Thesis (Not formatted for APA because I am unsure of whether this is a paper or a draft of a paper)

There are concurrent themes running through each of these four stories  Hawthornes Rappaccinis Daughter and The Birthmark, and Edgar Allan Poes The Fall of the House of Usher and the Tell-Tale Heart. Some of the themes are the unhappiness of ones inner life, and the havoc one wreaks on ones outer life. This mirroring is present in all of these stories. In Poes Fall of the House of Usher, gloom and fungi grow on the walls of a house, and are reflected in the water of the lake. The heaviness of the gloom, and the heaviness of the water and the walls provide the perfect backdrop for the inner unhappiness of Roderick. The man on the brink believes his sister to be dead, yet when the narrator finds out she is still alive, we question the veracity of the outer gloom, and start to consider it is Rodericks madness which has thus transformed his surroundings.  In the Tell Tale Heart, the narrator is very unreliable, sinking into and out of madness. Sometimes he is lucid enough to tell his story, and other times we must take his word for what he observes, namely the evil eye. The evil eye is, again, a projection of madness, and a lens through which we distort the world when we are insane. The insistence of sanity by the obviously deranged man is akin to the insistence of the death of the sister by the insane brother. The evil eye is responsible for the narrators view of the world, of his paranoia and delusions, while the metaphorical evil eye of Rodericks insanity changes the very landscape of the narrators experience.

We come to Hawthornes The Birthmark, where a man is obsessed (a sure quality of madness) with making his wife aesthetically perfect. When she falls ill and dies as a result of the potion he has mixed to aid her in this endeavor, he sees the true horror of what he has done. By viewing her through a distorted lens of an obsessed lover who is concerned with what others think, he decides to play God and rid her of her human markings. Aylmers evil eye views his wife as imperfect, just as Rodericks evil eye conjures a pall over his surroundings, just as the Tell Tale Hearts paranoid narrator feels persecuted by an evil eye. In the final story, a man tries to make his daughter into a perfect rare flower, even though this entailed poisoning her. When Giovanni falls in love with her, the landscape of love is slowly ruined by the poison of deadly perfection. The evil eye of perfection ravages Beatrice, and when Giovanni produces an antidote and presents it to her as a way to live free of the poison, Beatrice dies. A life poisoned cannot be made whole, except through death. Madness distorts everything it touches, and it is no less mad to challenge Gods perfection as it is to murder and lie.