Question

Write an essay that answers the question "what was haunting America in the nineteenth century?"

Answer 1

Hauting America

In a century of inventions and discoveries, such as Charles Darwin's theory or the implementation of the telegraph, there was a parallel world, another life that was taking place in the USA.

Although the supposedly ghosts which were photographed were proved to be a fake (a smart trick of double images was used to create them), there actually existed unexplained facts connected to the supernatural.

Wandering spirits were seen or heard, or simply felt, by ordinary people while they were leading their ordinary lifes. Sounds of chains, mourns and creepy places began legends that we still keep in our culture.

Haunting America in the nineteenth century was a chain of events that arouse the interest of past beliefs related to life after death. However, above all was the cradle of several literary works and film productions.

Answer 2

Authors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville are part of the American Ghotic Literature during the 19th century. This style of writing focuses on rhetorical strategies in which authors deploy the conventions of gothic writing. It can be said that the literature was being "haunted" since this type of literature expresses unthinkable feelings, like horror or fear for the unknown, and  it gets its power originating in the psychologically repressed mind of the reader.

It is important to consider how the authors of that time used the gothic genre as a vehicle to talk about what was happening in America at that period. Such as immigration issuesm the discovery of mental illnesses. Edgar Allan Poe in some of his works like ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Black Cat,’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ depict characters or narrators dealing with mental health problems.

Other elements that  are considered to be specific or characteristic of the American Gothic include: guilt, rationality/rational vs irrational and puritanism. At that time there was a sort of puritan culture of condemnation, also being constantly reinforced by guilt and shame, which caused marks into the collective consciousness.