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【Abstract】This thesis mainly compares and analyses the elements of The Gothic novel in two typical short stories, Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and Faulkner's A Rose for Emily. Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner, both are known for their writings of Gothic story. This thesis attempts to explore some gothic characteristics and mainly focuses on the demonstration of gothic horror in these two works. Furthermore, both authors use narration and symbolism to achieve the success.
【Key words】 Gothic novel; characteristics; horror
【中图分类号】：G622.41【文献标识码】：A 【文章编号】：1009-9646(2008)05-0195-03
1Introduction
Edgar Allen Poe who was born in the South of America was a real literary genius in the 19th century. As a major romantic writer in the history of American literature, he did make great contributions to Gothic literature. Although he was poor and lived an abnormal life, he wrote so many remarkable works. In The Fall of the House of Usher (1834), Poe used the gothic house (the House of Usher) to present the madness and despair of the family. From the beginning, readers could be surrounded by the bloodcurdling atmosphere until the collapse of the House of Usher. The gothic terror Poe achieved was often commonplace, little above the popular, overheated romantic fiction of the times. Poe's writing influenced a variety of writers in American literature. To the modern age, he stands as one of the most popular authors in the world.
William Faulkner who followed Poe in gothic writing was a true genius in the 20th century. Through the late 1920s and the 1930s, his bold experiments in the dislocation of narrative time and his use of stream-consciousness technique places him in the forefront of the avant-garde. He was born into a Southern family in the town of Oxford where became the model for his works .the same as Poe, Faulkner used the gothic architecture to fabricate a terrified atmosphere. A Rose for Emily takes place in Jefferson, the country seat of Yoknapatawpha which is often used as the fictional background setting in Faulkner's works.
The Fall of the House Usher and A Rose for Emily, both are milestones in Gothic literature. The Gothic writing explores death, creation and destruction, darkness, horror, madness, terror, evil and so on. In terms of setting and characterization, these two stories mean to invoke a gothic horror that is full of the color of mystery and the sense of fear. Both works posses the characteristics of Gothic genre, a haunted and gloomy house, and persons with physical or psychological disease; fear of barbarism, identity and subjectivity but of an alienated self. Both works share some similarities in writing style. The narrator plays an important role in each story. By using this technique, these works become more vivid and believable. Symbolism is another distinct similarity in both works. The Fall of the House of Usher is the destruction of the family and the despair of personality. And Emily is a rose with pricks.
2 Gothic genre and American Gothic
Art critics, during the Renaissance, who were referring negatively to the style of art and architecture that did not conform to the Classicism of Greece and Rome, first used the term “Gothic”. The critics came up with the term because they thought the Goths had invented a style of its own. They were incorrect in their thinking that it was the Goths who, in their opinion, were responsible for the destruction of the good and true classical style. The people of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries recognized the originality of the style and referred to it as “opus modernum” (modern work) or “opus francigtenum” (Frankish work). Gothic architecture primarily originated in France during the thirteenth century. The style prevailed in Western Europe from about 1200 to the beginning of the Renaissance. The term “Gothic” was first used during the Renaissance in a derogatory manner to describe those buildings that departed from Greek and Roman models.
Appropriately, the Gothic genre derives its name from the gothic architecture of the medieval period as many people have a romantic view of that long ago period, envisioning imposing castles, shadows, hidden passageways, shut-off room, and mysterious, unexplained characters and occurrences. In multicultural environment with the crossing of the color-line in progress, the theory of the Gothic as a genre that has inherited the disturbance planted at the time of national birth is now undergoing a great change. Now in considering the Gothic works of Poe and Faulkner, we should begin the discussion by looking briefly into the shift in the framework of Gothic theory.
