The gothic in Edgar Allan Poe's writings

VILNIUS UNIVERSITY KAUNAS FACULTY OF HUMANITIES DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC PHILOLOGY RENATA DUMBLIAUSKAITĖ THE GOTHIC IN EDGAR ALLAN POE'S WRITINGS ANNUAL ESSAY English Philology (State Code 61204H108) Scientific adviser_____________ Student________________ (signature) (signature) ____________________________ Handing-in date_________ (pedagogical and scientific degrees, name and surname) Registration No.________ KAUNAS 2007 VILNIAUS UNIVERSITETAS KAUNO HUMANITARINIS FAKULTETAS GERMANŲ FILOLOGIJOS KATEDRA RENATA DUMBLIAUSKAITĖ GOTIKA EDGARO ALANO POE KŪRINIUOSE KURSINIS DARBAS Anglų filologija (Valstybinis kodas 61204H108) Darbo vadovas_____________ Studentas________________ (parašas) (parašas) _________________________ Darbo įteikimo data_______ (darbo vadovo pedagoginis laipsnis, mokslo laipsnis, vardas ir pavardė) Registracijos Nr.__________ KAUNAS 2007 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION…....................................................................................................................4 1. The origins of the Gothic genre 5 2. The Gothic excess and transgression 7 3. Homely Gothic 10 4. The Gothic in Edgar Allan Poe’s writings 11 4.1. The Gothic in Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death 11 4.2. The Gothic in Poe’s short story The Fall of the House of Usher 14 CONCLUSIONS REZIUMĖ REFERENCES INTRODUCTION The elements of mystery, horror and romanticism characterizing the gothic literary genre distinguished it greatly from many other genres when it appeared in the late 18th century. During the years since, the gothic style has influenced many authors and found many fans among readers. One of the best representatives of the Gothic literature is the American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849). The aim of the annual essay is to get deeper into the phenomenon of the gothic. The tasks of the annual essay are to overview the peculiarities of the Gothic genre in general and reveal the effects and purposes of the Gothic style while analysing some of Poe’s works. For the analysis, Poe’s short story The Masque of Red Death (1842) and his tale The Fall of the House of Usher (1834) have been chosen. The annual essay compounds of introduction, four chapters of development, conclusions, a summary in Lithuanian and references. The theoretical part consists of three chapters. The first chapter deals with the beginning of the Gothic period, the concept of the Gothic and its most prominent features as a genre. The second chapter is concerned with Gothic literature itself. Here, the author underlines the main features of the Gothic and shows how the Gothic genre was transforming in the course of time. The third chapter focuses on the so called ‘homely Gothic’ which developed in 19th century American literature. Meanwhile the fourth chapter concentrates on the Gothic in Poe’s writings. The chapter consists of two subchapters, where the gothic in Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death and his tale The Fall of the House of Usher is analysed. In both the theoretical and analytical part of the paper the work of the literary critic Fred Botting and some internet sources have been referred to. In the conclusions, the annual essay’s investigation is generalized and inferences concerning the Gothic in Poe’s works are drawn. 1. The origins of the Gothic genre Morality and monstrosity became two most important issues in 18th century European literature. Virtue, propriety and domestic order were considered to be under menace. Following the classical principles, buildings, and works of art, gardens and written texts were to demonstrate homogeneity, proportion and strict order. Cultivation and civilized behaviour were considered the fundamental principles of conduct and life. However, rejecting the Enlightenment ideal of balance and rationalism, there emerged a different perception of the world, and this perception was first reflected in British fiction, which was called Gothic. Gothic fiction is defined as a “British literary genre from the late 18th and early 19th century, with a Victorian revival a hundred years later” (Wikipedia). For a long time, the word gothic was equated with barbarity, superstition and ignorance. Goth was used in the sense of savage despoiler (1663) in reference to the Goths’ sack of Roman cities in the 5th century. By scholars, the word Gothic was used to mean Germanic, Teutonic (1647), hence its evolution as a term for the architectural style that emerged in northern Europe in the Middle Ages, and the early 19th century literary style that used medieval settings to suggest horror and mystery (Online Etymology Dictionary). The Gothic fiction dominated English literature from its conception in 1764 with the publication of The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole to its ‘supposed’ demise in 1820. The genre drew a lot of images from the graveyard poets who mixed a landscape of dark