Poe & The Gothic

GOTHIC: Term comes from Germanic tribe of Medieval times called the "Goths"... later came to mean "Medieval" in general.

* In Architecture, it is applied to the syle flourishing from the 12th-16th centuries in Europe, marked by the pointed arch, the vault, vertical effects to suggest aspiration, stained windows to suggest mystery, slender spires, flying buttresses, a variety of detail, and a flexibility of spirit.

* In Literature, it is referred to by the 18th century Neoclassicists as meaning "barbaric"; they called it "all the extravagancies of an irregular fancy".

* However, the Romanticists of the next generation looked upon it with favor and embraced the GOTHIC as whatever as Medieval, primitive, wild, & free, authentic, and romantic. They praised Shakespeare for his use of Gothic elements, such as variety, richness, mystery, and aspiration.

* Examples of Gothic?? Batman (Gotham City), Gothic Rock (Marilyn Manson), Gargoyles, Hunchback, etc.

* Gothic includes the idea of the "SUBLIME": Raised above ordinary human qualities-- exalted. This adds a feeling of terror in the vastness and astonishment, or suspension in the horror.

* Some Gothic/Romantic characteristics are: Haunted environments, "gothic" architecture, an abbey, a castle, a dungeon, etc. The setting is usually ENTRAPMENT- an inversion fo the soaring upwards represented by the architecture. Gothic deals with the "space underneath".

* The notion of the SUBLIME emerges from the openness to TERROR & HORROR.  Terror is an expansion of the soul from the fear of the unknown; Horror is a constriction of the soul from a fear of the unknown.

* To understand the difference, think of "REACTIONS". Why do we call what happened on 9/11 "terrorist" attacks (not "horrorist" attacks)? We were scared, yes, but it causes us to open up and do something about it... by going through a terrifying experience, we grow. Now think of a horror film. The victims who are about to be attacked are always hiding; they are crouched down in a fetal position-- they are constricted. Horror weakens us...

* In Gothic LIT, we get a sense of the past, of decay, of a fallen or ruined world, an awareness of death, and an appearance of the uncanny or supernatural

** 3 TYPES OF GOTHIC:

1. High Gothic: Supernatural element remains a mystery and is NOT explained away.

2. Enlightenment Gothic: There's a natural explanation for uncanny events. The supernatural element IS explained away.

3. Ambiguous Gothic: Keeps you hesitating between explanations-- is it a ghost or a psychological manifestation? An example of this is "The Turn of the Screw" or the film "The Others".

* The GROTESQUE: Poe called one of his collections Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, which suggests a precise distinction b/w experiences of Christian N. Europe and Muslim W. Asia. The Arabesque suggests the EXOTIC and evokes an image of the "Arabian Nights"-- it is art with no human figure... based in Islam. Poe applied this to stories-- material which was selected for its strangeness of appeal to the sense of wonder. Teh distinction is that the "grotesque" would imply an element of horror.

-- Grotesque is usually considered an outgrowth of interst in the irrational, a distrust of cosmic order, and a frustration at humans' lot in the universe. It is characterized by fantastic representations of human and animal forms, often combined into distortions of the natural to the point of absurdity, ugliness, or caraciture: Ex. The Hunchback.

Adjectives used to describe this are Unnatural, Bizarre, Incongruous, and Abnormal.

Some of Poe's other stories... "Fall of the House of Usher" [setting is a decayed house in ruin with heavy imagery of enclosures... house is symbolic of main character, Roderick Usher, who is a manic depressive man going insane who has a sister that may or may not be alive]. "The Oval Portrait" is a story of an uncanny portrait; the artist transmits his wife's life to a portrait,a nd it is so real that it sucks the life out of her. The artists' only true love is his art, and art is substituted for life... remember "The Ring"??]. "The Black Cat" is a story that domesticizes the gothic-- "horror within the house"; it is a story of a cat that is killed by its owner and is possibly reincarnated... remember Stephen King??].

Poe lived from 1809-1849. He influenced many writers with his tales of psychological terror and the MACABRE: horror of death and decay. Because of Poe, we have the modern detective story, gothic horror tales, and symbolic fiction. Most of his tales are in the 1st person to give the effect of LIVING THE STORY, so to speak.

