Elements of Gothic Literature in Edgar Poe's Stories.
Edgar Poe's works had a great impact and contributed a lot to the development of the Gothic literature. His stories are a fine example of the Gothic style in the classical way of its interpretation. "The Black Cat," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Tell-Tale Heart" are three very different stories. However, they all are composed according to the rules of the traditional Gothic genre, and that is a distinctive feature of Poe's writing.
The main feature of all these stories is an atmosphere of mysticism and terror. A reader feels tension, suspense, and a premonition of the horrible event coming; a reader follows Fortunato deeper and deeper into the dark catacombs, "slowly, oh, so very, very slowly" moves to the room of the man with an Evil Eye, shivers of the dread in the presence of the second black cat. A reader senses, sees, smells, and hears the evil deed that is approaching, and before he even knows it, the mind sinks in the ocean of madness. The reality disappears and he joins the main characters in their journey to the land of insanity.
This is a certain characteristic of a typical Gothic story - the atmosphere of mysticism and terror, of supernatural events. The mood, the atmosphere of the gothic story is very important - tension, suspense, premonition of the horrible event coming; fantasy predominates over reality, the strange over the commonplace, and the supernatural over the natural. This is what distinguishes Gothic genre from a usual horror.
The plots and main characters of the Gothic stories are different. The plots can be - murders, revenge, betrayal, tragic stories of love and hate, and other gloomy but a bit romantic stories. The Gothic hero is usually burdened by a secret guilt or sorrow, conversant with alternate realities, obsessive in his/her individual quest for self-realization. Gothic novelists invest their characters with unprecedented psychological depth. Gothic fictions are often structured as case histories of types of insanity.
Poe does all that - he takes his readers to the darker side of life, to the world of pain and destruction, fear and anxiety, and not the one surrounding people, but the one inside them. His characters pass beyond all levels of reality. "Yet, mad am I not - and very surely do I not dream," claims the man from "The Black Cat." "How, then, am I mad?" asks the man from "The Tell-Tale Heart." And the hero from "The Cask of Amontillado" does not even bother to worry about proving the world that he is not mad. Maybe, he is the smartest one, for he is the only one to avoid the punishment, while two others are betrayed by their own madness. The desperate bragging gives them away. And so the one from "The Black Cat" is sentenced for death penalty, the one from "The Tell-Tale Heart" is making a confession. And only the hero of "The Cask of Amontillado" takes his time to stay at the wall and reply to the yells of his victim, and nothing disturbs him for the half of a century.
They all are mad, indeed, but they madness is so different! One can see how it evolves from drinking, and takes a man to the darkness of the nightmares that are chasing him day and night, makes him aggressive and obsessive, unable to control his explosive temper. One also witnesses the caution of truly insane one taking hours and hours for seven nights crawling into the room of his victim. And the madness of the one from "The Cask of Amontillado" is really scary - his mind is so clear, so sharp, and his intents are so evil as if it went somewhere beyond the madness and reached the very opposite of what is perceived as normal.
The evil thoughts had taken over all of the characters. "Evil thoughts became my soul intimates - the darkest and most evil of thoughts," confesses the man from "The Black Cat." What cruelty accompanies their deeds! Two of them hide the bodies in the walls, while the scarily insane one walls up a man alive! And what places they choose for their deeds! The cellar of the house, the dusty and moist catacombs with the piles of bones, and, if that is a room, it is a room "as black as pitch with the thick darkness." A perfect place to awaken the "mortal terror"- a classic Gothic setting, isn't it? And the victims? They are an uncomplaining wife, a dear friend, and an innocent old man - people whom murderers confess they loved.
What is the novelty of the Gothic stories? It is the unprecedented psychological depth the author describes his characters with. In fact, that interests Poe more than a crime itself. He is more interested in how men get to the state of mind that forces them to commit a crime and what is their reaction after the deeds are done, than in how they were committing it. It is also the new level of realism that the horror of Poe's stories acquired. Lovecraft, in his "Supernatural Horror in Literature," wrote:
Poe's spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none of their predecessors, and established a new standard of realism in the annals of literary horror. . . Verses and tales alike sustain the burthen of cosmic panic. . . Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feeling, that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations.
It is the new level of realism that Poe has achieved that makes the reader fascinated by somewhat predictable plots. The endless horror of life governing the man, the world as a kingdom of madness, chaos and death as the predetermined fate of the man - that is the content of the "scary stories" of Poe. But with the genius touch of Poe's writing these scary stories come to life and become the masterpieces of Gothic literature.
In the same time, these scary gothic stories are very mystical and lyrical. No wonder that some call Poe "the most starry of the troubadours of eternity who got lost on the Earth." There is a certain charm in all of Poe's stories, although it is mostly dark, gloomy, depressing, and touched by the breath of death. It is this dreadful charm that makes Poe a troubadour of not love, but death; and it is this unusual charm that makes the readers think that Poe must have got lost in the realms of life if he admires darkness over light.
Many critics acknowledged the outstanding importance of Poe's works and saw in them more than just "scary stories". Lovecraft wrote:
...it would be hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True, his type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first realized its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic expression. True also, that subsequent writers may have produced greater single tales than his; but again we must comprehend that it was only he who taught them by example and precept the art which they, having the way cleared for them and given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths. Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done; and to him we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state.
Gothic can be criticized for its melodramatic scenario and predictable plots, but the incredible popularity of the genre from the eighteenth century till our days proves that there must be something that fascinates so many different readers, that appeals to something in people's minds that makes them read these stories. What is it, one may wonder? It is a universal feeling of primeval fear and mortal terror that in spite of its negative meaning leaves us breathless. And so, over and over again new readers are taking a journey to the depth of madness as they read another one of Edgar Poe's gothic stories.