The Battling Psyche

The Battling Psyche

The human psyche is a mysterious and unknown force that human beings have attempted to understand for centuries. It is understood that as human being we possess this psyche, however the nature of this psyche is not known and has thus been examined and hypothesized upon by many great minds. Literature in particular seeks the means to offer a theorized explanation of the workings of this mysterious psyche in a multitude of ways, from scientific writings, to poetry and fiction. Although these thoughts lie subtly embedded in the fictional stories, they often offer the best explanations. Two of the earliest and best known American writers that attempted to explain such a complex matter in their stories are Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe. Both of these authors use twisted fictional stories, such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Young Goodman Brown” to try to explain the inner workings and struggles of the human psyche. These stories expose the psyche’s continuous battle between right and wrong, reality and illusion, and sanity and insanity, and look into things that affect these battles. Although Poe and Hawthorne’s writing differentiate vastly from one another, both of them expose the instability and frailty of the human psyche and the traumatic effect loneliness has on breaking the psyche.

Edgar Allen Poe’s works primarily center on death and the effect death has on one’s mental sanity. Poe uses death and fear to create horrific stories that entice his audience, but underneath all this he examines and displays the inner workings of the mind. “He [Poe] worked hard at structuring his tales of aristocratic madmen, self-tormented murderers, neurasthenic necrophiliacs, and other deviant types so as to produce the greatest possible horrific effects on the reader” (696). Fear is a very important aspect of the human psyche and Poe allows his readers to investigate it through their own feelings of fear produced by his works. In his stories the characters struggle to maintain mental sanity primarily because they are left all alone with nothing but fear and this fear consumes them.

The consumption of fear is particularly evident in “The Fall of the House of Usher”. In this tale the narrator rushes off to visit an old friend, Roderick Usher, who has the desire to see him. Upon arriving the narrator finds a large decaying house contain...

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...fter believing he is entirely alone, he no longer even fights against the evil; he gives into it. There is a certain power in numbers and we are able to help one another, but alone the psyche is rendered helpless.

The continual battling of the human psyche is rendered helpless when it is left all alone. These two great stories allow the reader to examine the human psyche from an objective view. Through normal characters in twisted circumstances, the inner human psyche is brought outwards and can thus be viewed. From literature we can learn many things, and in such a case the lesson perhaps is not how the psyche works, but the importance of relationships in our lives. Our human nature depends upon one another for without it we fall. By looking at the consequences of loneliness we can value the importance of relationships in our own lives.

Bibliography

Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Hershel Parker New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003. 714-727

Hawthorne, Nathaniel.. “Young Goodman Brown..” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Hershel Parker New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003. 610-619