爱伦坡及其作品中的哥特式元素

爱伦坡及其作品中的哥特式元素Poe and Gothic Elements in His

Works

Abstract: The Gothic tradition plays an important role in English and American literature, and many writers have inherited the writing tradition in their novels. This paper

analyzes the influence of the Gothic tradition on the creation of Poe’s famous

Gothic stories which contain Gothic elements in many aspects, including themes,

characters, environment, details and climaxes and so on. At the same time, Poe

adds disintegrating mentality and fresh energy into the old form of Gothic

tradition. What’s more, he endows the characters with complicated

psychological description which makes the old Gothic form perfect. He makes

his Gothic stories imitate the Gothic technique successfully and adds something

new to Gothic tradition as well. As a result his Gothic stories maintain the

unique and everlasting artistic charm in the literature.

Key words: Edgar Allan Poe; Gothic Novels; Gothic Tradition; Improvement

摘要：哥特式传统在英美文学的创作中扮演着非常重要的角色，许多作家都把这一传统用到他们的作品中。本文旨在分析哥特式传统在爱伦·坡的著名哥特式

小说中的运用与影响。这些著作在主题、人物、环境的描述以及细节和情节

的刻画方面都运用了哥特式的协作方法。爱伦·坡将分裂的心理和新鲜的能

量注入旧的哥特式形式，并赋予小说中的人物畸形的心理刻画使其与传统的

哥特式完美结合。他在巧妙地运用哥特式传统的同时又增添了新的元素，使

得他的哥特式小说在世界文学艺术中保持着持久的魅力。

关键词：爱伦·坡；哥特式小说；哥特式传统；传承

Contents

I.An Introduction to the Gothic Tradition and Its Influence on

Literature (1)

A. The origin of Gothic tradition and its development (1)

B. The beginning of Gothic novel (2)

C. The characteristics of Gothic novel (3)

II.A Brief Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe and His Gothic Novels (3)

III.Gothic Depiction Plays a Key Role in Poe’s Gothic Works (5)

A. Gothic application to the description of environment (5)

B. Gothic application to the creation of c haracters’ disintegrating m ind (6)

C. Gothic application to the device of climax (7)

IV.Edgar Allan Poe’s Improvement on the Gothic Tradition (7)

V.Conclusion (9)

Works Cited (10)

Ⅰ. An Introduction to the Gothic Tradition and Its Influence on Literature

A. The origin of Gothic tradition and its development

The term “Gothic” admittedly,originated from a confluence of history and architecture. The Goths were a northern Germanic European people whose ways and beliefs differed largely from those of Greco-Roman classical civilization farther south. So to the southern outlook, the Goths were wholly uncivilized and barbarous. They were absorbed by Christianity, brought a unique architectural and artistic sensibility. Gradually, “Gothic style” becomes the representive style of “The Middle Age” in Europe (Hayes 73). The Gothic architecture is always very strange and eccentric, high and broad, and with a heavy atmosphere of religion. It is not only frequently associated with architecture, and it can also be applied to sculpture, panel painting, illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, jewellery and textiles produced in that period.

The Gothic style expressed the essence of the Catholic faith, concerned with creating a sense of the numinous, of the presence of God, while still incorporating older Pagan (nature-worship) symbolism: gargoyles, elemental spirits whose purpose was to ward off evil.

However, the term “Gothic” was never actually applied to any of these art forms until after “The Dark Ages” was over. With the arrival of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, anything medieval came to be seen as backward and primitive, associated with brutality, superstition and feudalism. Gothic was therefore used derisively until a revival of interest in everything medieval occurred in the mid-to-late 18th century.

In the 18th century, the novel was coming into its own as an established literary form, many novelists began to look to older, oral and Romantic traditions (e.g. the Arthurian legends) as a literary source—essentially, a reaction against ideas of the Enlightenment and realistic literary conventions. Romanticism was a literary genre preferring grandeur, picturesqueness, passion, and extraordinary beauty. Like the Gothic art style, Romanticism was considered the opposite of classical, and also particularly medieval in character. The Gothic novel, distinctive for its fascination with the horrible, the repellent, the grotesque and the supernatural, in combination with many of the characteristics of the Romantic novel, was (and still is) seen by some critics as a sub-genre of Romanticism, and by others as a genre in its own right (Snyder 212).

