EKAM-DICK MORGAN ENGLISH COMMENTARY KH The Fall of the House of Usher, E.A POE As a precursor of romanticism and an earliest devotee of the American movement, Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories are known to make the reader shudder. By exploring the wild and irrational through aesthetics, he conveys a sense of death and decay with Gothic elements such as inclement weather, barren landscape and a skillful use of suspense. The text under study, entitled the Fall of the House of Usher and written in 1839, tells the story of Mr Roderick Usher who resides in a depressing mansion and invites the narrator in the hope he would help him with his troubles. Indeed Mr Usher is borne out of his fear of death which is showed by his decaying sensibilities and sensitivity. Through Mr Usher’s madness, the narrator experiences the horror of a haunted mansion, pervaded by a sense of claustrophobia.
Some of these characters can be understood as reflections of the authors themselves, but they are also faced with everyday temptations and evils. In this essay I will show how these authors understand darkness each in their own way. The darkness prevails in most of Poe's short stories but trough each story Poe changes the shape of the antagonist. Whether it is the nature or human condition, Poe manages to evoke some kind of foresight in reader of what is about to happen. In his stories Ms. Found in a bottle and The oblong box, Poe chooses to present nature as something dark and evil.
His work was famous for gothic mystery. The story focuses on two main characters; Montresor, the narrator, and Fortunato as the unfortunate victim. The narrator introduces his adversary immediately in a disdainful tone in the opening of the story, and without haste suggests Fortunato’s demise. Poe uses symbology to provide the story with a dark and sinister environment. The tone of Montresor in the beginning is important in that it attracts the reader’s attention to a mysterious plot.
Overtime, the novel has become synonymous with gothic literature. “Frankenstein revolutionized the genres of gothic literature … and horror stories” (Mazzeno). Frankenstein exemplifies powerful Gothic elements such as: environment and weather reflecting emotions, a sense of mystery and suspense, supernatural or otherwise inexplicable events, and an unreliable narrator. One of the most iconic and crucial elements of gothic writing in Frankenstein is the way in which Victor’s environment reflects the dark and lonely emotions he experiences throughout his tragic journey. The use of this literary technique first shows when Victor becomes enthralled in his attempt to create a living being.
2011 13 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY INFORMATION ○ ○ Gothicism in“The Fall of the House of Usher ” （ 476000） 【Abstract 】As one of the most controversial figures in American literature, most of Edgar Allan Poe ’s works show factors of Gothicism. By a brief analysis of “The Fall of the House of Usher ”, this paper trys to lead to a better understanding of Edgar Allan Poe and show readers a singular and beautiful flower — Gothic literature, and an extraordinary adventure far away from ordinary life. 【Key words 】Gothicism ；Gothic literature ；Adventure 1 Brief Introduction Poe , Edgar Allan, 1809 -1849, American poet, short -story writer, and critic. He is acknowledged today as one of the most brilliant and original writers in American literature ，at the same time, one of the most controversial figures. In recent years Poe is attracting more and more attention of literary critics.
Both stories comment pessimistically on the direction that our world is moving in from the post-war modernist perspective. Both men looked past the roaring twenties, and realized that this time period was actually a moral wasteland and the ‘valley of ashes’ is a metaphor for the clash of the middle class values and corruptions of the American Dream, (relates back to possible title chosen for the novel, ‘Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires’). T.S. Elliot describes a world in which all hopes and ambitions are lost. He paints a picture that shows this life as a wasteland for the soul; he writes, ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’, portraying dust, similar to Fitzgerald, as something corrupt, creating a sense of foreboding for the society in that era.
The story under consideration is called “The Tell-Tale Heart”. It was written by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was an important American writer of the 19th century who specialized in horror stories and psychological thrillers, and he is often considered one of the forefathers of the gothic genre. And The Tell-Tale Heart is one of these stories. The story is told by an unnamed narrator who insists he is insane He lives with the old man whose “pale-blue, vulture-like” eye disturbs the narrator so much that he makes up his mind to murder the old man.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ is another Gothic text in which the protagonist epitomizes the fears and anxieties of society, similarly reflected in the sketch. The protagonist, the interchangeable Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde both fears and scorns Christianity. The text however, is consistently scattered with religious and biblical allusions, both stated and assumed. Dr Jekyll believes that ‘man is not truly one, but truly two’ (p.84). Through the course of the novel, Jekyll tries to separate the two sides of his personality but something goes wrong, instead of ‘coming forth an angel’ (p.89), Jekyll becomes the fiend Hyde.
The first Gothic Element is setting which is a key aspect in the story; the setting is a unique part of the story because it states the time, place, and circumstances in which a novel takes place, and often it is dark and menacing, to reflect the mood of the novel. The setting with the big castle like houses and the weather with all the wretched delusion and the fact the monster was bought to life in the dreary month of November. Setting helps the reader see a form of imagery or foreshadowing because gothic literature has dark and scary atmosphere, the setting helps the reader understand the story more, in the sense that they feel present in the story. In Frankenstein, the setting of the story is very dark, depressing and mysterious, suitable for the setting of a gothic text. This is shown with lines such as, “It was on a dreary night of November” or, “It was already one in the morning”.
Heather Harris English III Mr. Reeves 31 March 2011 Roderick and His House Edgar Allan Poe is the master of the macabre. His stories are well-remembered for the images of darkness and death they all contain. As a romantic writer, Poe focuses on the emotion and the imagination of dismal situations. In his short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” Edgar Allan Poe personifies the dark decaying “Usher” house as a manifestation of the deteriorating mental, physical, and emotional state of Roderick himself. The story begins with a striking example of personification as the narrator comes upon the “Usher” house.