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. Gilman's " The Yellow Wallpaper" exploits this concept. Kristeva theorizes that the expulsion of all things defiling, much like a corpse, is a common coping mechanism for humanity. Julia Kristeva's concepts of jouissance and abjection are employed by American Gothic authors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 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. Lovecraft’s " The Outsider" and Nicholson Baker's "Subsoil". Parallels between humans and other living things on the planet were made obvious by the aforementioned. 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. The emergence of the "ab-human" in American gothic fiction was closely coupled with the emergence of Charles Darwin's theories of evolution. Fear of the unknown stemming from environmental factors like darkness and vastness is notable in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly. Early settlers were prone to fear linked to the unexplored territory which surrounded, and in some cases, engulfed them. Lloyd-Smith reinterprets Moby-Dick to make this point convincingly. 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. This perspective and its underlying hold on American society ripened the blossoming of stories like " The Pit and the Pendulum", " Young Goodman Brown", and The Scarlet Letter. Notions of predestination and original sin added to the doom and gloom of traditional Puritan values. The dark and nightmarish visions the Puritan culture of condemnation, reinforced by shame and guilt, created a lasting impact on the collective consciousness. Puritan imagery, particularly that of Hell, acted as potent brain candy for 19th-century authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Also, one cannot ignore the contemporary Gothic themes of mechanism and automation that rationalism and logic lead to. 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. It is not uncommon for a protagonist to be sucked into the realm of madness because of his or her inclination towards the irrational. The inability of many Gothic characters to overcome perversity by rational thought is quintessential American Gothic.
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