If we think back on the studies of American Gothic literature, it becomes apparent that we have three kinds of variations (that does not necessarily mean historical transition) concerning Gothic studies: the rhetorical framework has shifted from the Gothic landscape to that of psychology, and currently to a genre exploring “cultural contradiction.” Primarily the first flow has discussed how this minor genre of literature starting in England in the 18th century was Americanized and brought to the New World as a unique expression of the terror and horror experienced in the frontier between the settled land and the wildness. The Americanization of European Gothic apparatus and devices as an old castle, a wall, a letter, an abbey, into the wilderness, a cave, a great swirl, a somber residence; an “Indian” and murder impelled by madness have been widely researched. The search for the transformation of the original Gothic works to fit in the American culture leads to the conclusion that “the Gothic novels in Europe were born as a backlash of the authors against the outer world, the overwhelming power of church and nation, and also as a counter-reaction against the rationalism and the archaism up to the 18th century, while the American Gothic was imported to create an original genre in the background of political and cultural immaturity”. (Itoh, 1990)
In the second approach, a main source of the American Gothic can be traced in the psychological and religious fear and the mental and physical frontier, especially in the Puritan's vivid visual description and rhetoric of Hell. The research has expanded from the values initially and traditionally placed on the Gothic landscape to Gothic psychology and mentality. However, the grotesque, abnormal, and remote touch of the American Gothic remained latched by such terms as dark or negative romanticism. In the category of escapism of a kind oriented toward unreality or the surreal. The key word includes religious or existential fear, assuming the mythological and cultural continuity between American culture based in New England and European culture. An effort has been made for the discovery of the unconsciousness in the New Continent. For instance, G. R. Thompson (1974) states in the introduction to Essay in Dark Romanticism “the Gothic thrusts us forward into an existential void as it simultaneously recalls us the Age of Faith. Like the Medieval romances of knights in quest of the Holy Grail, the Gothic romance is also a quest literature. But the quest is finally metaphysical rather than purely religious, with destruction rather than redemption, at the end”.
The starting of the third framework occurred when Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) stated that the Gothic was the literature of darkness and grotesqueness in the realm of light and affirmation by perceiving the psychoanalytic relation between the Gothic and the national unconsciousness. Fiedler explicitly discovered the dialogical relationship between the national symbolization of America as the land under the sun and the literature of darkness of the Gothic, and pointed out that The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was the first literary attempt to make the Negro appear on the scene of American literature, and further stated that Absalom, Absalom! was the most significant novel in American literature that had pushed a person to his foundation.
The Gothic was an outgrowth of the Romanesque, but it was given direction by a different aesthetic and philosophical spirit and reflected much more famous writers in the literary world. Although not an American invention, the Gothic genre suits the American environment and experience, which undoubtedly explains its omnipresence in the American literature. The Gothic explores the relationship between death, creation and destruction, darkness, horror, madness, monstrosity, disease, terror, evil and at time weird sexuality. It is anything dark, shocking, haunting, frightening, repulsive, morbid, violent and startling. It focuses on anything morbid and dealing with death, sickness and decay. A major aspect of the Gothic is its tendency to invoke fear. One of the most popular gothic mediums is literature. Gothic literature includes a mixture of mystery, terror and horror. The way literature plays on people's fears is by telling a story whose intrigues yet scare the reader.
