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3. EDGAR ALLAN POE:
THE MAN,
HIS LIFE,
HIS STORIES

4. mystery
The metonymy
of gloom and
horror:
Wind
Doors &hinges
Light in dark
rooms
Characters
trapped in a room
Ruins of buildings
Thunder &
lightning
Crazed laughter
Distant dogs
/wolves baying
Eerie sounds
rain
Distressed
Women &
tyrannical
male
The
vocabulary of
the gothic:
Mystery
Fear, Terror&
Sorrow
Surprise
Haste
Anger
Largeness
Darkness
Supernatural or
otherwise
inexplicable
events
overwrought
emotion
Omens,
portents,
visions
An atmosphere of
mystery and
suspense.
An ancient
prophecy
Setting in a
castle
The fallen
hero
Catholicism
Vs
Anglicanism
Melodrama and
sensationalism
Isolation
Gothic literatureHORACE WALPOLE`S “CASTLE OF OTRANTO” 1764

5. Elements of
Romance
Powerful
love
Uncertainty of
reciprocation
Unreturned
love
Tension between
true love and
father`s control
Lovers
parted
Illicit love or
lust threatens
the virtuous
one
Rival lovers
or multiple
suitors

6. Main focus of Gothic Literature:
Deterioration
Death and dying
Isolation
RestraintDarkness
Alienation
Imprisonment and Inhumanity:
either in the behavior of one person toward another or
within an individual's own selfhood

7. His brief timeline
• 1809: born in Jan. in Boston( Lincoln & Darwin)
• 1810: Parents separate
• 1811: his mother(Elizabeth) dies John Allan adopts him
• 1812-13: dickens is born-Byron writes “the giaour”
• 1815: he goes to school in the UK
• 1818: shelly -Frankenstein & Polidori –vampire
• 1819: Whitman & Melville born. Florida joins the USA
• 1820: He goes back to the states - Florence nightingale born
• 1821:Pasteur , Baudelaire & Dostoevsky born
• 1826:attends the university of Virginia (EDGAR POE)
• 1827:Drops out of the university. "Tamerlane and other Poems“
is published.
• He joins the US army. Beethoven dies
• 1828: sergeant major Poe ! Verne &Tolstoy born.
• 1829:Mrs.Allan dies .Emily Dickinson born. Stories rejected.
1833:financial crisis. John Allan dies. Slavery
banned in England.
Postage stamps invented.
1835:wins a prize for Manuscript in the bottle.
Finds a job. Twain is born.
1836:marries Virginia six years later she gets TB
1839:"Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque",
Poe's first volume of short stories, is published.
Photography is born.
1843-44: wins a 100dillars for the gold bug moves
to NY
1847: Virginia dies. Edison born
1848:Sara Whitman - Sara Elmira Royster
1849: Dies on Oct. 7 in Baltimore

8. His major stories• Berenice (1835)
• The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)
• Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1939)
• Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
• The Masque of the Red Death (1842)
• The Pit and the Pendulum (1842)
• The Black Cat (1843)
• The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)
• The Purloined Letter (1845)
• The Cask of Amontillado (1846)
• The Oval Portrait (1850)
• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1850)

9. Roots of Poe`s Darkness
wom
en
Addicti
on
Wild
imaginatio
n
Early life
societ
y
influences

10. Know the ending before beginning to write
Keep it short (the ‘one-sitting’ rule)
Determine the location
The choice of impression
Choose the tone of the work
Determine the theme and characterization of the work
Establish the climax
POE`S
“PHILOSOPHY OF
COMPOSITION”

11. THEMES
Alienation
love and
hate
Obsession
The double
self
The power of
human resolve
Self vs alter
ego
Power of
the dead
over the
living
Insanity
Vs
rationality
Seclusion

12. SYMBOLS
AND
MOTIFS
EYES
HEART
PREMATURE
BURIAL/
SUFOOCATION
ANIMALS
TIME/
CLOCKS
DREAMS

13. The TALE-TELL HEART
THEMES:
-VERSIONS OF REALITY
-CUNNING AND
CLEVERNESS
-THE HOME
-MORTALITY
-TIME
SYMBOLS:
THE OLD MAN`S EYES
-THE WATCH
-THE LANTERN
-THE BED AND
BEDROOM

14. THE “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No
pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its
Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood.
There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then
profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet
stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the
victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and
from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure,
progress, and termination of the disease, were the incidents
of half an hour.
THE MASQUE OF THE RED
DEATH

15. But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.
When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his
presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the
knights and dames of his court, and with these, retired to the deep
seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive
and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric
yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had
gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and
massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means
neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of
frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such
precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The
external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly
to grieve, or to think.

16. The prince had provided all the appliances of
pleasure. There were buffoons, there were
improvisatory, there were ballet-dancers, there
were musicians, there was Beauty, there was
wine. All these and security were within.
Without was the “Red Death.”
It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth
month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence
raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince
Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a
masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.

