be heard, like this is her way of saying this is what happened to me and what I have come through to get to where I am in life. The way she writes in third person during the beginning I do not have a strong reason for maybe its a way to give a better over view of all the characters at first before going into Frado's personal thoughts.

Poe

The narrator is used i think to add the extra bit of fear to Poe's readers. He already had the scary house and the Ushers family with mental sickness to put fear into the reader. With the narrator it brings in a friend that is an outsider of the family of late. This adds to the story because of his lack of experience with the family and the hose brings out his own fears and superstitions that are going on and when the narrator gets scared if the readers are into the story they will start to feel the scary plot themselves.

Poe's gothic differs to me in that it focuses on the house a lot (it is like this in his other writings are well). The other stories we have read they have been about a character (mostly women) over coming aspects in their lives to make it in a man's society. This one puts emphasis on the surroundings as well as the character to portray an evil spirit as to say the house is evil and takes over the characters instead of the characters being evil themselves.

YGB

The guide plays the evil side that leads young goodman brown into temptation where he does think he should be going into. The guide resembles him it is stated that he could pass as his father. This might be for extra sense of trust for young goodman brown or it could be a view of the future of what could happen. The guide convinces him to keep going by telling him stories of his father doing the same routes and other respectable people that have been in the same area as him, this could all be a lie just to get him to do what he wants him to do. The people he keeps running into are all important people to Brown and people who he wants to keep his reputation for.