The inability of many Gothic characters to overcome perversity by rational thought is common in American Gothic work. It is not uncommon for a protagonist to be sucked into the realm of madness because of their inclination towards the irrational. A tendency such as this flies in the face of higher reason and seems to mock 18th-century
Enlightenment thinking as outlined by
Common Sense and
The Age of Reason. Contemporary Gothic themes of mechanism and automation can be interpreted as subverting the popular reliance on rationalism and logic.
Puritan imagery, particularly that of
Hell, acted as potent brain candy for 19th-century authors like
Edgar Allan Poe and
Nathaniel Hawthorne. The dark and nightmarish visions the Puritan culture of condemnation, reinforced by shame and guilt, created a lasting impact on the
collective consciousness. Notions of predestination and
original sin added to the doom and gloom of traditional Puritan values. This perspective and its underlying hold on American society ripened the blossoming of stories like
Rachel Dyer (the first novel about the
Salem witch trials), "
The Pit and the Pendulum", "
Young Goodman Brown", and
The Scarlet Letter. The dungeons and endless corridors that are a hallmark of European Gothic are far removed from American Gothic, in which castles are replaced with caves. Lloyd-Smith reinterprets
Moby-Dick to make this point convincingly. Early settlers were prone to fear linked to the unexplored territory which surrounded, and in some cases, engulfed them. Fear of the unknown stemming from environmental factors like darkness and vastness is notable in
Charles Brockden Brown's
Edgar Huntly. The emergence of the "ab-human" in American gothic fiction was closely coupled with the emergence of
Charles Darwin's theories of evolution. Ideas of evolution or devolution of a species, new biological knowledge, and technological advancement created a fertile environment for many to question their essential humanity. Parallels between humans and other living things on the planet were made obvious by the aforementioned. This is manifest in stories like
H.P. Lovecraft's "
The Outsider" and
Nicholson Baker's "
Subsoil". Ghosts and monsters are closely related to this theme; they function as the spiritual equivalent of the abhuman and may be evocative of unseen realities, as in
The Bostonians.
Julia Kristeva's concepts of
jouissance and
abjection are employed by American Gothic authors such as
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Kristeva theorizes that the expulsion of all things defiling, much like a corpse, is a common coping mechanism for humanity. Gilman's "
The Yellow Wallpaper" exploits this concept. Furthermore, "The Yellow Wallpaper" can be read as a social commentary on the oppressive conditions women suffered in their home lives at the turn of the 20th century. == Early American Gothic ==