"The Cask of Amontillado" and "Young Goodman Brown" ENC 1102
             The Romantic Movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France, and beyond, reached America around the year 1820. Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science, Romantics argued, could best express universal truth. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," are both novels from the Romantic Period. Both "The Cask of Amontillado" and "Young Goodman Brown," as well as all Romantic stories, contain at least one of the following: items of Gothicism, items of the Grotesque, or items from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.
             First, both Poe and Hawthorne incorporate a few devices of Gothicism into their story. Both "The Cask of Amontillado" and "Young Goodman Brown" has an unusual or wild setting. Poe and Hawthorne also give their main characters hidden secrets, some that are known from the start, and some that are not yet revealed. In Poe's story, the reader is shown the wild and fantastic settings of both the carnival and Montresor's catacombs. Poe points out the mood surrounding the carnival season when he describes it as a time of "supreme madness." The reader receives another detailed description of the setting when Montresor is walking with Fortunato through the catacombs and states, " "The nitre!" I said; "see, it increases. It hangs like moss upon the vaults. We are below the river's bed. The drops of moisture trickle among the bones"" (76). Hawthorne does not show the reader the wild and crazy happenings of a carnival; instead Hawthorne shocks the reader by leading goodman and us Brown !
             into the woods to see the townspeople participating i...