B. The beginning of Gothic novel

The Gothic novel began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), which was enormously popular and quickly imitated by other novelists and soon became a recognizable genre. To most modern readers, however, The Castle of Otranto is a dull reading. Except for the villain Manfred, the characters are insipid and flat; the action moves at a fast clip with no emphasis or suspense. But contemporary readers found the novel electrifyingly original and thrillingly suspenseful, with its remote setting, its use of the supernatural, and its medieval trappings, all of which have been so frequently and poorly imitated that they have become stereotypes. The genre takes its name from Otranto’s medieval or Gothic—setting. Early Gothic novelists tended to set their novels in remote times like “the Middle Ages” and in remote places like Italy or the Middle East (Hayes 75).

C.The characteristics of Gothic novels

What makes a work Gothic is a combination of at least some of these elements:

? a castle, ruined or intact, haunted or not (the castle plays such a key role that it has been called the main character of the Gothic novel);

? a curious heroine with a tendency to faint and a need to be rescued—frequently;

? a hero whose true identity is revealed by the end of the novel;

? a passion-driven, willful villain-hero or villain;

?dungeons, underground passages, crypts, and catacombs which, in modern houses

become spooky basements or attics;

?extreme landscapes, like rugged mountains, thick forests, or icy wastes, and extreme weather;

?horrifying (or terrifying) events or the threat of such happenings;

?labyrinths, dark corridors, and winding stairs;

?magic, supernatural manifestations, or the suggestion of the supernatural;

?omens and ancestral curses;

?ruined buildings which are sinister or which arouse a pleasing melancholy;

?shadows, a beam of moonlight in the blackness, a flickering candle, or the only source of light failing (a candle blown out or, today, an electric failure);

The Gothic creates feelings of gloom, mystery, and suspense and tends to the dramatic and the sensational, like incest, diabolism, necrophilia, and nameless terrors. It crosses boundaries, mixed daylight and the dark side, life and death, consciousness and

unconsciousness. Sometimes covertly, sometimes explicitly, it presents transgression, taboos, and fears— fears of violation, of imprisonment, of social chaos, and of emotional collapse. Most of us immediately recognize the Gothic elements (even if we don’t know the name) when we encounter it in novels, poetry, plays, movies, and TV series. To some readers— safely experiencing dread or horror is thrilling and enjoyable.

Gothic fiction, the frightening and horrifying stories of various kinds have been told in all ages, but the tradition confusingly designated as “Gothic”is a distinct modern development in which the characteristic theme is the stranglehold of the past upon the present, or the encroachment of the “dark”age of oppression upon the “enlightened”modern era (Drabble 422). In Gothic romances and tales this theme is embodied typically in enclosed and haunted settings such as castles, crypts, convents, or gloomy mansions, in images of ruin and decay, and in episodes of imprisonment, cruelty, and persecution. From those sources the first master of America Gothic writing, Poe, developed a more intensity hysterical style in Gothic stories.

Gothic elements have made their way into mainstream writing. They are found in Sir Walter Scott’s novels, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and in Romantic poetry like Samuel Coleridge’s “Christabel” Lord Byron’s “The Giaour” John Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes”,etc.. A tendency to the macabre and bizarre which appears in writers like William Faulkner, Truman Capote, and Flannery O’Connor has been called Southern Gothic (Hayes 74).

Ⅱ. A Brief Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe and His Gothic Novels

Poe, novelist and poet, is one of the most important figures of American literature in nineteenth century. His life experience and hard writing career stamped a direct and deep influence in his creating of short stories and poems, the main literary forms, both of them are not the reflection of the real world, but the imagination of him. Most of them are Gothic novels with decadent content, eccentric and abnormal psychological characters, and the plot of death and decadence.

Usually the basic tone of them is negative and oppressive, filled with mysteries. The ancient eccentric castles, decadent temples or abbeys and the ghastly crypts are always the happening places of his Gothic novels.

His heroes often present as crazy noble, the murder who tortured himself, the weak neurotic man who addicted in the corpses and death, or the man with abnormal psychology. These abnormal heroes and heroines were locked in the terrible castles, abbeys, crypts or

inner world, and standing various kinds of pain and horror.