3 Gothic horror embodied in these two short stories
To begin, Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher exemplifies an early example of the American Gothic, still showing the influence of the European style as Poe takes us into a world of castles and ancient families. Vincent Buranelli says (Vincent, 1977), “Poe is able to sustain an atmosphere which is dark and dull. This is one of the tricks that he largely derived from the tradition of the Gothic tale”. While its accessory characteristics seize the imagination,its architectural associations, accentuated by an atmosphere governed by terror and horror, emerged as a fundamental source of terror. This development of the castle from insipid paraphernalia to the central feature of the atmosphere is achieved by the privileging of terror and horror the two principles that are primarily responsible for evoking the atmosphere. The Fall of the House of Usher possesses the quintessential-features of the Gothic tale: a haunted house, dreary landscape, mysterious sickness, and doubled personality. For all its easily identifiable Gothic elements, however, part of the terror of this story is its vagueness. We cannot say for sure where in the world or exactly when the story takes place. Instead of standard narrative markers of place and time, Poe uses traditional Gothic elements such as inclement weather and a barren landscape. A master of Gothic description, Poe lets the readers know at the very onset of his work that they have entered a land of forbidding terrain. For example, as the narrator rides alone on horseback “during the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens”① through a “singularly dreary tract of country” and sees the “melancholy House of Usher”, he describes a scene of luxuriant gloominess that can stand for all of Poe's interiors, “The room in which I found myself was very large and excessively lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether in accessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trelliced 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.”② He feels the house is staring at him, and immediately we understand that this is no ordinary house, and no ordinary family that lives in it. From the very beginning of the story, the madness is apparent in the house, and in the residents. It is frightening, and yet seems very appropriate in this dark and dreary setting, full of sickly inhabitants. We know we should turn back, but like the narrator although this setting oppresses and scares us, we keep going. Ironically, the “bleak walls,” the “vacant eye-like windows,” and the “white trunks of decayed trees” beckon us. However, when the narrator himself tries to explain this fascination with danger, concluding “there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the reason, and the analysis of this power lie among consideration beyond our depth.”③ Even he cannot explain the allure.
In the same Gothic vein, Poe describes the house and its occupants, Roderick and Lady Madeline. The disintegration of the castle offers a unique study in the inevitable force of decay. The singular importance of the castle is undeniable. Ste apart from civilization, the house has “minute fungi overspreading the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled webwork from the eaves…” and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts and the utterly porous and evidently decayed condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old woodwork which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air… a barely perceptible fissure, which extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the Sullen waters of the tarn.“④ Like its occupants, the house seems to be falling apart and yet there seems to be no rational explanation. Then, Roderick, a character of mystery, keeps himself aloof from others; even the narrator who had been a close childhood friend admits ”he knows little of his friend.“ And to add to the mystery, Roderick and his sister (who literally shuts herself away) suffer from some unnamed debilitating disease. According to the narrator, Roderick's affliction displays itself ”in a host of unnatural sensations.“ In addition, Poe also uses the Gothic element of the apparition as Lady Madeline, whom the narrator and Roderick had buried in the dark and oppressive vault some days before, makes a ghostly appearance at the end. Drawing upon one of the readers' darkest fears, being buried alive, Poe tells us she ”now stands without the door! It was the work of the rushing gust-but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.“⑤ But luckily, we, like the narrator, escape the danger as the work comes to a timely end with the narrator's flight from the House. He can go back to civilization and we back to our ”normal“ lives.
