Edgar Allan Poe wrote haunting tales that explored the dark side of the human mind. One of his most famous works was "The Fall of the House of Usher", published in 1839. The story follows a nameless narrator who visits his friend Roderick Usher, whose twin sister Madeline is ill. Madeline appears to die and is buried within the house, but later claws her way out of her tomb. She collapses on Roderick, killing him as well. The story examines themes of evil, madness, and the decay of the Usher family and house. Poe uses the tale to criticize transcendentalist beliefs in favor of empiricism.

1. American Gothic

2. Gothic Literature
The Beginnings…
 Gothic Literary tradition came to be in
part from the Gothic architecture of the
Middle Ages.
 Gothic cathedrals with irregularly placed
towers, and high stained-glass windows
were intended to inspire awe and fear in
religious worshipers.

3. of small deformed
creatures squatting at
the corners and
crevices of Gothic
cathedrals—were
supposed to ward off
evil spirits, but they
often look more like
demonic spirits
themselves.
•Think of the gargoyle as a
mascot of Gothic, and you
will get an idea of the kind of
imaginative distortion of
reality that Gothic
represents.

4. Gothic vs. Romanticism
Romantic writers celebrated
the beauties of nature.
Gothic writers were peering
into the darkness at the
supernatural.
 Romanticism developed as
a reaction against the
rationalism of the Age of
Reason.
 The romantics freed the
imagination from the hold of
reason, so they could follow
their imagination wherever it
might lead.
 For some Romantics, when
they looked at the individual,
they saw hope (think “A
Psalm of Life”).
 For some Romantic writers,
the imagination led to the
threshold of the unknown—
the shadowy region where
the fantastic, the demonic
and the insane reside.
 When the Gothic's saw the
individual, they saw the
potential of evil.

5. Purpose
• To evoke “terror” versus “horror” in the reader
because of situations bordering reality/unreality
•Often used to teach a message
• May lack a Medieval setting but will develop an
atmosphere of gloom and terror

6. Differentiating between the
two
• Horror
•“An awful
apprehension”
•Described distinctly
•Something grotesque
•So appalling,
unrealistic
•Depends on physical
characteristics
• Terror
•“A sickening realization”
•Suggestive of what will
happen
•Depends on reader’s
imagination
•Sense of uncertainty
•Creates an “intangible
atmosphere of spiritual
psychic dread”

7. Gothic Conventions
Murder Death Suicide Ghosts Demons
Gloomy
settings
Family
secrets
Dungeons Curses Torture
Vampires Spirits Castles Tombs Terror

8. Metonymy of gloom and terror
 Metonymy is a subtype of metaphor, in which
something (like rain) is used to stand for
something else (like sorrow). For example, the
film industry likes to use metonymy as a quick
shorthand, so we often notice that it is raining
in funeral scenes.

9. Note the following metonymies that suggest
mystery, danger, or the supernatural
wind, especially howling sighs, moans, howls, eerie sounds
rain, especially blowing clanking chains
doors grating on rusty hinges gusts of wind blowing out lights
footsteps approaching doors suddenly slamming shut
lights in abandoned rooms crazed laughter
characters trapped in a room baying of distant dogs (or wolves?)
ruins of buildings thunder and lightning

10. Gothic Movement in America
The Gothic Tradition was firmly established in Europe before
American writers had made names for themselves.
By the 19th
century, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathanial Hawthorne, and to
a lesser extent Washington Irving and Herman Melville were using
the Gothic elements in their writing.
Edgar Allan Poe was the master of the Gothic form in the United
States.

11. Gothic aspects
of American Romanticism
 - Naturally American writers could not
avoid references to European
experiences, particularly British romantic
poets and German philosophy.
 - However they succeeded in adapting
them to their own cultural
circumstances. American response to
British Romanticism accelerated in two
directions. One of them was
Transcendentalism.

12. Transcendentalism
 - The "founding father" of Transcendental movement
was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who expressed admiration
for romantic values in his book Nature and essay Self
Reliance. Emerson praised five tenets:
 "intuition is more trustworthy than reason, expressing deeply felt
experience is more valuable than elaborating universal
principles, the individual is at the centre of life and God is at
centre of the individual, nature is an array of physical symbols
from which knowledge of the supernatural can be intuited and we
should aspire to the Ideal, to changing what is to what ought to
be."

13. Dark Romanticism (I)
 - Still Ralph Waldo Emerson had opponents. Edgar
Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville
did not accept his optimistic vision of the world and did
not believe in happy future of mankind.
 - For the sake of pessimistic nature and strong
relationship with Romanticism it was described as Dark
Romanticism. Gothic and romantic writing are closely
related chronologically and share some themes and
characteristics, for example the character of tormented
with pangs of conscience man.

14. Dark Romanticism (II)
 -Most importantly, Gothic as well as Romanticism are
considered as definitive shift from neoclassical ideals
of logic and reason, toward romantic belief in emotion
and imagination. Both are preoccupied with the
individual, the human mind and thus with interior
mental process.
 As Eric Savoy rightly noticed, it shows the other side of
the coin, the nightmare which hides under the
"American dream".