He was the son of traveling actors. His mother died of TB before he was 3. He was raised by foster parents in VA... while that family was wealthy, Poe struggled financially through his college years and gambled to get by. He had to drop out. He worked as a magazine editor and literary critic. In 1836, he married his 13-year old cousin, Virginia Clemm. Over the next few years, he worked hard and produced most of his tales. His stories were widely admired, but he remained poor.

He lost his wife to TB in 1847, and the last years of his life were a struggle. He suffered from poverty, illness, and heavy drinking. However, over the last year of his life, he lectured on American Literature, launched magazines, concoted hoaxes and cryptograms, wrote reviews, experimented with fictional genres (creating the detective story with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" 1841)... his last critical recognition came with the publication of his most popular poem "The Raven", in 1845.

In 1849, he was found barely conscious outside of a tavern. A few weeks later, he was dead at age 40. Gossip about his immorality and drunkenness threatened his reputation here in America... until Charles Baudelaire, a French poet, translated Poe's works into French in the late 1800's. At this time, Poe's genius was discovered and appreciated, and he's been considered a MAJOR LITERARY FIGURE ever since.

Questions for Consideration:

Symbols in the stories?

Compare the 2 narrators.

Compare the settings.

Motivations for telling the tales?

Themes?



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The following is an example of Literary Criticism. I wrote this essay during my graduate studies while I was in a class studying "American Gothic Literature". I took a "Psychological Approach" to the reading. I first decided on a "theme" in the story that I wanted to further explore. In order to back up my premise, I had to rely heavily on textual evidence, so I re-read the tale many times and took notes as to what lines in the tale best further explained my theme. In order for it to be considered for publication, I had to incorporate outside research as well. I had to find 2 types of research to back up my claims: 1. Information on the "psychology"-- if I was going to diagnose Poe's narrator, then I had to learn about what I thought to be his ailment... I had to decide whether or not my diagnosis actually fit. 2. Information on the story-- I had to learn what other critics have said about the story... I had to make sure that I wasn't saying the same thing that someone else already said, and I had to find points in other critical articles that backed up my own claims.  The Professor told us that this assignment was to "write an essay that could be submitted for publication", and I succeeded. This essay is "my baby", so to speak! :)

 

 

Title: Poe's THE TELL-TALE HEART. By: Pritchard, Hollie, Explicator, 00144940, Spring2003, Vol. 61, Issue 3 Database: Academic Search Complete Poe's THE TELL-TALE HEART Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" provides an engaging premise-the murder of a beloved old man by his housemate-and provokes readers into an exploration of the true motivation for that crime. The narrator makes reference to "the disease" that had "sharpened [his] senses" but remains firm in his question, "[W]hy will you say that I am mad?" (Poe 303). The actions of the narrator, combined with his insistence that he is not mad, lead readers to determine that he must suffer from some psychological disorder; however, it has been suggested that it is not the idea but the form of his madness that is of importance to the story (Quinn 234). Upon close examination, a sadomasochistic element emerges, although, as one critic points out, it is a sadomasochism "made acceptable to a mass readership by the elimination of any ostensible sexual element" (Symons 210). Imbedded in the tale is the psychological journey of an egocentric who derives pleasure from cruelty.

Although Poe remains covert in any presentation of sexual analogy, "the narrator begins [the tale] with language of penetration" (Dayan 225). He speaks of the murder as a "conceived" idea that "entered" his brain (Poe 303). This sexually charged language continues as the narrator describes the ritual that preceded the murder: "And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head [...] I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in!" (303). In addition to the language, the setting of the ritual and murder, a bedroom, only furthers the notion that this is a psychosexual tale. Finally, the narrator confesses, "I loved the old man" (303). Interestingly, a dichotomy is created between the narrator's love for and his desire to kill the old man.