Horror is an ancient genre, it roots lodged in ancient myth and folklore. Since then the genre horror stories where founded. Despite the emergence of natural horror that incorporates elements of the supernatural still remains superior. A Rose for Emily is a good example of horror which contains no supernatural elements. While the realism of the story makes it more plausible to the reader, it also lessens its effectiveness. The idea of a woman lying down next to a dead body for decades is revolting, but not very horrific. No sense of dread is imposed upon the reader, and the only visceral response is one of disgust. While the piece in effective at entertaining the reader, it lacks the ability to truly inspire horror. Research some background on the Gothic horror tales of the mid-nineteenth century Romantic period. The dominant atmosphere of A Rose for Emily is Gothic. A Rose for Emily is considered to be a ”Southern Gothic“ tale. It has all of the essential components. In the story A Rose for Emily, the symbolism shows more about the character than is detailed by the author, William Faulkner. A nameless narrator describes the life of a pathetic woman, Emily, who represents a figure from the past. In A Rose for Emily, because William Faulkner has an American Gothic experience (the Old South) to draw upon, he does not have to depend on the European one. Faulkner establishes his Gothic atmosphere with the way of narration and with some special images and symbols. The imposing decrepit house, the mysterious servant, the Poe-like manner, Faulkner describes Miss Emily's house in Gothic architectural terms ”It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies.“⑥ The description of the house is a superb example of a metonym operation further moves inside the house, revealing obnoxious details which point towards death. A Rose for Emily we witness the gothic in the form of a heavy, stifling, smelly air in which the characters, and in turn the readers, must experience. The gothic mode operates much like a form of imagery, in that it must appeal to one or more of the five senses in order to be effective. Emily Grierson's house is described as smelling of ”dust and disuse——-a close, dank smell“. The reader must call upon her sense of smell to understand the gothic mode enabled in this line. The air is stale and distasteful and thus the atmosphere is eerie and mysterious. Similarly, as the men representing the mayor enter Emily's house and proceed to sit down, a ”faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray“. Not only does the air smell of ”dust and disuse“, but also the air is so heavy with dust mites and dirt, that what seems to be ”clouds“ of dust are physically seen by the naked eye. Imagine, for a moment, how seemingly suffocating the air in Emily's house must be. Faulkner has successfully called upon his readers' senses of smell to create the blinds; a ”single sun-ray“ reveals ”a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father“ -the emblem of power and authority. Yet, the father is already dead and the house is nothing but a tomb. The idea of death is latent in the description of Emily who ”looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of“ that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another……”⑦.Her distorted image and unnatural color invoke the image of a corpse about to decay, immediately recalling the “coquettish decay of her house,” in turn resulting in a linguistic operation which associates her with decay and fall. Like the House of Usher, this house that is in a state of decay, “an eye sore among eyesores,” attracts the attention of the readers, as well as the townsfolk. We, like they, want to know the mysteries of the house and its occupant. Recalling Roderick's isolation, Miss Emily, “a fallen monument” likewise has held herself aloof from the townspeople. The reader is left with the definite impression that the environment has connections with Miss Emily's deterioration as it does with Roderick's. In the end, Faulkner, like Poe, leaves us with a disturbingly nightmarish image, this time one of necrophilia. Thematically, A Rose for Emily may also be considered a tragic love story in the naturalist mode, a detective story, a “thriller,” and a typical O'Henry's story with surprise ending. “Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and learning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.”⑧
4 Conclusion
Gothic literature which plunged its characters into mystery, torment, and fear in order to pose distributing questions to our familiar and comfortable ideas of humanity, society, and the cosmos. “American Gothic” contextualizes these questions in term of five nineteenth-century cultural trends: (1) the images of the swamp;(2) interest in the occult;(3)the image of American as a “ship of state ”;(4)abuse of reason and science;(5)the senti-mentalization of death. Southern writing of the twentieth-century follows in the gothic tradition. Poe set a good example to the Southern writers for the Gothic writings. This classification highlights that fact that many of the elements Faulkner incorporates into his story, such as darkness, death, and dismal descriptions of a society setting. While not obviously a Gothic work, A Rose for Emily contains convincing features that identify it as Gothic. The story contains imagery, tones, and plotting made familiar in The Fall of the House of Usher. The Fall of the House of Usher and A Rose for Emily are two stories that exemplify mastery of the gothic tale: both are set in worlds of darkness and decay, populated by people of disposition and abnormal. The technique of achieving the gothic may differ in Poe and Faulkner, however the end result is the same-each of these two works contains the gothic mode of writing.
