Violence, Pain, And Violence In Prey By Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allen Poe's, "Masque of the Red Death" also has many gothic themes. A bloody disease called the Red Death has ravaged a country. Prince Prospero thinks he can hide from this plague and throws a ball to celebrate his victory over it. First, Poe uses several words in this play conveying horror such as fatal, bleeding, blood, redness, and chambers, which are all clue to death.

Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Black Cat immerses the reader into the mind of a murdering alcoholic. Poe himself suffered from alcoholism and often showed erratic behavior with violent outburst. Poe is famous for his American Gothic horror tales such as the Tell-Tale Heart and the Fall of the House of Usher. “The Black Cat is Poe’s second psychological study of domestic violence and guilt. He added a new element to aid in evoking the dark side of the narrator, and that is the supernatural world.” (Womack). Poe uses many of the American Gothic characteristics such as emotional intensity, superstition, extremes in violence, the focus on a certain object and foreshadowing lead the reader through a series of events that are horrifying

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.

Gothic literature has been criticized as being a dreary, dark, and death-involving subset of Romanticism (a literary movement accentuating human individuality, imagination, and subjectivity). In addition, gothic lit incorporates several themes- not all about deathly acts - but includes some emotional and surprising themes such as dreams, nightmares, or hallucinations, and grotesque or bizarre occurrences. Two short stories, both written by Edgar Allan Poe, entitled “The Raven,” and “The Black Cat,” as well as the novel The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern, all encompass these gothic elements, found throughout each story.

Richard Matheson, Edgar Allen Poe, and Washington Irving all take advantage of the metaphoric and literal meanings of entrapment and violence in each piece of their gothic literature. In “Prey”, “Black Cat”, and “The Devil and Tom Walker” the authors use entrapment to show how evil finds and can hold us one way or another. Similarly violence is incorporated to portray the dangers of what horror can inflict on one and those associated.

Gothic tales are very dark and disturbing. “The Feather Pillow”, “Prey”, and “The Black Cat” the main character is broken down by events. The pain that they suffer can be connected to their relationships.

The classic short story of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, written by one of the all time masters of horror, Edgar Allen Poe, has always been used as an excellent example of Gothic fiction. Edgar Allen Poe specialized in the art of gothic writing and wrote many stories that portrayed disturbing events and delved deeply into the minds of its characters. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe revolves the plot around a raving individual who, insisting that he is sane, murders an old man because of his` “vulture eye”. The three main gothic elements that are evident in this story are the unique setting, the theme of death and decay, and the presence of madness.

Pre-Write In the novel “Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children” and the short stories The Black Cat, Feather Pillow, and The Raven, the author uses elements that cause a domino effect on each other and cause distress, physically or mentally on the victim. The authors have intricate ways of evoking or emphasizing points they want to get across, and can do it so well they only have to subtly apply it into their works. In all the works, the authors use gothic elements such as psychological issues, monsters, and death to show their prevalence within each other and their level of severity.

Although now seen as the father of the modern horror story, Edgar Allan Poe was previously viewed as a drunken failure. Within Poe’s writings much of his own life riddled with guilt, anxiety, alcohol, depression and death shines through resulting in works that appear unrelated yet once dissected prove similar. This is true for Poe’s works “The Raven” and “The Black Cat”. Poe’s examples of gothic fiction share the use of the color black and a rapid digression of the narrator 's sanity while seemingly unveiling Poe’s internal pain. Despite these similarities, Poe’s works also differ immensely. “The Black Cat” focuses around death while “The Raven” is fixed around discovering the reasoning for a bird 's arrival. Moreover, gothic themes seen within “The Raven” do not necessarily remain constant when compared to “The Black Cat”.

Punching, kicking, cutting, and shooting are all examples of violence. But what is the worst of them all? Murder. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe is a story that depicts how an individual cleverly stalks an old man; only to kill him when the time was right. By using the narrator’s denial of his insanity and his initial motive of the assassination, Poe creates the theme of violence. In The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe uses this motif to portray the evil in everyone, and the guilt that follows these unethical actions.

Gothic Literature is surrounded upon romanticism that involves various emotions. Horror is a relevant and popular theme of emotion in numerous gothic stories including the following literary pieces: “The Black Cat”, “The Feather Pillow”, “A Rose for Emily”, and “Prey”. Authors such as Edgar-Allan Poe, Richard Matheson, William Faulkner and Horacio Quiroga include various gothic elements such as supernatural entities and entrapment that support the idea of horror and fear as well as good versus evil in their literature.

Every genre of literature has distinct themes that weave together all the works classified under that genre, but what makes a work of (Gothic) literature so appeasing to all different types of people? Gothic literature utilizes dark and grotesque themes and phenomena to stir up shock and horror. This genre of literature is tied together by common themes that may include, but are not limited to: psychological issues, fascination with the past, and the pain and suffering inflicted by monsters. These themes are exemplified in: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, “Fall of the House of Usher” by Poe, “Dr. Heidegger's Experiment” Hawthorne, and “Feathered Pillow” by Quiroga as these authors were able to use Gothic elements

Gothic genre in the late 18th century was founded by Horace Walpole’s. He published The Castle of Otranto, in 1764, and has been commonly recognized as the first Gothic novel. In this case, the term Gothic referred to the novel’s medieval setting in a castle in Italy, and many of the Gothic novels that followed would similarly be set in castles from the distant past, often in European countries still dominated (from an English point of view) by the Catholic Church (www.saylor.org). As the genre advanced, Gothic expanded to include all kinds of writings that contained mysteries, from time to time supernatural events; extreme emotions, especially elements of terror; complex plots with heroines imprisoned in ancient castles or abbeys with

Gothic novels rose to popularity because for the English the late 18th and 19th centuries were a time of great discovery and exploration in the fields of science, religion, and industry. The people both revered and questioned the existence of god and the novels produced in this time allowed the people to explore these ideas.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an acknowledged short story writer and an American novelist. Born in July 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, Hawthorne, according to many biographers was a deeply self contained and introspective man who for many years after his graduation from Bowdoin preferred to stay alone in Salem while he learned to write fiction. Eventually he married Sophia Peabody, fathered three children and became a respectable public figure owing to the fact that his writings were being admired in general. In the nineteenth century the American writers were influenced by the age of romanticism, fear and horror. Hawthorne