It is hardly surprising that evil, as palpable force or entity, is often seized upon by writers of fiction. The inherent mystery and fear it engenders allow for extraordinary dimension to be extracted from characters, as a simple act or presence of evil can propel a story by providing an ideal source of momentum and reaction. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, esteemed 19th century authors, most certainly exploited this rich resource to great effect. Moreover, while approaching the subject of evil from somewhat opposing directions, the two men are as one in their ultimate assessment of it. Both Poe and Hawthorne, focusing either on the macabre and insane or evil as a consequence of sin, consistently address evil as a force emanating from within mankind, and not as an external influence threatening it.

Hawthorne and Puritanical Terror

While any work has the right to be judged independently of its creator’s life, the reality remains that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s career as a writer cannot be extricated from his personal background, if only because he consistently infuses that background into his fiction. The practice is certainly understandable; it is hard to conceive of a more fruitful field upon which to create fiction than the tangled, disturbing legacies of Hawthorne’s native Salem, Massachusetts. In this place, and early in the nation’s history, extremely Puritanical creeds fostered communal feeling so strong that women and men were burned as witches. That Hawthorne was descended from a presiding judge at the Salem witch trials virtually confines him as an artist to exploring this unique history of evil both imagined and, quite literally, practiced.

As with his forebears, Hawthorne’s conception of evil is inextricably linked to the Puritan ideas of sin. His evil is never an intruding monster or inexplicable and horrifying visitation; it is, rather, the frightening ways in which merely the dread of evil must breed evil reaction. In The House of The Seven Gables, for example, he sets forth a dynamic as haunting and haunted as any cycle of Greek drama. The Pyncheon family, the remnants of whom are attempting to survive in the house, live every day with ghosts. The living in Hawthorne are victims of the past, and particularly of the evil in which they played no real part, a situation highlighted by Holgrave’s ongoing work on the family history. Moreover, the history of the family’s role in the witchcraft trials is by no means the only, malign legacy, for the story unfolds to reveal a kind of curse as arising from the property itself as having been stolen in the past. Evil moves in every hall of the house, yet it is all a sad and undying residue of very human action and sinful behavior.

Less blatant, but even more powerfully, The Scarlet Letter points a decisive finger at mankind as the bringer of evil, and ironically guilty of this through misguided and severely Puritanical impulses to crush it. There is a striking modernity to the book, despite an understandable ambiguity regarding sin and redemption in Hawthorne; he seems to dismiss the public outrage that brands Hester Prynne as an adulteress as an evil of itself, yet he also acknowledges the force of the sin as being felt by Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale, the father of the illegitimate Pearl. This duality notwithstanding, the evil portrayed in The Scarlet Letter is predominantly that of intolerance, for Hawthorne appears to believe that sin, or evil, is best left as a matter for those guilty of it to endure.

Poe and The Beast Within

If Nathaniel Hawthorne employed sin as his foundation for presenting evil, Edgar Allan Poe did not even venture that far. For Poe, and in an intensely personal way, evil is merely one aspect of the madness within men. This perception, then, removes an element of focus on the subject writers such as Hawthorne enjoy. That is, Hawthorne is able to step away from the nightmares he reveals, and Poe chooses, time and gain, to plunge headfirst into them.

For example, it is tempting to parallel Poe’s “The Fall of The House of Usher” with The House of the Seven Gables, as both tales center on doomed residences. The differences, however, are stark, and go directly to each author’s method of exploring evil, for the Usher house itself is seemingly organic. It is depicted as cracked from the beginning, illustrative of the twisted relationship between Roderick Usher and Madeline, his sister. Poe’s house, in fact, is unimportant, as it serves as merely another incorporation of the doomed twins. Evil occurs, certainly as Roderick chooses to bury his sister alive, yet this is no focused malice. It exists to accomplish no actual end, nefarious or otherwise; it is simply madness in motion, and from within the Usher family. The character of Roderick Usher may be said to arise again in Poe’s “The Raven”, for here too is a case of incipient evil as originating from within the hero. The raven of the title is a malevolent presence, although it essentially does nothing. What it is, in fact, is an implement; the narrator, mad in his grief over the lost Lenore, transmits every inner accusation and despair to the statue. As in so much of Poe’s work, it is the hero who generates the evil, and is most tortured by it because it stems from lunacy.

Conclusion

It is extraordinary that two American writers from the 19th century should have so presciently understood that “evil” is most pernicious when it is the result of man’s own behaviors. Hawthorne examined this through the lens of an ultra-Puritanical background and locale, while Poe chose to present evil as almost a by-product of tortured insanity. Both men, nonetheless, keep to that concept of man’s responsibility for it. Poe and Hawthorne, addressing either madness as source of evil or sin has generating it in a reactive way, consistently portray evil as a thing emanating from within mankind, and not as an external influence threatening it.