Examples Of Gothic Literature In The Fall Of The House Of Usher

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a great example of Gothic Literature because of the way the story was

To properly convey these complex themes, Poe employed the use of the Gothic Tradition. That is to say, he used elements such as the supernatural, and traditional gothic settings to create a mood in his story to help the reader become immersed in the story. The Fall Of The House Of Usher is told in the first person, with a nameless narrator who is never properly described. This helps the reader to feel part of the story, as it is as if they are listening to themselves describing the story. Poe has also set the story in a very claustrophobic way, including

Poe’s ‘The Fall of The House of Usher’ express gothic completely immersed in madness and darkness while ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ limits the decent madness of woman but shows the depression and gloominess of the character.

Various authors develop their stories using gothic themes and characterizations of this type to lay the foundation for their desired reader response. Although Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Peter Taylor’s “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time” are two completely different narratives, both of these stories share a commonality of gothic text representations. The stories take slightly different paths, with Poe’s signifying traditional gothic literature and Taylor approaching his story in a more contemporary manner.

Poe’s use of foreshadowing, the act of providing hints of future actions, in “The Fall of the House of Usher” foretells the “death” of Madeline Usher, along with her grandiose return. “She succumbed (as her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer”. The "destroyer" here is Roderick Usher, referring to the end of the story, when he buries his sister alive. Poe uses foreshadowing again when Roderick “stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight, in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building”. By “preserving” Madeline’s corpse, Roderick leads the audience, as well as the narrator, to believe that she is still alive, thus giving her the ability to “rise from the dead”.

The main themes of Edgar Allan Poe’s works are death, perversity, revenge and destruction. The settings he employed in the given short stories, especially in The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat are Gothic. Therefore, naturally the mood of these stories would be dark and sepulchral. However, this is not a trivial employment undertaken to put the reader in a certain kind of zone.

In fact, the first five paragraphs of "The Fall of the House of Usher" are devoted to creating a gothic atmosphere. An ancient, decaying castle paints an eerie, moldy picture. The surrounding moat seems stagnant and sullen. The time period also ties into this mood. It's autumn and the weather is cool and dreary. How many horrors take place in the daytime? Not many, and this story is no different. It's dark, or at least semi-dark. Immediately Poe entraps the reader. There is a sense of being confined within the walls of the Usher house. Outside a storm is raging and inside there are mysterious rooms where windows suddenly whisk open, blowing out candles. Creaking and moaning sounds fill the air. The wind is whipping, and the landscape is barren. This is gothic writing and these are its trappings. The darkness of everything symbolizes death to come. Upon entering the gothic archway of the deteorating mansion, the narrator is led "through many dark and intricate passages" filled with "somber tapestries" and "ebon blackness". Over everything, Poe drapes his atmosphere of sorrow and irredeemable gloom. He evokes his primary effect, the anticipation that some fearful event will soon transpire.

Edgar Allen Poe's Use of Gothic Setting in The Fall of the House of Usher

In the text “The Fall of the House of Usher” there are supernatural events throughout the short story. From the rapidly decaying house that is quite literally connected to the main character Roderick Usher, to the ghost of Roderick's twin sister Madeline. “House of Usher” -- an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion. This line gives us a hint from the title toward the supernatural link between the physical house collapsing and the metaphorical “fall” of the Usher Family. I believe Edgar Poe did this to evoke an uncanny feeling in the reader and to add to the sublime of the short story. This link between living and inanimate gives the story an extra gothic element. “There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold -- then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.” The supernatural element of Madeline “coming back from the dead” or being a ghost creates conflict within the plot and therefore leads to the inevitable fall of the Usher Family. I believe this ghostly figure struck fear into the reader creating a suspenseful follow up, allowing the imagination to take off and picture this supernatural occurrence. This was never an explained supernatural event. It was left up to the reader's imagination and their assumption as to what is real and what is a figment of the characters imagination. “There was a long and

The gothic literary movement is a part of the larger Romantic Movement. Gothic literature shares many of the traits of romanticism, such as the emphasis on emotions and the imagination. Gothic literature goes beyond the melancholy evident in most romantic works, however, and enters into the areas of horror and decay, becoming preoccupied with death. “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe is a powerful example of gothic fiction, whereas James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans serves as the romantic predecessor, illustrating the differences and the similarities between romantic and gothic literature.

“A Stranger in this Century”: An Analysis of Sexuality in Gothic Literature of the Nineteenth Century Demonstrated in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” Edgar Allan Poe is regarded as the father of the short story with a dark romantic style rooted in the Gothic mode. Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century was about “reaching into some undefinable world beyond fictional reality” (Haggerty 10) in order to comment and critique the society in which the author lived in. This concept suggests that sexuality was used within the Gothic as an attempt to “rewrite the psychic reality” (10) in order to shift the “range and complexity of cultural control” (10) as a means to challenge the status quo and to expand upon Gothic’s own influence

Pearing through the lense of different perspectives of criticism allows new light to be shined on elements of literature that readers may not have considered before. Analyzing Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” through the biographical perspective allows readers to recognize the similarities between the short story and Poe’s life. The biographical perspective shows the house symbolizing tuberculosis that was a motif in Poe’s life and the use of inbreds in “The Fall of the House of Usher” parallels Poe’s life of marrying his cousin.

Gothicism, a style of writing that developed from Romanticism, is evident today in many literary mediums such as novels and movies, but it had its origins centuries earlier with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1765 (Melani, 2002). The gothic novel was written to thrill and terrify readers with eerie settings and supernatural events. This genre would come to influence one of America’s most iconic authors and the father of the American short story: Edgar Allen Poe. The influence of the Gothic tradition in the works of Edgar Allen Poe, especially in “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado” is evident through his use of eerie settings, horror/terror, development of the main character, and common themes seen throughout his work.

“The Fall of the House of Usher (1939)”, arguably Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous short story, is a tale centered around the mysterious House of Usher and its equally indiscernible inhabitants. These subjects are plagued with physical and mental degradation – the Usher siblings suffer from various abnormal ailments and unexplained fears, while the house itself seems to be tethering on the edge of collapse. The gothic elements in the story are distributed generously, and the plot is increasingly ridden with the supernatural as it progresses.

The twenty first century author Alexandra Iftodi Zamfir (1986- ) argues that “architecture and settings are more important in Gothic fiction than in any other type of literature…all architectural elements are closely connected with Gothic protagonists and the plot.” (Zamfir. 2011: 15). This critical essay will first consider and analyse this statement and investigate the style, language and form of the American author Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809-1849) macabre and Gothic fictional prose The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) (Poe. 1987: 1). I shall present and argue how the artistic effects deployed in the narrative structure create an atmosphere of tension and suspense, through the exploration of architectural space demonstrated in a close