30 POINTS TO BEST ANSWER
Write an essay that answers the question, "What was haunting America in the nineteenth century?" Develop your thesis with details and quotes from the stories "Rip Van Winkle," "Young Goodman Brown," and "The Black Cat". These details can include information about the theme, plot, and characters, and also information about life in nineteenth-century America where appropriate.

Gothic literature

Explanation:

Writers like Edgar Allan Poe (The Black Cat) focussed on rhetorical strategies that produced a literature that was being haunted. This haunted or Gothic literature expressed al kinds of unthinkable horror-like feelings. The Gothic writers used the gothic genre as a vehicle to express their thoughts/opinions on what was happening in America.

In Rip Van Winkle Washington Irving conveys the theme of freedom vs tyranny with his main character (the freedom to be himself) who falls asleep for twenty years.

¨Most of the people of this world are asleep in their minds¨  

In Young Goodman Brown Nathaniel Hawthorne the main character´s wife is called Faith (!) and she assures him that she will be safe while he meets with the Devil.  ¨Evil is the nature of mankind¨

In The Black Cat Edgar Allan Poe explores the mind of an alcoholic who is haunted by having killed his cat. This in the end drives him insane.

¨Yet mad I am not... and very surely do I not dream.¨