Stories of Edgar Allen Poe

The narrator tells of his solitary pilgrimage on horseback "through a singularly down(p) tract of country," on a "dull, dark, and soundless day" in autumn (Poe 54). When he introductory sees the theatre of Usher, with its "bleak walls" and "idle eye-like windows," he feels a " soul of insufferable gloom" (Poe 54). These atmospheric elements ar further heightened by the sense of strangeness and isolation, as well as the indefiniteness of the setting. The actual location of the House of Usher is never specified, and as such the reader may imagine it to be practically anywhere: Germany, Ireland, Scotland, or nonetheless America. This element of a remote and unknown location adds to the aspect of suspense. This technique is echoed in the story "Ligeia" as well. Although "Ligeia" begins with a interpretation of a character and non a place, the narrator sets the image early on by stating that he thinks he "met her first and most frequently in some large, old, decaying city confining the Rhine" (Poe 38). After the death of the Lady Ligeia, the narrator moves to a sodding(a) abbey, the location of which is vaguely described as "one of the wildest and to the lowest degree frequented portions of fair England" (Poe 45). The eeriness of the setting is further enhanced by the narrator's statement that the "gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building . . . had a good deal in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into that remote and unsocial region of the country

" (Poe 45-46). Again, Poe has apply atmospheric description to give the reader a sense of the psychological state of his character.

The narrator of "Ligeia" is also a super-sensitive showcase who could not function in the normal world. In this case, it is not an undefined illness which is to blame, but rather an addiction to opium. The ugly room in which Lady Rowena dies is decorated under this somniferous influence to look like something out of a hallucination. In fact, the narrator admits this by saying "I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a colourise from my dreams" (Poe 46).

It is interesting to note that the vague way in which the character's maladies be described in both stories is typical of Poe's approach to the knightly tale. Things are never clear explained. Porte has noted that "Poe's main usance in all of these instances is, of course, to heighten the sense of implied horror by being suggestive rather than explicit." (Porte 64). By writing in this manner, Poe allows the reader's imagination to fill in the blanks, and thus to inspire a greater sense of the supernatural weirdness of the tales.

Edith Birkhead has noted that the Gothic story continues to maintain its popularity because "there is still a zest for the unusual, there is still pleasure to be found in a thrill, and so long as this human disposition endures devices will be found for satisfying it" (Birkhead 227). This paper has shown that Edgar Allen Poe was clearly a master of the elements of Gothic style, and as such his plant are timeless wonders which will continue to thrill and catch readers forever.

The vague intimations of the locale are in contrast to the highly detailed physical descriptions of the structures wherein which the stories take place. Gothic stories are so-named because they are typically set in Gothic buildings. Walpole's Otranto Castle, for example, "is a cobwebbed fracture full of underground passage
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