Washington Irvings The Legend Of The Sleepy Hollow And...

How does different literature, written years and centuries apart by different authors, still contain the same prevailing ideas? Some ideas occur over and over again in literature, often revolving around human nature. Humans have a tendency to do the same thing over and over again even across different years and locations. This idea can be seen when observing these romanticism and gothic writings. Washington Irving’s The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown are all Romantic literary writings. They all feature characters who have a psychotic element to them and claim supernatural events have occurred; it’s Ichabod in The Legend of the†¦show more content†¦Ichabod’s paranoia made him perceive the object as a head, although the reader discovers later it was just a pumpkin. Ichabod hastily rationalized this event as an act of the headless h orseman because the rider appeared to have no head and he had heard the legend of the Horseman. He let his feelings of fear create the situation into the Headless Horseman, and Ichabod created a new version of events because it is human nature. He created events that matched his paranoia, thus he was petrified and fled the town. It is part of human nature for people to rationalize events as supernatural or create new events to make themselves feel better or correct. Furthermore, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher exemplifies how humans rationalize events by equating then as supernatural. The Fall of the House of Usher follows Usher, a name who is overcome with an unnamed disease; he is plagued by physical pains and mental hallucinations and fears after his sister dies. The house appears to be haunted or possessed, so the narrator had a creepy vibe from the house. The narrator tells that â€Å"as if in the superhuman energy of his utterance...the huge antique pa nels to which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust-- but then without those