Notes:①Emory,Elliott.AmericanLiterature. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs,1991.P388;②Ibid.P390;③Ibid.P388;④Ibid.P389;⑤Ibid.P400;⑥Cowley, Malcolm. The Portable Faulkner. The Viking Press, 1946.P433;⑦Ibid.P435;⑧Ibid.P444
References:
[1] Buranelli, Vincent. Edgar Allan Poe. Boston: G.K.Hall&Co., 1977
[2] Cowley, Malcom. The Portable Faulkner: New York: The Viking Press, 1946
[3] Elliott, Emory. American literature. New Jersey: prentice Hall, Eichosha, 1990
[4] Itoh, Shoko. A Transformation of American Gothic. Tokyo: Eichosha, 1990
[5] Peter, B. An outline of American Literature . New York: Longman, 986
[6] 常耀信，美国文学简史，天津：南开大学出版社，1990
[7] 李公昭，20世纪美国文学导论，西安：西安交通大学出版社，2000
[8] 童明，美国文学史，上海：译林出版社，2002
[9] 吴伟仁，美国文学史及选读，北京：外语教学与研究出版社，1990
Receivde date：2008-5-15
【Key words】 Gothic novel; characteristics; horror
【中图分类号】：G622.41【文献标识码】：A 【文章编号】：1009-9646(2008)05-0195-03
1Introduction
Edgar Allen Poe who was born in the South of America was a real literary genius in the 19th century. As a major romantic writer in the history of American literature, he did make great contributions to Gothic literature. Although he was poor and lived an abnormal life, he wrote so many remarkable works. In The Fall of the House of Usher (1834), Poe used the gothic house (the House of Usher) to present the madness and despair of the family. From the beginning, readers could be surrounded by the bloodcurdling atmosphere until the collapse of the House of Usher. The gothic terror Poe achieved was often commonplace, little above the popular, overheated romantic fiction of the times. Poe's writing influenced a variety of writers in American literature. To the modern age, he stands as one of the most popular authors in the world.
William Faulkner who followed Poe in gothic writing was a true genius in the 20th century. Through the late 1920s and the 1930s, his bold experiments in the dislocation of narrative time and his use of stream-consciousness technique places him in the forefront of the avant-garde. He was born into a Southern family in the town of Oxford where became the model for his works .the same as Poe, Faulkner used the gothic architecture to fabricate a terrified atmosphere. A Rose for Emily takes place in Jefferson, the country seat of Yoknapatawpha which is often used as the fictional background setting in Faulkner's works.
The Fall of the House Usher and A Rose for Emily, both are milestones in Gothic literature. The Gothic writing explores death, creation and destruction, darkness, horror, madness, terror, evil and so on. In terms of setting and characterization, these two stories mean to invoke a gothic horror that is full of the color of mystery and the sense of fear. Both works posses the characteristics of Gothic genre, a haunted and gloomy house, and persons with physical or psychological disease; fear of barbarism, identity and subjectivity but of an alienated self. Both works share some similarities in writing style. The narrator plays an important role in each story. By using this technique, these works become more vivid and believable. Symbolism is another distinct similarity in both works. The Fall of the House of Usher is the destruction of the family and the despair of personality. And Emily is a rose with pricks.
2 Gothic genre and American Gothic
Art critics, during the Renaissance, who were referring negatively to the style of art and architecture that did not conform to the Classicism of Greece and Rome, first used the term “Gothic”. The critics came up with the term because they thought the Goths had invented a style of its own. They were incorrect in their thinking that it was the Goths who, in their opinion, were responsible for the destruction of the good and true classical style. The people of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries recognized the originality of the style and referred to it as “opus modernum” (modern work) or “opus francigtenum” (Frankish work). Gothic architecture primarily originated in France during the thirteenth century. The style prevailed in Western Europe from about 1200 to the beginning of the Renaissance. The term “Gothic” was first used during the Renaissance in a derogatory manner to describe those buildings that departed from Greek and Roman models.
Appropriately, the Gothic genre derives its name from the gothic architecture of the medieval period as many people have a romantic view of that long ago period, envisioning imposing castles, shadows, hidden passageways, shut-off room, and mysterious, unexplained characters and occurrences. In multicultural environment with the crossing of the color-line in progress, the theory of the Gothic as a genre that has inherited the disturbance planted at the time of national birth is now undergoing a great change. Now in considering the Gothic works of Poe and Faulkner, we should begin the discussion by looking briefly into the shift in the framework of Gothic theory.