15. Dark Romanticism (III)
 - American Gothic writers did not have spooky old castles,
monasteries and legends like their European "professional
colleagues", but they did have: the frontier, Puritan legacy,
slavery and political utopianism.
 - American Gothic adapted all main conflicts, settings, motifs
and narrative situations, like: the feeling of fear and anxiety,
the gloomy atmosphere, unexplainable, supernatural events
or motif of haunted place.
 - While Transcendentalists were convinced that perfection is
inborn quality of mankind and ignore less praiseworthy
nature of human, Dark Romantics uttered something
completely opposite, meaning that human beings were
equally capable of evil and good, individual is vulnerable to
sin, self-destruction...

16. Edgar Allan Poe
 His stories have:
Settings that featuring
○ Dark, medieval castles
○ Decaying ancient estates
Characters that are
○ Male—insane
○ Female—beautiful and dead (or dying)
Plots that include
○ Murder
○ Live burials
○ Physical and mental torture
○ Retribution from beyond the grave
For Poe, it was only in these extreme situations that people revealed their true
nature.

17. The Gothic dimension of Poe’s
fictional world offered him a way
to explore the human mind in
these extreme situations and so
arrive at an essential truth

18. Nathanial Hawthorne
 He also used Gothic elements in his
work to express what he felt were
essential truths
 Instead of looking at the mind for its
dysfunction, Hawthorne examined the
human heart under conditions of fear,
vanity, mistrust, and betrayal.

19. Nathanial Hawthorne (II)
 - The man's relationship to the natural world as well as
mysterious, disturbing nature of human life also preoccupied
Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the leading writers of his time.
His novel House of Seven Gables constitutes the part of
early American Gothic. It includes many characteristic
features like: fascination with location, reference to the
supernatural, irrational, horrifying events. In The Haunted
Mind Hawthorne wrote:
 "In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the
lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their
existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But
sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, these dark receptacles are flung
wide open. In an hour like his....pray that your grief may slumber."

20. The Scarlet Letter
 Nathaniel Hawthorne liked to explore the theme of sin,
penitence and morality. The best reflection of Hawthorne's
interests makes up his most famous novel The Scarlet
Letter.
 - The plot is set in 19th century Puritan Massachusetts and
presents the story of Hester Prynne, a fallen woman, who
gave birth to a child after an affair. It was really controversial
theme but Hawthorne was not focused on the affair's course
but its effects, like: sin, shame, envy.
 - The Scarlet Letter became one of America's first mass-
published books, thanks to which Hawthorne gained respect
among New England's literary establishment. Nathaniel
Hawthorne soon after that befriended with Herman Melville
(Moby-Dick).

21. Southern Gothic
 After the real horrors of the Civil War,
the Gothic tradition lost its popularity.
 During the 20th
century, it made a
comeback in the American South.
 Authors like William Faulkner, Carson
McCullers, Truman Capote, and
Flannery O’Connor are grouped
together because of the gloom and
pessimism of their fiction.

22. Edgar Allan Poe
During a life marked by pain and loss,
Edgar Allan Poe wrote haunting tales in
which he explored the dark side of the
human mind.
A well-read man with a taste for literature,
Poe was cursed with a morbidly sensitive
nature and made his feelings of sadness
and depression the basis of a distinctive
body of literary work.
The following is a look at the life and work
of a mysterious American master.

23. Marked by Loss
Poe’s Childhood
 Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts in
1809, one of three children born to a couple
who toured the East as actors.
 Before he was three years old, his father
had abandoned the family, and his mother
had died of tuberculosis.
 John and Francis Allan, took Poe to their
home in Richmond, Virginia and became his
foster parents.
With the Allan’s he briefly lived in England, and
continued his education in the United States.

24. A Restless Spirit
Poe’s Writing
 This period in Poe’s life was full of high’s
and lows.
1826, he started at the University of Virginia,
where his reckless habits led to heavy debt,
forcing him to leave school.
He moved to Boston, where he published his first
book, Tamerlane and Other Poems in 1827.
In 1828, he was flat broke and enlisted into the
army. John Allan got him an appointment at West
Point, but he found the school confining and
made sure he was expelled.

25. A Man of Letters
Poe’s Career
 After leaving West Point, he moved to Baltimore to
live with his aunt Maria Clemm and her young
daughter Virginia. There he began writing short
stories.
 In 1834, he moved to Richmond to work for the
Southern Literary Messenger. His reviews in the
Messenger led to increased in the magazine’s
circulation.
 In 1836, Poe married his cousin. Soon after, a
disagreement led to him leaving the Messenger and
moving again, this time to New York City.
 After publishing another short novel, he moved
again searching for work, this time to Philadelphia.