forest with vegetation that bordered on concealed ruins with horrific rooms, monasteries and a desolate character that excels at the melancholy. As a result, such characteristics as extravagance, mystery and wildness, at the beginning considered to be negative, became associated with a more imaginative potential for aesthetic production. The 18th century was marked by important social, economical, cultural and political changes. These changes raised apart the bonds connecting individuals to an ordered social world. Gothic works can be seen as influenced by fear, anxiety and the wish to explain what the Enlightenment did not explain. In this way, Gothic was the site of fight among the forces of advance, progress and the efforts to save continuity. Gothic fiction, the tales of exotic adventures and magical events, took the customs and superstitions of the Middle Ages, and therefore was followed by general disapproval from the late eighteenth century on. ‘Graveyard poetry’, which rejects human imperfection through an insistence on mortality, stimulated an interest in ruins and nocturnal gloom as the walls that opened on to “afterlife of infinite bliss” (Botting, 1996, 24). Natural and artistic were considered to conjure up emotional effects such as terror and wonder, which marked a sense of majesty going beyond human understanding and also bringing up human sensibility. The scholars who collected the ballads and songs recovered the effusive and imaginative descriptions of natural and supernatural objects, which gave the examples of a romantic and sublime method of writing. All these developments affected the Gothic novel very much. Such features as the wonderful incidents and chivalric customs of romances, the characterization of wild settings and the gloom of the graveyard, the constancy of the terror and wonder of the sublime became most characteristic features of the eighteenth century Gothic novel. 2. The Gothic excess and transgression Gothic means a writing of excess and it appears in the terrible obscurity that haunted eighteenth century rationality and morality. Gothic atmosphere is always mystic, gloomy, mysterious, dark and fearful. Gothic signals the worrying coming back of pasts upon presents; it awakes emotions such as terror and laughter. As the literary critic Botting observes “Gothic condenses the many perceived threats to these values, threats associated with supernatural and natural forces, imaginative excesses and delusions, religious and human evil, social transgression, mental disintegration and spiritual corruption” (Botting, 1996, 2). In other words, Gothic writings deal with objects and practices which are negative, irrational, immoral and fantastic. Gothic fiction embodies cultural anxieties. The eighteenth century Gothic fiction distinguished itself for fragmented narratives connecting mysterious events and such characters as spectres, monsters, skeletons, fainting heroines and bandits: A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones Three murdered bodies, quite fresh. As many skeletons, in chests and presses… (Anon., Terrorist Novel Writing, 1797, 229) Later the list was extended to include criminals, madmen and nuns as well. The common settings of the eighteenth century Gothic plots were wild, mountainous landscapes combined with the Gothic architecture grandeur and darkness (Botting, 1996, 2). In early Gothic fiction, the image of the castle was used very widely. Later, the images of other medieval buildings that were associated with superstition and fear, for example, churches, abbeys and especially graveyards, were introduced. Finally, the castle was replaced by the image of an old house, the place where fears and worries came back in the present. In Gothic writings, imagination and emotional effects exceed reason. Excitement, sensation and passion transcend all moral laws and proprieties. Using the legends, myths and folklore of medieval romances, the Gothic brings back to life magical stories of knights, ghosts, monsters and terrors. The boundlessness and over-ornamentation of Gothic styles were part of a move away from neoclassical aesthetic rules which were based on clarity and symmetry. As Botting points out, “Gothic signified a trend towards an aesthetics based on feeling and emotion and associated primarily with the sublime” (Botting, 1996, 3). In the eighteenth century, the issue of the sublime encouraged a lot of debates among writers and theorists of taste. All the time the sublime was related with grandeur and magnificence. Craggy, mountainous landscapes and their immense scale offered to look at the awful power, infinity and magnificence. Moreover, the sublime conjured up excessive emotion. Instead of moral lessons that introduced decent attitudes to literature and life, Gothic produced emotional effects on its readers. These emotions chilled the reader’s blood and fed the appetite for amazing events. Of course, the emotions invoked by Gothic fiction are ambivalent: first of all, objects of terror and horror