E'A' Poe and the Gothic Tale

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E.A. Poe and the Gothic Tale

• Cultura Inglese II S. Anelli

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Poes Cultural Legacy

• Poe as an originator of Detective Fiction
• "Each of Poe's detective stories is a root from
  which a whole literature has developed.... Where
  was the detective story until Poe breathed the
  breath of life into it?
• (Arthur
  Conan Doyle)

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Poes Cultural Legacy

• Poe and Science Fiction
• Scientific (or pseudo-scientific) discourses as a
  fundamental source of inspiration for his
  creative imagination.
• "Pym tells what a very intelligent mind could
  imagine about the south polar region a century
  ago
• (H. G. Wells)

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Poes Cultural Legacy

• His Poes ratiocinating hero is the ancestor
  of Sherlock Holmes and his many successors, his
  tales of the future lead to H. G. Wells, his
  adventure stories to Jules Verne and Robert Louis
  Stevenson
• (H.G. Auden)

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Poes Cultural Legacy

• Poe and the Gothic Tradition

Poe as a foremost proponent of the Gothic strain
in literature. Poe as a icon for the troubled
genius and for the horror in art in contemporary
popular culture.
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The Gothic Poe

• "At sixteen I discovered the work of Edgar
  Allan Poe When I came home from the office
  where I worked I went straight to my room, took
  the cheap edition of his Tales of the Grotesque
  and Arabesque, and began to read. I still
  remembered my feelings .. I was afraid, but
  this fear made me discover something Ive never
  forgotten since fear, you see, is an emotion
  people like to feel when they know they are safe.
  Very likely, it's because I was so taken with
  the Poe stories that I later made suspense films.
  I cant help comparing what Ive tried to put in
  my films with what Poe put in his works a
  completely unbelievable story told to the readers
  with such a spellbinding logic that you get the
  impression that the same thing could happen to
  you tomorrow
• (A. Hitchock)

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The Gothic Poe

• Legend vs craftmanship
• Poes myth a tormented genius, a disturbed
  soul.
• Vs.
• Contemporary vision of Poe as a rational writer
  ( rationalist in method as well as in practice),
  perfeclty conscious of the narrative techniques
  he adopted and of the dynamics of the literary
  market and the journalistic world of his time.

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The Gothic Poe

• Poes literary reputation in America was
  blackened by accusations of perversion,
  alcoholism and drug addiction
• He walked the streets in madness or melancholy,
  with lips moving in indistinct cursesand all
  night, with drenched garments and arms wildly
  beating the wind and rain, he would speak as if
  to spirits that at such time only could be evoked
  by him from that Aidenn close by whose portals
  his disturbed soul sought to forget the ills to
  which his constitution subjected him
• (R. Griswold, Introduction to Poes Tales of the
  Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840)

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Poes Technique

• Basic Principles
• UNITY (create a single effect to which
  everything must tend, both in a poem and in a
  tale)
• BREVITY
• RATIONALITY

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Poes Technique

• The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its
  length, for reasons analogous to those which
  render length objectionable in the poem. As the
  novel cannot be read at one sitting, it cannot
  avail itself of the immense benefit of totality.
  Worldly interests, intervening during the pauses
  of perusal, modify, counteract and annul the
  impressions intended. But simple cessation in
  reading would, of itself, be sufficient to
  destroy the true unity. In the brief tale,
  however, the author is enabled to carry out his
  full design without interruption. During the hour
  of perusal, the soul of the reader is at the
  writers control

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Poes Technique

• A skilful artist has constructed a tale. He has
  not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his
  incidents, but having deliberately conceived a
  certain single effect to be wrought, he then
  invents such incidents, he then combines such
  events, and discusses them in such tone as may
  best serve him in establishing this preconceived
  effect. In the whole composition there should
  be no word written of which the tendency, direct
  or indirect, is not to the one pre-established
  design.
• (E.A. Poe, Commentary on Hawthornes Twice-Told
  Tales, 1842)

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Poes Technique

• SINGLE EFFECT
• Effect

The totality of impression or emotional impact
upon the reader
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Poes Technique

• BREVITY
• If any literary work is too long to be read at
  one sitting, we must be content to dispense with
  the immensely important effect derivable from
  unity of impression for, if two sittings be
  required, the affairs of the world interfere and
  everything like totality is destroyed
• (E.A. Poe, The Philosophy of Composition, 1846)

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Poes Technique

• Tales of Ratiocination or detection
• Reason Deductive Method
• Tales of Imagination
• Hallucinations Nightmares
• Horror from inside, horror of the soul

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Poes Nightmare Formula

• RENEWAL OF THE GOTHIC TRADITION
• Gothic Artistic Style (12th-16th c.)
• architectural style of the Middle Ages (12th-14th
  c.) pointed windows, dark, narrow spaces etc.
• Irregular and barbarous, opposed to classicism
• Wild, mysterious, frightening, supernatural

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Poes Nightmare Formula

• RENEWAL OF THE GOTHIC LITERARY TRADITION
• Gothic Novel (late 18th -early 19th c.)
• - magic, mystery, suspense, horror,
  supernatural powers
• - emotions of fear, terror and pity
• - to shock the readers
• H. Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)
• A. Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
• M. Lewis, The Monk (1798)
• M. Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern
  Prometheus (1818)

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Poes Nightmare Formula

• RENEWAL OF THE TERROR TALE
• He Poe was the one who discovered our great
  subject, the disintegration of personality in the
  field of narrative fiction
• (Allen Tate)

