Charles Halloway's Something Wicked This Way Comes

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In Something Wicked This Way Comes we see one stage of development, of the eight Erik Erikson theorized, in Charles Halloway’s character. Charles believes himself to be past the point of any use to his family and to his community. This perception often keeps him from doing things of which he is capable and it is the reason he stays so late at his library rather than be at home with his wife and child. This view is not lost on Will, Charles’ son and the major protagonist of the story, when he says “It made [him] sad and funny to see that light, to know the old man - he stopped to change the word - his father, was here in all this shadow” (Something Wicked 15). It is apparent that Charles wishes he was as young and capable as Will and his friend, …show more content…
An individual’s subconscious represses any information, experience, thoughts, or feelings that would cause the conscious mind anxiety or stress. In the short story, “Carnival of Madness,” repression has escaped from the minds of individuals and into the policies of the government. The main character, William Stendahl, described the process as such:
They passed a law. Oh, it started very small. Centuries ago it was a grain of sand. They began by controlling books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures, there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves. (Pleasure 111)
The government took its role of protecting the people farther than physical security and into the realm of the psychological. It repressed anything it perceived as causing disagreements, biases, fear, or as being unusual or disturbing. In “Carnival of Madness,” William Stendahl throws the very thing that is being repressed into the faces of those who influence and encourage the censorship. He does this by recreating the House of Usher from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and murdering those who encourage the censorship in the same fashion characters die in Poe’s works. The censorship is repression and Mr. Stendhal claws his way through the repression to bring back fear into the
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