The Gothic Villain Narrative Essay Example

because of his fatal attraction for female characters. This darkly attractive and very conflicted male figure surfaces everywhere in the 19th and 20th century gothic” (Heckmondwike). “Simms's Martin Faber relies upon subtlety and devious logic as his major weapons of deception.

By undermining typical principles of the Gothic hero (William Harding), Faber tricks his arbitrators into feeling sympathy for him, a deception that makes him much more calculating and undermining than conventional Gothic villains” (Jett). Poe is greatly inspired by Simms's Martin Faber, so much so that this villain is the basis for ‘William Wilson. ’ “Many similarities exist between the two. Both Simms's Faber and Poe's Wilson self-condemn their sinister deeds and must confront their conscious minds, represented by Gothic "double" figures” (Jett).

These ‘doppelgangers’ are the villains conscious. For instance, Martin’s doppelganger is his friend William Harding. William is responsible for “bringing Martin to justice for the murder of Emily Andrews” (Jett). Wilson's doppelganger is a schoolmate who has his same name and challenges him whenever he gives into his evil side. Their selfish needs motivate Faber and Wilson. “However, the major difference between the two centers on Wilson's inability to express guilt over his sins and Faber's perpetual need to confess his.

Consequently, Poe failed to establish a dynamic Gothic villain in William Wilson—one capable of demonstrating feigned remorse in multidimensional facets Wilson commits only trivial crimes, hardly comparable to Faber's crime of murder” (Jett). Many of Poe's villains take on the characteristics of the self-indulgent Aristocrat. Poe used this often mad, at times inventive, noble heir in place of the traditional Gothic villain. His villains depict the transcendent hostility of life

itself instead of the evil personified by individuals.

Some of the tales that Poe utilized the Aristocrat villain: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” such characters appear in his stories ‘Metzengerstein’ (1840), ‘Berenice’ (1840), ‘Ligeia’ (1838), ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1842), and ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842)” (Poe). Poe had another villain; one that was not a typical gothic villain, this villain was the guilty conscious. These include ‘The Black Cat,’ ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ and the doppelganger story ‘William Wilson’ (1840).

In, ‘The Black Cat’ and “The Tell-Tale Heart,’ it is the villains guilty conscious that give away his deed—in both cases the deed is murder. In the Tell-Tale Heart, it is the still beating heart of the old man that gets louder and louder and louder. In ‘The Black Cat’ it is the screaming animal on his wife’s head that is his undoing. While the stories ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1843), and ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ do not utilize a guilty conscience as their villain, “they [do] share the same paranoid intensity demonstrated in these tales” (Poe).

Sensationalizing controversy and fears, in the face of the quickly transforming social and economic environment, turn into the typical medium for gothic authors to engage in the aesthetic and political questions brought about by current events. The Gothic Villain personifies the evil the writers see in their society.