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Poes Nightmare Formula

• Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)
• Arabesque A style of decorative design.
• stylized flowers, foliage, fruits and animal
  outlines
• strangeness, appeal to the faculty of imagination
  and wonder

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Poes Nightmare Formula

• Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)
• Grotesque
• - fantastic representations of humane and
  animal forms
• - bizarre, ugly, unnatural, fantastic, abnormal
  
• - comic and tragic

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Poes Nightmare Formula

• Poes defence against the charge of germanism
  and plagiarism
• The charge of writing Gothic tales is in bad
  taste, and the grounds of it have not been
  sufficiently considered. Let us admit, for the
  moment, that the phantasy pieces now given are
  Germanic . If in many of my productions
  terror has been the thesis, I maintain that
  terror is not of Germany, but of the soul that
  I have deduced this terror only from its
  legitimate sources, and urged it only to its
  legitimate results.
• (E.A. Poe, Preface to Tales of the Grotesque and
  Arabesque, 1840)

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Poes Nightmare Formula

• Soul Mind
• Poe draws on English and German gothic tradition
  (very popular among readers, although considered
  as subliterature by critics) to create fine
  psychological fiction.
• Terror from inside gt Psychic Terror
• Dark Side of the Self
• Dark Side of 19th c. American Conscience (faith
  in democracy and in scientific progress, but
  obsessed by the idea of Evil and of the natural
  wickedness of man, rooted in Puritanism)
• Poe vs R.W. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, W. Whitman

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Poes Nightmare Formula

• TERRIFYING VISION OF THE INDIVIDUAL
• To be thoroughly conversant with Mans heart, is
  to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped
  volume of Despair (E.A. Poe, Marginalia, 1848)
• Such a vision comes from
• Direct experience with insanity
• New (pseudo-) sciences, focusing on the study of
  the human mind (Phrenology Mesmerism)

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Poes Nightmare Formula

• Phrenology a theory which claims to be able to
  determine character, personality traits and
  criminal tendencies on the basis of the shape of
  the head. Developed by the German physician F.J.
  Gall around 1800, it became very popular also in
  America in the 19th century.
• Basic principles the brain is the organ of the
  mind, the mind has a set of different mental
  faculties, each particular faculty is represented
  in a different part or organ of the brain.

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Poes Nightmare Formula

• Mesmerism (or Animal Magnetism) an earlier name
  for hypnosis or hypnotism. The name of this
  discipline comes from the german physician Franz
  Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), who believed in the
  existence of a physical force a universal
  magnetic fluid, pervading both the animate and
  the inanimate world - which could be used to
  cure mental and physical states of disorder.
  Mesmer claimed to be able to exert his strong
  will over his patients and to control their
  actions as well as their minds by using, at
  first, magnets and, later, even without touching
  them (hypnosis).
• On this subject Townsheds Facts in Mesmerism,
  1840 (London), 1841 (Boston)

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Poes Nightmare Formula

• Main features of Poes Horror Tales
• Psychic plausibility (lt great emotional impact)
• Symbolism
• Uncanny atmosphere of terror and anxiety
• Interior monologues
• Theme/ figure of the Double-self
• Influence of pseudo-sciences

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William Wilson (1839)

• Poes archetypal horror tale
• Focus on
• Narrator (unreliable)
• Atmosphere (movement from the outer world to the
  inner self villagegt wall, gate gt front of the
  housegtinside the buildinggt school rooms)
• Relationship btw. the narrator and his namesake
  (affinities and differences)
• gtwhisper (inner voice)

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William Wilson (1839)

• Theme of the Double (conflict btw. the desires of
  the physical self the first W.W. and the
  values of conscience the second W.W.)
• - conscience seen by the narrator as a
  tormenting, punitive force

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The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)

• Focus on
• - Theme madness
• Perverseness psychic duplicity
• gt Theme of the Double relationship btw.
  the narrator and the old man
• Symbols
• -volture EyegtEvil eyegt evil I
• - Heart
• Influence of medical studies on the human mind
  (see I. Ray, Treatise, 1838)
• Narrator nameless, obsessed criminal

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• Homicidal maniacsall possess one feature in
  common, the irresistible, motiveless impulse to
  destroy life.
• (Dr. I. Ray, Treatise, 1838)

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Perverseness

• a radical, primitive, irriducible sentiment
  which impels us to do wrong for the wrong sake.
  (E.A. Poe, The Imp of the Perverse, 1845)
• one of the primitive impulses of human heart
  one of the indivisible primary faculties
  which give direction to the character of
  Man.(E.A. Poe, The Black Cat, 1843)

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• To register the disintegration of human soul
  is Poes pretty bitter doom one of the
  bitterest tasks of human experience but
  necessary task too. For the human soul must
  suffer its own disintegration, consciously, if
  ever it is to survive.
• (D.H. Lawrence, 1966)

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The Masque of the Red Death (1842)

• Focus on
• Theme Death (horror, inevitability)
• Apocalyptic atmosphere
• Symbols
• - gates, walls (outer vs inner
  world)
• - seven rooms (laid out from East
  to West)
• - last room
• - ebony clock

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The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845)

• Focus on
• Theme Death, Science (Mesmerism)
• Narrator
• Language pseudo-scientific, detached
• gt Plausibility
• Macabre details
• Comparison betw. The Masque of the Red Death
  and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

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• Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in
  all ages. Why then give a date to the story I
  have to tell?
• 
  E. A. Poe