Poe’s Gothic novels show, though carefully crafted symbols, complex characters in deep psychological states. The symbols are rays of light that Poe casts on those hidden, deep recesses of the human mind. Often, the stories gain added complexity and sophistication because of Poe’s use of complex narrators. In order to show the details of their psychological states, Poe did his best to place the characters in a special situation to enhance the force of his works.

What’s more, his characters own an alter ego or a double, thus signifying the incompleteness and the self-loathing part of an individual. Sometimes the characters try to escape from or destroy or bury the part of the self which is represent as the double, the annihilation of the double or the half of one’s half, leads to the destruction of the other half, thus to the self-destruction(Tong 117-118).

Actually, the Gothic novels originated from the late eighteenth century in England, after 1920s, its core position transferred to America, among them, the novels written by Poe are the most famous (Wei 1). He is a famous novelist, his works impacted deeply on many European and American writers. He is good at depicting the horrible scenes and the morbid psychology.

When it comes to Poe, a famous American novelist, no one can ignore his Gothic Novels. What, however, contributes to the author’s success of those works? There are two main reasons.

One is the environmental impact on the author’s growth. Poe was born in a poor travel actor’s family; his parents died when he was only three years old. This sudden death probably warped him for the rest of life. He was taken into the home of John Allan, a successful and ambitious Richmond merchant. Because of lack of parents’ love, especially father’s love, and the conflicts between his foster-father, he lived a lonely life which made him eccentric to the society. And his character was full of contradictions, naturally stubborn and willful, gloomy, indignant and intolerant. He, however, had a strong and creative brain filled with eccentric but depressed mighty. Poe was endowed with the unique imagination which a novelist must have. And both his character and his mind were with Gothic color which can be seen in “William Wilson”.

Another is the impact of the author’s morbid love affection. Poe had an unhappy childhood during which time he had senses of inferiority, timidness, introversion, and precocity. During school time, he felt more and more insecure and estrange from his schoolmates for his lowly origin and more and more antagonistic to Mr. Allan out of love for his sick foster-mother—a standard Oedipus relationship. Being a passionate boy, while

still at school, he fell in love with a beautiful young mother of one of his friends—Mr. Stanard. After that, he married a thirteen-year-old child wife Virginia who was fatally ill and died in her 23. In “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”, we can easily find the influence of his morbid love affection. All his life he craved love and tenderness, but was doomed to lose in turn all the women he loved. When he reached a sheltered childhood and adolescence he encountered nothing but failures and denials.

Ⅲ. Gothic Depiction Plays a Key Role in Poe’s Gothic Novels

“T he permanent charm of literature usually is the most unique and the most inconceivable works and that those can make people feel greatly mysterious, instead of those of the most extensive living space and the most profound scale”(Cecil. D. 162). Because of Gothic depiction, Poe’s Gothic novels can be. And the peculiar effect caused by the depiction is clearly reflected in his writing.

A. Gothic application to the description of environment

Poe’s stories in Gothic novels almost happened in a hellish environment. In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, When “I”saw the melancholy house of Usher, “a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit”, “bleak wall”, “the vacant eye-like windows”, “decayed trees” and “mansion of gloom”. When entering the house, what the reader see are “dark and intricate passages”, “the somber tapestries of the wall”, “the ebon blackness of the floor, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies” (Li 175-180). All the things what he saw paved the way of Gothic effect to the readers and make them feel that there is a kind of “pestilent and mystic vapor”over the house of Usher. Poe applied a lot of rhetorical devices to show the horrible environment, for instance, at the beginning of the story, he used alliteration, such as “during, dull, dark, day, dreary, drew”, in which many voiced consonant “d”to strengthen the heavy atmosphere. And with the readers’imagination, or the visual effect, the sentences show the time, place and background to the readers clearly. Without telling story, the horrible and ghastly effects have been already for readers.

In “Ligeia”, “I”met Ligeia most frequently in “some large, old and decaying city near the Rhine”. Her family is “remotely ancient”. After Ligeia’s death, “I”, in order to be far away from the sorrow of losing loved woman, purchased “one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England”, “gloomy and grandeur of the building” (Li 2-13). The stylistic Gothic environments contribute a more terror and more expectable plot of the

story. That is really a good way to attract people.

