Examples Of Entrapment In Short Stories

In the short stories: The Black Cat written by Edgar Allan Poe, Prey written by Richard Matheson , and The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving, the gothic elements violence and entrapment are used through the author's tone and attention to detail. Each of the gothic elements listed above are used in each piece of literature. Entrapment is shown in each of these stories by the author putting the characters in inescapable predicaments. For example, in Matheson’s Prey, the woman in the story decides to gift her boyfriend a doll that allegedly has a spirit trapped inside. The only way for the spirit to escape the doll is for the necklace placed around the doll’s neck is removed. The necklace falls off the doll releasing the spirit. The woman is trapped in the house with the taunting spirit. The doll began to hunt her down everywhere she went. Then it began to attack her. She was unable to escape until she burned him in the oven. Secondarily, in Poe’s The Black Cat the man in the story was extremely violent. He kills his cat and then his wife. He breaks down a wall, “the felon’s cell”(Poe 3) and puts his wife’s dead
In Prey the doll mentioned above is extremely violent against the woman. He tries to stab her, and even more lethal things. He slashes her “along the calves of both legs” (Matheson 5). In The Devil and Tom Walker, on the man's hunt for the devil he encounters his wife’s apron where in the pocket he “found nothing but a heart and a liver tied up in it” (Irving 328). In the story The Black Cat the man who kills his first cat “slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree” (Poe 2). The element of violence is a very popular element in gothic literature. Gothic elements are what makes gothic literature what it is. Entrapment and violence are very popular elements found in these types of works. They are very apparent in the works described