Dark Romanticism in the pit and the pendulum

Dark Romanticism was a period in literature and a type of writing. This type of wirting was known to commonly be very morbid, and well, dark. Often the author who was writing a dark romanticism novel would include things like death and human nature. Things like greed, anger, sin and things liek that. Stuff that romanticism tried to forget and not focus on. Dark romantiicism was really in it's simplest form a rebellion agaisnt the perfect world of romanticism as well as a result of transcendentalism. Whcich is a literary period that focused on your inner self. Some people felt that their inner self was bad and evil sot hat is what they wrote about.

The story the Pit and the Pendulum was very much a dark romantic story. The basic summary of the story is that a man finds himself in a jail, being accused of heresy by the Spanish inquisition. Just from that much information we can begin to imagine all of the different things that could be evil and dark in this setting. The man begins to wonder around, believing he has fooled his captors. It is only till later in the story the man realizes he was being played the whole time. In reality his captors were doing they're best to make the man crazy. The most interesting and morbid part of the story was most likely when the unknown man was strapped down and a pendulum begin to swing overhead now normally this would not be a bad thing but this particular pendulum had the head of an ax strapped to it. The pendulum was slowly getting lower and lower always moving closer to cutting the man. This torture is not so much physical as it is mental. Something like this would have never been seen in a romanticism period story. Things like these were far to gruesome for the authors of the time to write about. In the end of the story the ax is slowly descending and lightly cutting the man swing by swing. Dark romanticism is obviously about the darker aspects of human life. Things that are on exhibit in this story. Ideas like torture being gruesome. Death being long and drawn out. That is something really different form romanticism. If someone did die they would quickly and honorable. There was never ever a mention of a long drawn out death or a painful and dishonorable one. The idea of a man forsaking his principles and pleading for mercy would never have been popular in romanticism times. Mean were supposed to be storng and iron willed. Without flaws. Stuff like that is pretty strong characteristics and really show how ingrained the idea of dark romanticism was in the writng of this story. Dark romanticism is pretty interesting and a cool off shoot of romanticism it is always good to get so many different views on these literary periods, so thigns like this are really coola nd show how people differ even when writing.