Almost his Gothic stories took place or developed under such atmosphere: dim, ghastly, mysterious and horrible-stricken, such as “The Black Cat”, “The Masque of the Red Death”. This kind of natural environment can further deepen the smell of mystery and gloomy which can create a charming and blood-curding atmosphere.

Poe’s Gothic stories set in a mysterious and horrible environment both in the real nature environment and the inner movement of the characters, the author described a strange and a nameless terror for us. While reading those stories, you will be absorbed in the terror atmosphere which the author created.

B. Gothic application to the creation of c haracters’ disintegrating mind

The characters described in Poe’s Gothic novels belong to Gothic mode. Another look at “The Fall of the House of Usher” will reveal it is interesting in more ways than one. Here in the decaying, disintegrating house lived a sister and a brother. Roderick Usher, the brother, is very much a Poe’s character. He knows every turn of his own disintegrating mind. At beginning, he was so sensitive that he can hear the sound which his sister made in the coffin. But he suffered the terrible sound rather than saved his sister for that he can not make himself believe he had buried his sister in the coffin alive. So, on one hand, deep in his mind he was sad, nervous and horrible, on the other hand, he was more horrible to acknowledge the fact that his sister in the coffin alive. At last, at a stormy night, the sister broke the coffin and came out died in the embrace of his brother who also died at the same time.

Approaching the theme from a slightly different point of view is the story “William Wilson”. The namesake schoolmate of William Wilson is in the point of fact his double, and Wilson’s mind refuses to acknowledge what he really is until it is totally disintegrated. “Ligeia” is a good case in the point, too. The narrator was so obsessed with the death of his first wife that he can not see his second wife except in the guise of his first wife Ligeia. More than that, even his vision is reflected in the eyes of his first wife: there is no sense of reality except as he knows it from her.

“The Tell-Tale Heart”, a tale of murder, tends to present the internal disintegration in an exterior way. The narrator-murder is obviously a schizophrenic, to whom the eyes of the victim prove to be intolerable. On one hand, the murder-narrator does not hate the old man, even love him for he thought that “he had never wronged me”, and “he had never given me insult”, while, on the other hand, the murder-narrator can not stand the “vulture-a pale blue eye, with a film over it”. That is just one case to show his

disintegrating mind. We can also see it in the end of the story that he was too proud of not being found guilty to keep the corpse under the floor. “The Black Cat”is an incisive inquiry into the capacity of the human mind to originate its own destruction (Chang 112).

Those tales turn on the central theme that the human mind would not be healthy and alive if it was incapable of thought, but since it is a mind and does possess the power of introspection and self-knowledge, then that very power and knowledge spell its death. Poe’s greatness lies in the fact that he anticipated these developments as no one else did and influences modern life and literature in a profound way.

C. Gothic application to the device of climax

In terms of the climax of stories, Gothic novels are always full of mystery, terror and violence, and it is always at the end of story. In Poe’s Gothic novels, we can easily find the climaxes. For instance, in “The Fall of the House of Usher”, it is at the end that we gradually understand why Roderick Usher is so frightened and nervous after his sister’s death for that he knows his sister was buried in the coffin alive and was struggling in the coffin. At last, on a stormy night, his sister, in white robe with blood on it, “trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold-then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily in ward upon the person of her brother, and in her horrible and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had dreaded” (Li 229). The last scene of the story may be the most tragic and horrible one throughout the whole story.

And in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, at the end of the story, the climax comes. The murder-narrator’s emotion becomes over-glad and over-proud, at the end it arrives at the highest point. He is even proud to point out the place where the old man’s corpse is and show the beating heart. Through the author’s psychological describe of the murder-narrator do we know the change of the story.

“Ligeia”, Poe also shows us the Gothic climax at the end of the story. During the terrible night, I saw the body became vigorously three times. At the last time, “the corpse of Rowena once again stirred”and “more vigorous”, even “stood bodily and palpably before me”. I was too afraid to move until I found that Rowena grown taller since her malady. I reached her feet and discovered she was not Rowena but Ligeia who had already died long time ago!