Indeed, the narrator exists as a bipolar being, divided by his love for and desire to kill the same man. As Wilhelm Stekel noted over seventy years ago, it is this "coupling of love and hate [that] forms the basis for sadomasochism" (2:408). Congruous with the idea that "the sadist suffers from a fixed idea" (2:408), the eye becomes the narrator's obsession (Symons 211), for what the narrator hates about his victim is his eye. What links sadomasochism to obsession is the "compulsion to repetition" (2:408), which manifests in the story as a voyeuristic tendency, "for seven long nights," to look "in upon [the man] while he slept" (Poe 303). Further suggestion for a sadomasochistic reading emerges from Stekel's comments that "the sadist strives for a total annihilation of the object," and "every sadist is a murderer" (Stekel 2:407). The narrator seems proud of carrying out his crime. He brags about "how healthily--how calmly [he] can tell you the whole story" (Poe 303). It is this egocentrism from which "the pleasure in cruelty [is] manifested by civilized man" (Stekel 1:28). Since cruelty requires "the consciousness of cruelty, joy in another's hurt, delight in a sense of power over another's life" (1:27), it is not surprising that the narrator admits that he "could scarcely contain [his] feelings of triumph" (Poe 304), and although he "knew what the old man felt," he "chuckled at heart" (304). He further admits that the night of the murder led him to, for the first time, feel the "extent of [his] own powers" (304). The narrator not only receives pleasure from the act of murder itself, but also from the obsessive ritual that precedes the murder.

Sigmund Freud observed that "a sadist is simultaneously a masochist" (qtd. in Weinberg and Kamel 30). Poe's narrator discovers truth in the notion that "every pain contains in itself the possibility of a pleasurable sensation" (30). Because the narrator experiences a "merging of himself and his victim" (Quinn 236), it can be inferred that he also experiences the pain that he inflicts. As Patrick Quinn points out, the narrator admits, "I know what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart" (235), yet despite this empathy, he carries out the crime. Quinn offers the example of the lantern as a symbol for the man's eye to explain the merging of the characters (235). He maintains that the narrator "used the lantern to project a beam of light that filled the old man with terror, and in this way executioner and victim exchanged experiences" (235). Indeed, the narrator "later tells the police that the scream heard during the night was his own, 'in a dream'" (236). Although the scream is the old man's, the narrator seems unable to separate himself from the victim. This idea solidifies when one recognizes that the beating heart that the narrator hears in the end is not his victim's, but his own. Because it is apparent that he experiences a "collapse into oneness" (Dayan 144) with his victim and that he finds pleasure in his deed--he "smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done" (Poe 305), one may infer that the pleasure he feels is not only for inflicting pain but for receiving it as well.

As the criminal sits and answers the officers' question "cheerily," pleasure fades, and he begins to talk "more freely to get rid of the feeling" (306). He becomes convinced that officers who "chatted pleasantly, and smiled" (306) were "making a mockery of [his] horror" (306). Fittingly, he views the officers as sadists taking pleasure in his pain. What readers witness is the culmination of the narrator's psychological journey. It is said that "death wishes are a source of the consciousness of guilt" (Stekel 1:26) and that "the phenomenon of 'pleasure in pain' leads [...] persons [... to] accuse themselves unwarrantably of most serious crimes, in order to receive the punishment dictated by the unconscious" (2:161). The criminal does not have to confess because "the officers were satisfied [...] he had convinced them" (Poe 306). Yet, his heart cannot take it, so he "admit[s] the deed" (306), thus self-inflicting his punishment.

Egocentrism is at the heart of sadomasochism: "men want to feel like they are better than they are" (Stekel 1:7). Perhaps this explains why the narrator goes into such detail about how perfect his crime is. He comments, "You should have seen how wisely I proceeded-with what caution-with what foresight" (Poe 303). However, in the end, he cannot accept that he gets away with the deed. Perhaps his confession represents a sadomasochist's "return to reality after this excursion into the fantastic" (Stekel 1:21). Certainly, as "every delight craves eternity" (1:4), it makes perfect sense that the narrator would speak his deeds--he must tell his tale so that it can be immortalized in ink. Knowing that his story will live on is the final step that the narrator must take to receive pleasure from his cruelty.

WORKS CITED Dayan, Joan. Fables of Mind. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Poe. Edgar Allan. The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Poe. New York: Random House, 1992.

Quinn, Patrick F. The French Face of Edgar Poe. New York: Southern Illinois UP, 1957.

Stekel, Wilhelm, ed. Sadism and Masochism: The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty. 2 Vols. New York: Liveright, 1929.

Symons, Julian. The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Harper & Row, 1978.

Weinberg, Thomas, and G. W. Levi Kamel, eds. S & M: Studies in Sadomasochism. New York: Prometheus, 1983.

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By Hollie Pritchard, University of Louisiana, Lafayette