arouse disgust, loathing and other negative emotions, but, on the other hand, it engages the reader’s interest, attracts and enchants. In the eighteenth century, the security and permanence of social, political and aesthetical formations were unshaken, meanwhile the situation changed in the nineteenth century – hierarchies and distinctions governing social and economic formation were on question. Ghosts, dark castles and terrible elements desisted to arouse terror or horror. These gothic elements were not able to embody fears and anxieties anymore. The new concern inflected in Gothic forms – it was the darker side of Romantic individual and its imaginative consciousness. Gothic became the world of guilt, despair, anxiety, individual transgression and uncertain border of imaginative liberty and human knowledge. Gothic passions and extravagance put Romantic ideals into the shade. External forms were signs of uncertain subjective condition predominated by fantasy, madness and hallucination. Of course, the disturbed psychic states do not mean disintegration; it shows Gothic writers’ wish to leave readers unsure if narratives represent “psychological disturbance or wider upheavals within formations of reality” (Botting, 1996, 11). Subsequently in the nineteenth century, Gothic fiction lost its position and was not a separate genre anymore. It seemed to go underground. Cities, dark and dangerous forests became places of nightly corruption, violence and real horror. The family became a threatening, mysterious and horrible place. Uncanny effects instead of sublime terrors began to predominate. Moreover psychological rather than supernatural forces became more important in worlds where nobody could be sure of others or even themselves. Gothic subjects were aloof, divided from themselves, from passions, desires, wishes and fantasies that had been popular in the eighteenth century. Nature, wild and indomitable, was as much within as without. Scientific theory and technological innovation provided a vocabulary, which was full of words denoting anxiety, fear and worries of the nineteenth century. Criminological researches interpreted criminal behaviour as the coming back of animalistic and instinctual habits. In defining a divided world of divided human beings, science also revealed the sense of loss, degradation of human society and its values of individual strength. 3. Homely Gothic The Gothic style changed a lot in the mid-nineteenth century literature including the forms of realism, sensation novels and ghosts stories. As Botting notices, “eighteenth century Gothic machinery and the wild landscapes of Romantic individualism give way to terrors and horrors that are much closer to home, uncanny disruptions of the boundaries between inside and outside, reality and delusion, propriety and corruption, materialism and spirituality” (Botting, 1996, 113). Ghosts, mirrors and doubles show this. The works of the American Gothic writers as Washington Irving (1783-1859), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), and Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) are considered to be among the most influential works of Gothic fiction. They defined a black thread in American literature, which was perfected in their works and continues to show its form in subsequent literature, both American and European. In their works, the bourgeois family becomes the place of ghostly return; the modern city, gloomy and labyrinthine, becomes the scene of violence and horror. “The traces of Gothic and Romantics forms, however, appear as signs of loss and nostalgia, projections of a culture possessed of an increasingly disturbing sense of deteriorating identity, order and spirit” (Botting, 1996, 114). Furthermore, reception and transformation of European romantic literature had a great impact on the development of the American novel. The simple Gothic style was left behind, but contrast of light and dark, good and evil, could be still found in texts where the mysteries of the mind or the family pasts were the dominating themes: the human completely changed Gothic terrors of a supernatural kind. As Botting observes, writers used different geography and history in the American context: “romantic adventures could take place in the wilds of an uncharted continent or horrors could be found in the Puritan witch trials of Salem in the seventeenth century”. The Gothic psychology and the questions it brought forward of the bizarre which pervaded reality were framed within the issues of rationalism, democracy and religious organization. Despite the fact that Gothic European traditions, including wicked aristocrats, ruined castles and abbeys were unsuitable for North America, the shadows of the superstitious fancy of the individual were retained. 