If we think back on the studies of American Gothic literature, it becomes apparent that we have three kinds of variations (that does not necessarily mean historical transition) concerning Gothic studies: the rhetorical framework has shifted from the Gothic landscape to that of psychology, and currently to a genre exploring “cultural contradiction.” Primarily the first flow has discussed how this minor genre of literature starting in England in the 18th century was Americanized and brought to the New World as a unique expression of the terror and horror experienced in the frontier between the settled land and the wildness. The Americanization of European Gothic apparatus and devices as an old castle, a wall, a letter, an abbey, into the wilderness, a cave, a great swirl, a somber residence; an “Indian” and murder impelled by madness have been widely researched. The search for the transformation of the original Gothic works to fit in the American culture leads to the conclusion that “the Gothic novels in Europe were born as a backlash of the authors against the outer world, the overwhelming power of church and nation, and also as a counter-reaction against the rationalism and the archaism up to the 18th century, while the American Gothic was imported to create an original genre in the background of political and cultural immaturity”. (Itoh, 1990)
In the second approach, a main source of the American Gothic can be traced in the psychological and religious fear and the mental and physical frontier, especially in the Puritan's vivid visual description and rhetoric of Hell. The research has expanded from the values initially and traditionally placed on the Gothic landscape to Gothic psychology and mentality. However, the grotesque, abnormal, and remote touch of the American Gothic remained latched by such terms as dark or negative romanticism. In the category of escapism of a kind oriented toward unreality or the surreal. The key word includes religious or existential fear, assuming the mythological and cultural continuity between American culture based in New England and European culture. An effort has been made for the discovery of the unconsciousness in the New Continent. For instance, G. R. Thompson (1974) states in the introduction to Essay in Dark Romanticism “the Gothic thrusts us forward into an existential void as it simultaneously recalls us the Age of Faith. Like the Medieval romances of knights in quest of the Holy Grail, the Gothic romance is also a quest literature. But the quest is finally metaphysical rather than purely religious, with destruction rather than redemption, at the end”.
The starting of the third framework occurred when Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) stated that the Gothic was the literature of darkness and grotesqueness in the realm of light and affirmation by perceiving the psychoanalytic relation between the Gothic and the national unconsciousness. Fiedler explicitly discovered the dialogical relationship between the national symbolization of America as the land under the sun and the literature of darkness of the Gothic, and pointed out that The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was the first literary attempt to make the Negro appear on the scene of American literature, and further stated that Absalom, Absalom! was the most significant novel in American literature that had pushed a person to his foundation.
The Gothic was an outgrowth of the Romanesque, but it was given direction by a different aesthetic and philosophical spirit and reflected much more famous writers in the literary world. Although not an American invention, the Gothic genre suits the American environment and experience, which undoubtedly explains its omnipresence in the American literature. The Gothic explores the relationship between death, creation and destruction, darkness, horror, madness, monstrosity, disease, terror, evil and at time weird sexuality. It is anything dark, shocking, haunting, frightening, repulsive, morbid, violent and startling. It focuses on anything morbid and dealing with death, sickness and decay. A major aspect of the Gothic is its tendency to invoke fear. One of the most popular gothic mediums is literature. Gothic literature includes a mixture of mystery, terror and horror. The way literature plays on people's fears is by telling a story whose intrigues yet scare the reader.