26.  His years in Philadelphia would be Poe’s
most productive.
In 1839 he was the editor of Burton’s Gentlemen’s
Magazine, to which he contributed both reviews
and stories.
His first collection of short stories was published,
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
He was then fired from Burton’s in 1840.
He attempted to begin his own literary magazine,
but it failed.
He accepted an offer as editor of Graham’s
Magazine, where he published his
groundbreaking story The Murders in the Rue
Morgue”
○ The was considered groundbreaking because it was
the first detective story.

27. The real trouble begins
Poe’s trouble vs. success
 Poe was awarded a $100 prize for his
short story “The Gold Bug” published in
1845.
 This brought his the recognition and
success that he had always wanted.
 With the success, he was hit with a
major personal blow; Virginia, who had
been battling illness since 1842, died.

28.  In the years following Virginia’s death,
Poe struggled with despair as well as his
own failing health.
 He moved back to Baltimore in 1849,
where his health declined quickly.
He collapsed on a Baltimore street where he
was taken to a hospital. He died a few days
later.

29. Poe’s Reputation
 Poe’s work generated strong responses. Critics
either loved his work, or they hated it.
 Shortly after his death, a one-time friend published a
biography on Poe.
 This work established the view of Poe as a gifted, but
socially unaccepted writer.
 This tainted his reputation in America for many years.
 Eventually in the United States, his reputation was
regained.
 Today, Poe is recognized as a master of poetry, a
superb writer of short stories, and a profound
explorer of the torments of the human soul.
 He wrote only one novel, around 50 poems, and 70
short stories.

30. New fictions / New
realities
 Poe also introduced of a new form of short fiction—the
detective story—in tales featuring the Parisian crime
solver C. Auguste Dupin. The detective story follows
naturally from Poe’s interest in puzzles, word games, and
secret codes, which he loved to present and decode in
the pages of the Messenger to dazzle his readers. The
word “detective” did not exist in English at the time that
Poe was writing, but the genre has become a
fundamental mode of twentieth-century literature and
film. Dupin and his techniques of psychological inquiry
have informed countless sleuths, including Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Raymond
Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.

31. Timeline of Poe’s Work
1809
Poe was born
on January
19th
1827
Poe published
Tamerlane and
Other Poems
1831
Expelled from
West Point
Publishes Poems
1839
Poe published Tales
of Grotesque and
Arabesque including
“The Fall of the
House of Usher”
1841
Poe wrote “The
Murders of Rue
Morgue”
1845
Poe published
“The Raven”
1847
Poe dies in
Baltimore on
October 7th
1836
Poe married
Virginia
Clemm

32. The Fall of the House of
Usher (1939)
 A woman returns from the dead in “The Fall of the
House of Usher.” The story’s narrator is summoned
by his boyhood friend Roderick Usher to visit him
during a period of emotional distress. The narrator
discovers that Roderick’s twin sister, Madeline, is
also sick. She takes a turn for the worse shortly
after the narrator’s arrival, and the men bury
Madeline in a tomb within the house. They later
discover, to their horror, that they have entombed
her alive. Madeline claws her way out, collapsing
eventually on Roderick, who dies in fear.

33. Empiricism and
Transcendentalism
 The novel was inspired by two factors: Empiricism and
Transcendentalism.
 Poe's opposition toward the transcendental believes is obvious
here, every element of his novel confirms his convictions:
 the main characters
 environment
 house.
 Roderick Usher represents central transcendental views:
morbid sharpness of senses, connection with the "oversoul."
 Poe uses Ushers to prove his point, he shows that there is
no brightness and goodness only blackness and evil.

34. Interpretations
 Interpretation #1 - Roderick attempts to murder his
sister and sends for the narrator to strengthen him
in the days leading up to it.
 Interpretation #2 - The narrator is insane.
 Interpretation #3 - The decay surrounding the
house has poisoned the air, causing bodily illness to
all who wander near its environs (this may be a
plausible explanation for the narrator's possible
madness).
 Interpretation #4 - Everything happens just like the
narrator tells us.

35. Main themes
 Evil - Evil has haunted Roderick and the Usher
family for generations. The root of the evil is not
spelled out specifically, although incest between
Roderick and his "tenderly beloved sister" is
suggested. Throw in the family tree never putting
forth an "enduring branch" and that the "entire family
lay in a direct line of descent" and incest is obvious.
The debilitating physical and mental faculties of
Roderick Usher are most likely the result of such
relationships.

36. Main themes
 Madness - Roderick and Madeline demonstrate tell-
tale signs of madness--anxiety, nervousness,
depression. Madeline suffers from catalepsy, a
symptom of nervous disorders such as
schizophrenia, hysteria, alcoholism, and brain
tumors, that causes long periods of
unconsciousness. The narrator also demonstrates
signs of madness as catalogued above. Roderick
and Madeline's isolation contributes to their
madness.

37. Study Questions
 How does Poe portray the motif of the
doppelganger, or character double, in
“The Fall of the House of Usher”?
 How does Poe use setting as a Gothic
element in “The Fall of the House of
Usher”?
 How does Poe portray family in “The Fall
of the House of Usher”?
 Poe’s language