4. The Gothic in Edgar Allan Poe’s writings The deformed imagination of people is best revealed in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, who is considered by most literary critics to be a pioneering master of the macabre and one of the first modern writers who explored the darker side of human nature and reflected disturbed psychological states. Poe belongs to American Gothic writers and is one of the leaders of the American Romantic Movement; however, he is different from other Americans writers. In his tales and stories, the outward elements of eighteenth century Gothic (such as darkness, dreariness, decay and extravagance) were turned inward “to present psychodramas of diseased imaginings and deluded visions” (Botting, 1996, 120). Horror in Poe’s tales reveals sickly admiration with dark places, which reflects states of confused consciousness and imaginative excessiveness, and also presents fatal beauties, premature inhumation, bloodstained hauntings and terrible metempsychosis. Poe weaves nightmare and reality: “human desires and neuroses are dressed in the lurid of the supernatural to the extent that nightmare and reality become entwined” (Botting, 1996, 120). Poe promotes the dark powers of the imagination. However, his fiction leaves inderteminated border between reality, illusion and madness. Poe did not domesticate Gothic motifs or rationalize mysteries. His subjects were varied, researching individual cases of delusion and more general worries about death. In order to reach great effect, Poe uses doubles and mirrors. He also uses scientific theories in order to present natural sources of horror in which tracing exposes criminal rather than supernatural mysteries. Poe’s short stories The Masque of the Red Death and The Fall of the House of Usher have a lot of elements of the Gothic fiction and are considered by most critics to be the greatest examples of the Gothic genre. These two stories deal with uncanny, mysterious and horrifying events or the threat of such happenings, uncertain psychological states of sensitive characters, and death. 4.1 The Gothic in Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death is an allegory about the unavoidability of physical decay and death. The story takes place at a castellated abbey, where Prince Prospero and one thousand other nobles are taking refuge to escape the Red Death, a terrible plague sweeping the land. One night, Prospero holds a masquerade ball to entertain his guests. About midnight, Prospero and other masqueraders notice a figure dressed in grey and wearing a mask depicting a victim of the Red Death. Greatly insulted, the Prince pursues the mysterious guest to find out his identity. To everyone’s horror, the guest reveals himself as the personification of the Red Death. Eventually, Prospero, together with the rest revellers, dies from the disease. Throughout the story, the gothic style reveals itself through the recurrent images of death, the presentiment of which naturally evokes fear. Here, death is allegorically represented by a mysterious guest who appears at the masquerade ball: 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. His vesture was dabbled in blood – and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror (Nineteenth Century American Short Stories, 1970, 121). Although Prince Prospero is temporarily the host of the abbey (and represents power) and even tries to punish the stranger for making jests of the victims of the disease, it is the unwanted figure which “holds illimitable dominion over all” (ibid, 123) everyone in the abbey dies in the end killed by the Red Death. The power of the source of terror as the dominating one is frequently found in Gothic fiction and, as it has been shown, is present in this story as well. Here, the source of fear is death represented by a mysterious, supernatural figure. Death has the supreme power over the material world and humans as well. The description of the symptoms of the plague is another instance of the Gothic in the short story. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. 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 (ibid, 117). Here, terror is evoked through a scientifically detailed depiction of physical suffering and death which causes fear and disgust in the reader. A typical feature of the gothic fiction found in this story is the medieval-type setting; namely, a castellated abbey with strong and lofty walls, huge gates of iron, winding corridors, narrow Gothic windows, tapestries, a gigantic clock of ebony and other attributes of medieval architecture and design, which create a picture of a gloomy, depressing place. Paradoxically, the abbey which has to serve as a stronghold where the Prince and his people expect to save their lives becomes their prison where they lock themselves inside and still cannot escape death. The depiction of a closed space where the characters of the story are prisoners rather than refugees creates a psychological tension while reading the story. The Gothic atmosphere is most vividly revealed in the description of the “black room”, one of the seven rooms where the masquerade is held: 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. The panes here were scarlet – a deep blood color. The effect