3 Gothic horror embodied in these two short stories
To begin, Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher exemplifies an early example of the American Gothic, still showing the influence of the European style as Poe takes us into a world of castles and ancient families. Vincent Buranelli says (Vincent, 1977), “Poe is able to sustain an atmosphere which is dark and dull. This is one of the tricks that he largely derived from the tradition of the Gothic tale”. While its accessory characteristics seize the imagination,its architectural associations, accentuated by an atmosphere governed by terror and horror, emerged as a fundamental source of terror. This development of the castle from insipid paraphernalia to the central feature of the atmosphere is achieved by the privileging of terror and horror the two principles that are primarily responsible for evoking the atmosphere. The Fall of the House of Usher possesses the quintessential-features of the Gothic tale: a haunted house, dreary landscape, mysterious sickness, and doubled personality. For all its easily identifiable Gothic elements, however, part of the terror of this story is its vagueness. We cannot say for sure where in the world or exactly when the story takes place. Instead of standard narrative markers of place and time, Poe uses traditional Gothic elements such as inclement weather and a barren landscape. A master of Gothic description, Poe lets the readers know at the very onset of his work that they have entered a land of forbidding terrain. For example, as the narrator rides alone on horseback “during the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens”① through a “singularly dreary tract of country” and sees the “melancholy House of Usher”, he describes a scene of luxuriant gloominess that can stand for all of Poe's interiors, “The room in which I found myself was very large and excessively lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether in accessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trelliced 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.”② He feels the house is staring at him, and immediately we understand that this is no ordinary house, and no ordinary family that lives in it. From the very beginning of the story, the madness is apparent in the house, and in the residents. It is frightening, and yet seems very appropriate in this dark and dreary setting, full of sickly inhabitants. We know we should turn back, but like the narrator although this setting oppresses and scares us, we keep going. Ironically, the “bleak walls,” the “vacant eye-like windows,” and the “white trunks of decayed trees” beckon us. However, when the narrator himself tries to explain this fascination with danger, concluding “there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the reason, and the analysis of this power lie among consideration beyond our depth.”③ Even he cannot explain the allure.
In the same Gothic vein, Poe describes the house and its occupants, Roderick and Lady Madeline. The disintegration of the castle offers a unique study in the inevitable force of decay. The singular importance of the castle is undeniable. Ste apart from civilization, the house has “minute fungi overspreading the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled webwork from the eaves…” and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts and the utterly porous and evidently decayed condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old woodwork which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air… a barely perceptible fissure, which extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the Sullen waters of the tarn.“④ Like its occupants, the house seems to be falling apart and yet there seems to be no rational explanation. Then, Roderick, a character of mystery, keeps himself aloof from others; even the narrator who had been a close childhood friend admits ”he knows little of his friend.“ And to add to the mystery, Roderick and his sister (who literally shuts herself away) suffer from some unnamed debilitating disease. According to the narrator, Roderick's affliction displays itself ”in a host of unnatural sensations.“ In addition, Poe also uses the Gothic element of the apparition as Lady Madeline, whom the narrator and Roderick had buried in the dark and oppressive vault some days before, makes a ghostly appearance at the end. Drawing upon one of the readers' darkest fears, being buried alive, Poe tells us she ”now stands without the door! It was the work of the rushing gust-but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.“⑤ But luckily, we, like the narrator, escape the danger as the work comes to a timely end with the narrator's flight from the House. He can go back to civilization and we back to our ”normal“ lives.
