Puritans: A Literary Analysis

Compared to the Romantics, Puritans had no connection between their writing and the reader. An abundance of examples can easily be found throughout Irving’s The Devil and Tom Walker, Bonet’s The Devil and Daniel Webster, and Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. Each of these stories was written to humanize the writing so the readers could connect to it easier. The humanization helped the reader to connect to the characters that were able to defeat evil without God’s help, using the human power that the reader themself also has. Puritans used their writings to show only what you could do with God, and how helpless you were without God. Romantics were better than puritans because they bring out this power humans have without God’s help. The first …show more content…
He had a shock coarse black hair, that stood out from his head in all directions, and bore an eye on his shoulder,” (Benet 307). This passage illustrated the Devil as portrayed by Benet in The Devil and Daniel Webster. This Devil was particularly important because it promoted religion in a different way. Tom Walker was a greedy man who refused homes to anybody he could possibly refuse homes to and kept the money for himself and himself only. The Devil punished him for his sins by taking him away from his bank and away from the world, which could have been prevented if he did not put his work above the Bible, literally in some situations. This aspect of writing proved how romantics are above the puritans because they expose human power in the readers, instead of telling them to hope and pray that God will help them on their …show more content…
To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the winding of the suite. These windows were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue- and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout and so were the ornaments. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange-the fifth was white- the sixth with violet,” ( Poe 96). The scene has a strong sense of symbolism as each color in the hallway represents a different time of life, ranging from the first being the moment you are born, to the sixth being the final stage before the black area, which was death. Symbolism this intense showcases the allegorical elements of the story and promote the real world aspects of the plot, which entices the reader to look deeper into the story. As the reader searches further and finds the meaning behind the words, it increases their power when it comes to analyzing text, something that could not be done with a Puritan’s