of the fire-light 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 (ibid, 119) The black colour of the tapestries, ghastly light and scarlet panes resembling the colour of blood can be traditionally associated with approaching death. Allegorically, the seven rooms stand for the seven stages of man’s life from birth to death, the seventh one representing death. Thus, a feeling of a gruesome ending pursues the reader from the very beginning. The gigantic clock of ebony (again black colour) standing against the wall symbolizes the passing time. Its chimes are the omens of the nearing death: 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 (ibid, 119). The clock counts the masqueraders’ time left in this world. Every hour, its chime makes the company pause; the group becomes filled with trepidation and uncertainties. The sound is so loud and clear that it is heard by everyone and even the most joyous grow pale as it stops. The countdown of the melting time left before the fatal ending is an effectual technique keeping the readers on the edge of their seats, caught in suspense. In the end, the clock stops just as the Red Death takes its last victim. The mysterious, horrifying events, ghostly, dark atmosphere, descriptions of the deadly disease and the presentiment of the nearing death are all elements of the Gothic sublime, terrifying and at the same time compelling the reader. 4.2 The Gothic in Poe’s short story The Fall of the House of Usher The short story is a story of twin brother and sister, Roderick and Madeline, who are the last remaining the House of Usher; however both suffer from a mysterious disease. Thinking their illnesses have something to do with the mansion and terrified by the thought that it somehow controls his behaviour, Roderick invites his childhood friend (nameless narrator) asking for company. One night Roderick announces that lady Madeline is dead. Asked by Roderick, the friend helps him place the corpse in a vault below the house. Later on, Roderick starts to hear strange sounds the house is making when finally a week after placing Madeline in the vault, Madeline bursts into Roderick’s room, covered in blood and as she falls on her brother, he dies, and the two fall to the floor together. The friend flees the house, and the mansion crashes down. With a heavy emphasis on atmosphere, using setting to create suspense in the reader and the subject matter including mystery, fear, madness and death, the story may be called a prime example of gothic fiction. The story is set in an old gloomy House of Usher. The outside of the house and its surroundings look truly ghastly and dismal: the bleak walls, the vacant eye-like windows, rank sedges and “a few white trunks of decayed trees with an utter depression of soul” (Poe, 1998, 49). The house is surrounded by a lurid black tarn. Even the air has “no affinity with the air of heaven, but reeked up from the decayed trees, and the grey wall, and the silent tarn – a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued” (Poe, 1998, 50). The inside of the old house is replete with Gothic spirit as well: the Gothic archway of the hall, dark and intricate passages, the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, the phantasmagoric armorial trophies… The dominating dark colour, winding passages and quirky interior arousing a strong feeling of uneasiness make the atmosphere of the home cold, hostile and menacing. Consider the impressions of Roderick’s friend as he steps inside one of the rooms: The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all (Poe, 1998, 52). The signs of decay (old architecture, tattered pieces of furniture, fretted ceiling) point to the collapse nearing. They may be associated with the twins’ disease. Thus, the deteriorating emotional and physical state of Roderick and Madeline is reflected in the house’s interior and surroundings. Time is also Gothic. As the reader of Gothic fiction might expect, it is the autumn. As for the daytime, the story starts from the evening. Roderick’s friend arrives at the House of Usher on a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn, when the clouds hang “oppressively low in the heavens” and “the shades of the evening” draw on (Poe, 1998, 49). Both autumn and evening symbolize the coming of death as autumn is the season of decay in nature and the evening the time of stillness. Evening is also the time when the unconscious human mind becomes active, fears and fancies are set free, sensations become more acute. Even the works of art created by Roderick Usher – a picture and the poem The Haunted Palace – are Gothic. The picture shows an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Technically, a tunnel is a passing from one place to another, and here it stands for the passage from life to death, which corresponds with the time of the story which is also a transitional. The plot of the poem The Haunted Palace which is about a king who is scared of evil forces that threaten him and his palace reflects Roderick’s