INTRODUCTION:

Firstly let us draw a quick sketch of Romanticism. It is “an attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century.” [Pioch, 2002]

However Edgar Allen Poe was not strictly a Romantic Poet. Poe, Hawthorne and Irving were the three main authors who defined the darker side to romantic literature of the time. They combined the two styles of Romanticism and Gothicism, and for this reason critics often call Poe’s style “Gothic Romanticism.”

The element of the exotic, the weird, the monstrous and at times even the Satanic was present in Poe’s works, together with the characteristics of Romanticism: a deep appreciation of nature and her complexities, the slavery of reason to emotion and intellect to instinct and a heightened analysis of the human mind and personality. In the examples of which we speak, Poe, in accordance with Romantic traditions, explores the importance of psychic communications, the obscurity of time and place, and the emphasis given to the emotional and intutive part of man’s soul. In the following section we shall explore how these elements are present in “The Fall of The House of Usher” and “Ligeia”.

ANALYSIS:

Poe makes almost no reference to either the time or the placing of ‘The Fall of The House of Usher”. This serves to make the story more believable, as it allows the reader to believe that the story is happening in a sort of ‘twilight zone’, where the supernatural is only natural. This is a characteristic of Romantic literature. Poe describes the Usher house as located in “singularly dreary tract of country…in a distant part of the country” when the character Roderick’s letter reaches the narrator. (Poe, “Usher”). The narrator reveals that “many years had elapsed since our last meeting” thus disallowing any guess at the age of either Roderick or the narrator. On top of this, the symbiotic, even parasitic correspondence is echoed as Roderick’s illness manifests itself in the character of Madeline.

In “Ligeia,” a similar ploy is made use of. In the very first line of the story the narrator claims that he cannot remember “how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia.” He only “believes” that he met her in a “city near the Rhine”. When he purchases the abbey all that is mentioned about its location is that it was “in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England”. He even states about the location: “I shall not name it.”(Poe, “Ligeia”). Romanticism is also famous for its connotations with regard to nature. This can be clearly seen in Poe’s description of the lady Ligeia. He describes her as one does nature: she is portrayed as a moth, butterfly, chrysalis, a stream of running water, the ocean, falling from a meteor. Like nature, she is tempestuous under a façade of tranquility: “outwardly calm but the most violently prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion.”