Horror is an ancient genre, it roots lodged in ancient myth and folklore. Since then the genre horror stories where founded. Despite the emergence of natural horror that incorporates elements of the supernatural still remains superior. A Rose for Emily is a good example of horror which contains no supernatural elements. While the realism of the story makes it more plausible to the reader, it also lessens its effectiveness. The idea of a woman lying down next to a dead body for decades is revolting, but not very horrific. No sense of dread is imposed upon the reader, and the only visceral response is one of disgust. While the piece in effective at entertaining the reader, it lacks the ability to truly inspire horror. Research some background on the Gothic horror tales of the mid-nineteenth century Romantic period. The dominant atmosphere of A Rose for Emily is Gothic. A Rose for Emily is considered to be a ”Southern Gothic“ tale. It has all of the essential components. In the story A Rose for Emily, the symbolism shows more about the character than is detailed by the author, William Faulkner. A nameless narrator describes the life of a pathetic woman, Emily, who represents a figure from the past. In A Rose for Emily, because William Faulkner has an American Gothic experience (the Old South) to draw upon, he does not have to depend on the European one. Faulkner establishes his Gothic atmosphere with the way of narration and with some special images and symbols. The imposing decrepit house, the mysterious servant, the Poe-like manner, Faulkner describes Miss Emily's house in Gothic architectural terms ”It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies.“⑥ The description of the house is a superb example of a metonym operation further moves inside the house, revealing obnoxious details which point towards death. A Rose for Emily we witness the gothic in the form of a heavy, stifling, smelly air in which the characters, and in turn the readers, must experience. The gothic mode operates much like a form of imagery, in that it must appeal to one or more of the five senses in order to be effective. Emily Grierson's house is described as smelling of ”dust and disuse——-a close, dank smell“. The reader must call upon her sense of smell to understand the gothic mode enabled in this line. The air is stale and distasteful and thus the atmosphere is eerie and mysterious. Similarly, as the men representing the mayor enter Emily's house and proceed to sit down, a ”faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray“. Not only does the air smell of ”dust and disuse“, but also the air is so heavy with dust mites and dirt, that what seems to be ”clouds“ of dust are physically seen by the naked eye. Imagine, for a moment, how seemingly suffocating the air in Emily's house must be. Faulkner has successfully called upon his readers' senses of smell to create the blinds; a ”single sun-ray“ reveals ”a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father“ -the emblem of power and authority. Yet, the father is already dead and the house is nothing but a tomb. The idea of death is latent in the description of Emily who ”looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of“ that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another……”⑦.Her distorted image and unnatural color invoke the image of a corpse about to decay, immediately recalling the “coquettish decay of her house,” in turn resulting in a linguistic operation which associates her with decay and fall. Like the House of Usher, this house that is in a state of decay, “an eye sore among eyesores,” attracts the attention of the readers, as well as the townsfolk. We, like they, want to know the mysteries of the house and its occupant. Recalling Roderick's isolation, Miss Emily, “a fallen monument” likewise has held herself aloof from the townspeople. The reader is left with the definite impression that the environment has connections with Miss Emily's deterioration as it does with Roderick's. In the end, Faulkner, like Poe, leaves us with a disturbingly nightmarish image, this time one of necrophilia. Thematically, A Rose for Emily may also be considered a tragic love story in the naturalist mode, a detective story, a “thriller,” and a typical O'Henry's story with surprise ending. “Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and learning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.”⑧
4 Conclusion
Gothic literature which plunged its characters into mystery, torment, and fear in order to pose distributing questions to our familiar and comfortable ideas of humanity, society, and the cosmos. “American Gothic” contextualizes these questions in term of five nineteenth-century cultural trends: (1) the images of the swamp;(2) interest in the occult;(3)the image of American as a “ship of state ”;(4)abuse of reason and science;(5)the senti-mentalization of death. Southern writing of the twentieth-century follows in the gothic tradition. Poe set a good example to the Southern writers for the Gothic writings. This classification highlights that fact that many of the elements Faulkner incorporates into his story, such as darkness, death, and dismal descriptions of a society setting. While not obviously a Gothic work, A Rose for Emily contains convincing features that identify it as Gothic. The story contains imagery, tones, and plotting made familiar in The Fall of the House of Usher. The Fall of the House of Usher and A Rose for Emily are two stories that exemplify mastery of the gothic tale: both are set in worlds of darkness and decay, populated by people of disposition and abnormal. The technique of achieving the gothic may differ in Poe and Faulkner, however the end result is the same-each of these two works contains the gothic mode of writing.
Notes:①Emory,Elliott.AmericanLiterature. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs,1991.P388;②Ibid.P390;③Ibid.P388;④Ibid.P389;⑤Ibid.P400;⑥Cowley, Malcolm. The Portable Faulkner. The Viking Press, 1946.P433;⑦Ibid.P435;⑧Ibid.P444
References:
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[2] Cowley, Malcom. The Portable Faulkner: New York: The Viking Press, 1946
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Receivde date：2008-5-15