inner fears. Usher is afraid that his own and his sister’s death is nearing. A text in a text (a poem in the tale) doubles the plot and supports the theme of fear. Premature burial and resurrection in The Fall of the House of Usher is another element of the Gothic plot. After her supposed death, Madeline is entombed in a dark, small, damp vault under the house. However, as Roderick later confesses, his sister was still alive as they brought her to the vault. Premature burial is followed by resurrection, which a typical Gothic scenario. The appearance of Lady Madeline is the culmination of the story: there was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold—then, with a low, moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated (Poe, 1998, 65). The theme of madness is also Gothic. People are usually afraid of others who are mentally unstable as their actions are unpredictable. Roderick’s mysterious disease and his unusual behaviour adds to the horror that the reader experiences. Roderick feels that the old mansion is controlling him and that it will finally kill him. At one place in the story he sits facing the door rocking from side to side with eyes open wide and rigid. Roderick mumbles random words and phrases expressing his fear that he buried his sister alive. The thought of watching someone go crazy in front of your eyes, is terrifying. Moreover, Poe explores the human mind as overtaken by fear which may even lead to insanity. Throughout the story, there are clues that it was the fear that caused the man’s illness. CONCLUSIONS Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death and the tale The Fall of the House of Usher are perfect examples of the gothic genre. The investigation of the two Poe’s works reveals his great talent as a Gothic writer. Through the descriptions of the setting (gloomy Gothic architecture, dark old buildings), mysterious events, characters overwhelmed by fear, death and premature burial as well as terrifying portrayals of human physical and mental diseases while extensively using the imagery of death, decay and dark colours, Poe achieves a strong effect on the reader’s feelings and imagination. In the short story The Masque of the Red Death, Gothic elements serve to reveal the idea that no one can escape death. The murky castellated abbey where Prince Prospero and a hundred of other nobles are hiding from the Read Death, the black room where nobody dares stay for a longer time, the ominous chimes of the ebony clock counting the hours left for the masqueraders in this world, the appearance of the mysterious figure wearing the mask of a victim of the Red Death – skilfully intertwined in the plot, these images and scenes make Poe’s story a classic example of Gothic fiction. Poe’s short story The Fall of the House of Usher represents homely Gothic. The tale deals with the darker side of the Romantic individual, its imaginative consciousness, and inner fears which may even lead to insanity. Here, contrary to The Masque of the Red Death, the unsafe, menacing environment is that of home. Throughout the story, terror is evoked trough the images of death, detailed descriptions of the house as a dreary, hostile place, medieval legends, Roderick’s madness, and the scary scene of Madeline’s resurrection. Gothic in Poe’s short stories becomes the world of guilt, despair and anxiety, the portrayal of which chills the reader’s blood and feeds the appetite for thrilling stories. REZIUMĖ Gotikinė literatūra, gimusi Anglijoje ir klestėjusi aštuoniolikto amžiaus pabaigoje bei devyniolikto amžiaus pradžioje, išsiskyrė iš kitų literatūros žanrų savo savitu rašymo ir vaizdavimo būdu. Kūriniai persismelkę slogios nuotaikos, gąsdinančios aplinkos ir kitų šiurpą keliančių elementų. Kursinio darbo užduotis buvo atskleisti gotikinės literatūros kilmę, raidą, vystymąsi, taip pat pagrindinius jos bruožus ir elementus, būdingus šio žanro literatūrai. Žymaus amerikiečių rašytojo, dar vadinamo siaubo meistru, apsakymai “Raudonosios mirties kaukė” ir “Ešerų namų žlugimas” – tipiški Gotikinės literatūros pavyzdžiai. Per niūrios, paslaptingos atmosferos bei siaubą keliančių įvykių aprašymus rašytojas prikausto skaitytoją prie knygos ir tuo pačiu analizuoja mirties temą, kalba apie tamsiuosius žmogaus išgyvenimus, psichinius sutrikimus, vidines baimes. REFERENCES Anon. (1797). Terrorist Novel Writing. Spirit of the Public Journals. Botting, F. (1996). Gothic. London and New York: Routledge. D. Van Leer (ed.) (1996). Complete stories of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: International Collectors Library American Headquarters. Poe, E.A. (1998). Selected Tales. New York: Oxford University Press. Шишкина (ed.) (1970) Nineteenth Century American Short Stories. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Online Etymology Dictionary. In http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=gothic&searchmode=none Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic

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