17. It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell
of the rooms in which it was held. These were seven—an
imperial suite. In many palaces, however, such suites form a
long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back
nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole
extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different, as
might have been expected from the duke’s love of the bizarre.
The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision
embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp
turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel
effect. To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and
narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which
pursued the windings of the suite.

18. These windows were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance
with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it
opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue—
and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in
its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third
was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was
furnished and lighted with orange—the fifth with white—the sixth with
violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet
tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in
heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this
chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the
decorations. The panes here were scarlet—a deep blood color.

19. Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or
candelabrum, amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay
scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. There was no light of
any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers.
But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to
each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire, that projected its
rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And
thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances.
But in the western or black chamber the effect of the firelight that
streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was
ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the
countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the
company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all.

20. It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the
western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to
and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the
minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be
stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound
which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but
of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour,
the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause,
momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the sound; and
thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was
a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the
chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest
grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over
their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation.

21. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter
at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at
each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and
folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the
next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar
emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes (which
embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the
Time that flies), there came yet another chiming of the
clock, and then were the same disconcert and
tremulousness and meditation as before.

22. But, in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel. The tastes of the
duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for colors and effects. He disregarded the
decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed
with barbaric luster. There are some who would have thought him mad. His
followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to
be sure that he was not.
He had directed, in great part, the movable embellishments of the seven
chambers, upon occasion of this great fête; and it was his own guiding taste which
had given character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There
were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm—much of what has been
since seen in “Hernani.” There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and
appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There
were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of
the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in
the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these—the
dreams—writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild
music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps.

23. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the
velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice
of the clock. The dreams are stiff frozen as they stand. But the echoes of
the chime die away— they have endured but an instant—and a light, half-
subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now again the
music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than
ever, taking hue from the many-tinted windows through which stream the
rays from the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westward of the
seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture; for the night is
waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-colored
panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appalls; and to him whose
foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony
a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears
who indulge in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.

24. But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly
the heart of life. And the revel went willingly on, until at length there commenced
the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have
told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy
cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be
sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of
thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among
those who reveled. And thus too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last
echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many
individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence
of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual
before. And the rumor of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly
around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur,
expressive of disapprobation and surprise—then, finally, of terror, of horror, and
of disgust

25. In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no
ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade license of
the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone
beyond the bounds of even the prince’s indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts
of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to
whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The
whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the
stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from
head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was
made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny
must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if
not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume
the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all
the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.

26. When the eyes of the Prince Prospero fell upon this spectral image (which,
with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role,
stalked to and fro among the waltzers) he was seen to be convulsed, in the
first moment with a strong shudder either of terror or distaste; but, in the
next, his brow reddened with rage.
“Who dares”—he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near
him—“who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and
unmask him—that we may know whom we have to hang, at sunrise, from
the battlements!”
It was in the eastern or blue chamber in which stood the Prince Prospero
as he uttered these words. They rang throughout the seven rooms loudly
and clearly, for the prince was a bold and robust man, and the music had
become hushed at the waving of his hand.

27. It was in the blue room where stood the prince, with a group of pale
courtiers by his side. At first, as he spoke, there was a slight rushing
movement of this group in the direction of the intruder, who, at the
moment was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate and stately step,
made closer approach to the speaker. But from a certain nameless awe
with which the mad assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole
party, there were found none who put forth hand to seize him; so that,
unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the prince’s person; and, while the
vast assembly, as if with one impulse, shrank from the centers of the
rooms to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same
solemn and measured step which had distinguished him from the first,
through the blue chamber to the purple— through the purple to the
green—through the green to the orange—through this again to the white—
and even thence to the violet, ere a decided movement had been made to
arrest him

28. It was then, however, that the Prince Prospero,
maddening with rage and the shame of his own
momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the
six chambers, while none followed him on account of a
deadly terror that had seized upon all. He bore aloft a
drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid
impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the
retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the
extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and
confronted his pursuer.

29. There was a sharp cry—and the dagger dropped gleaming
upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterward, fell
prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then, summoning
the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revelers at
once threw themselves into the black apartment, and,
seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and
motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped
in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and
corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a
rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.

30. And now was acknowledged the presence of the
Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night.
And one by one dropped the revelers in the
blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each
in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life
of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of
the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired.
And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held
illimitable dominion over all.

31. MASQUE OF THE
RED DEATH
themes Mortality
Versions of reality
Fear
Foolishness and folly

32. MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH
SYMBOLS
SEVEN COLORED ROOMS:
BLUE
PURPLE
GREEN
ORANGE
WHITE
VIOLET
BLACK
THE CLOCK
THE”CASTELLATED
ABBEY” ART IMAGERY
THE
MASQUERADE/DREM
IMAGERY:
A SCARY DREAM
THE RED DEATH
THE SHAKESPEARE
CONNECTION:
PROSPERO
RED PLAGUE
APOCALYPTIC
SYMBOLISM:
BIBLICAL ALLUSION

33. SEE YOU
IN TWO WEEKS
WITH
EDGAR ALLAN POE`S
POETRY