LITR 4232: American
Renaissance
Online Student's Assignments
Poe’s Gothic Descriptions
While Emerson wrote about nature in a very complimentary way, Poe uses
nature as a way to embody the gothic in his stories.
Emerson’s appreciation for nature makes it seem like a beautiful dream
and Poe makes nature seem like “The Blair Witch Project”.
He makes nature seem evil, even frightening.
A presenter in 2002 said that, “This representation of the thwarted
romantic pursuits of man in nature contrasts with that of Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s romantic view of nature from page 1517, which almost speaks directly
to Poe’s weary man. Here Emerson consoles man’s need of renewal and
transcendence from a progressing human world as he tells him that the stars were
made to help him rise above his physical surroundings, and that they appear all
the more great against a man made environment.”
Poe’s character, on the other hand, seems to sink into his
surroundings. His surroundings are
always gothic and depressing and his main character is a gothic and
depressed/depressing man.
Poe
seems to be particularly concerned with water in his writings.
He uses adjectives to make the water appear as a gothic entity.
For example, water is “shadowy” in Romance,
“melancholy”, “lurid”, and “less hideously serene” in City
in the Sea. He also uses water
to add to the gothic atmosphere in “The Fall of the House of Usher”.
The house appears much more sinister when he is looking at it through the
reflection in the water. It is almost as though his characters in their melancholy
depression seem to be drawn to water. He
uses descriptions of gothic architecture and decaying buildings to add to the
gothic feel of his writings, but he always seems to use water as a large factor
for the gothic atmosphere.
He also uses water in his theme of desire and loss. In "Ligeia" Lady Ligeia who he loves and loses lives in a “decaying city near the Rhine”. He moves away from the decaying city and suffers from desire and loss yet again in a monastery that does not appear to be anywhere near water, but he does not have the same kind of history and love for Lady Rowena as he did for Ligeia. She can die in the monastery and it does not matter. She was not important enough to him to die near the water, which Poe writes about almost as if it is an evil entity. He also has Annabel Lee living in a “kingdom by the sea”. She also dies and is not forgotten by the narrator even after she is put “in her tomb by the sounding sea”. The women who his characters love deeply and then lose always seem to have some sort of connection to the sea.
In
a final exam from last year, a student wrote that, “This technique, as you
stated in class, relocates the Gothic space to the mind itself and only needs a
place to project it. In other words, a change in the surrounding environment or
nature correlates to a change in the state of mind of the character or even the
reader.” When the narrator moves
from the “decaying city by the Rhine” to the monastery in “Ligeia”, he
seems to become much more depressed and insane.
He is depressed over the death of Ligeia, but his surroundings, the
monastery in an uninhabitable land, seem to heighten his insanity, and the
reader knows that the narrator is going to go insane.
His surroundings seem to give his insanity credibility. He is not merely going insane because he lost his wife,
he is going insane because he was destined to go insane.