Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe were both writers of the American Gothic genre whose writings were characterized by the typical Gothic devices of horror and mystery. In Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" these devices are used abundantly. Interestingly, the motif of the veil figures in both of them, although to a much lesser extent in the Poe story. Hawthorne and Poe, although similar in their ability to create an atmosphere of suspense and horror as well as their preoccupation with death and gloom, differ considerably in other aspects of their work, most notably in their views of morality and the message behind their stories.
In "The Fall of the House of Usher," Poe uses images of death and decay to create an image of impending death and the dissolution that comes from age. He links the House of Usher with the tarn-a lake created by a glacier, thus signifying a centuries-long process that gradually reduces the glacier to nothing-and describes it as having air "reeked up from the decayed trees" and "a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued" (Poe). The entire exterior of the house is covered with "minute fungi" and the narrator notes indication of "extensive decay" and an almost imperceptible fissure running from the roof of the building all the way to the tarn, hinting of an imminent cracking and breaking of the House of Usher (Poe). The characters, too, appear to be drawing near to death, with their unearthly pallor, preoccupation with death, and mysterious ailments. Thus, from the beginning of the story the reader sees the fall of the House of Usher coming, even if he has not deduced it from the story's title. The reader is driven by the suspense of how the fall will happen to keep reading the story.
In Hawthorne's story, by contrast, there is a different atmosphere. Although the story starts out wit...