Ⅳ. Poe’s Improvement on the Gothic Tradition

From the above analyses, we can see that Poe’s works contain a lot of Gothic

elements. In writing his remarkable horror stories, Poe touches on nerves that still quiver today. His writing is viewed as highly revelatory of the darkest elements of human nature. Poe’s tales “are a concatenation of cause and effect,” observes D. H. Lawrence. “His best pieces, however, are not tales. They are more. They are ghastly stories of the human soul in its disruptive throes” (Li 2). However, Poe does not only imitate the Gothic tradition; instead, he uses this form innovatively to describe the romantic story occurring in his times. What’s more, he goes further than the Gothic tradition. This is shown in two following aspects:

Firstly, Poe brings the usage of complex narrators into the Gothic form to show the different views and insights of stories. That makes readers feel closer to the plot of the horrible stories. In “The Black Cat”, that is “I” who tell the whole story. Based on what “I”said, the readers can easily understand the procedures how the narrator became an insane murder from an animal lover. The nameless narrator details the long, slow, brutal destruction of his home life, loved cat, even his loved wife at his own hands and offers us a parade of violent acts. Eye gouging, hanging, axing – these are the gruesome highlights. “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Ligeia” are also written in the first person, and also show the same effect in the depicting of Gothic plot. By tapping into our deepest fears and anxieties, the unnamed narrators never fail to chill us to the very marrow of our bones. Most Poe’s narrators are “unreliable” first person narrators. This doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t show up when they say they will, bu t rather that they either can’t or won’t tell us what “really” happened. In“The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator is trying to prove his sanity, and also admits that due to his intensely powerful sense of hearing, “he can hear all things in the heaven and in the earth and many things in hell” (Li 55). So, he isn’t gripping reality very tightly, due in part to a sick mind, and in another part to a sick body. On occasion, he also pretends to be an omniscient narrator. He tells us how the old man feels and what the old man is thinking. “Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror”, “I knew the sound well”, “Many a night, it has welled up from my own bosom” (Li 57). T he narrator’s insight into the man’s head is just a reflection of his own experience. Yet, he’s probably right. In this moment he humanizes both himself and the man through empathy.In “William Wilson”, William Wilson – or should we say, the man who pretends to be called William Wilson – is no different from the unreliable narrators. For starters, he’s willingly masking his identity. Then you have to remember that he himself doesn’t really understand what’s going on in his story; his imagination has convinced him that his conscience, alter ego actually are a totally different person.

Secondly, he adds disintegrating mentality and fresh energy into this old form.

Because of these, his Gothic novels show the unique and everlasting artistic fascination in the world of literature for a long time. Poe’s greatest achievement lies in the area of psychological narrative. In “William Wilson”, Poe applied the interior monologue way to show character’s inner world, while at the same time show Wilson’s confusing and angry to readers clearly. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the murder’s psychological activities show clearly why he killed the old man who he did not hate even love. Through the whole story, the murder’s emotion changes with his inner world. T he fixation on the old man’s vulture-like eye forces the narrator to concoct a plan to eliminate the old man. The narrator confesses the sole reason for killing the old man is his eye: “Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees - very gradually - I made up my mind to rid myself of the eye for ever”(Li 59).

Those stories are such a small part of one of America’s most enigmatic literary giant.

A complicated individual, Poe was characterized by a wide range of incompatible traits; his reputation among his literary peers varied a great deal, too. He was unquestionably a man of culture, yet surprisingly on target in his view of literary reputations, he was possessed of old-fashioned Southern courtesy, but he was notoriously hard to get along with, finicky, and often extreme in his judgments. Walt Whitman is the only major American man of letters who attended a memorial service for Poe in the 1870s. Although he was Poe’s virtual opposite, Whitman had a surprising grasp of Poe’s genius.

Ⅴ. Conclusion

From what have been mentioned above, we can easily find Poe followed the Gothic tradition and applied Gothic technique perfectly so that his Gothic novels contain a lot of Gothic elements. What’s more, he brought the old Gothic form to a new height not only by transcending also reforming it in many ways. Although the Gothic form was not treated as an important literature genre in Poe’s time, he wrote many famous Gothic novels which are still popular today. His Gothic works have been accepted by the social standard and rational judgments. Poe broke away from the traditional form of social novels in his own time and found the best way to express violence and fervid emotion.

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Snyder, James. Medieval Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture--4th-14 Century. New York: Abrams, 1989.

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李华田. 丽姬娅[M].武汉: 武汉测绘科技大学出版社, 2000.

肖明翰. 英美文学中的哥特传统[J]. 外国文学评论,2001(3):59-64.