The Unique Aesthetics Of Allan Poe S Ho

The Unique Aesthetics of Allan Poe’s Horror Tales

Abstract: My study is aiming at an approach to Poe’s horror tales dealing with his unique aesthetics. The paper is devoted to give a detailed analysis of some of Poe’s most famous horror tales in three aspects: Gothic Writing Style, Vivid Psychological Description, and Death of Beauty.

Keyword: Aesthetics, Gothicism, Psychology, Death of Beauty

Chapter One Introduction of Poe’s Aesthetics
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) has been held among the greatest poets and the most popular American authors due to his great literary success. During a short life of poverty, anxiety, and fantastic tragedy, Poe explored in different fields of literature, including poetry, fiction, and literary criticism. Indeed he has made contribution to all these genres of literature. As a poet, Poe, Whitman and Dickinson are regarded as the most creative American poets in the 19th century. As a story writer, Poe is the first American professional writer and is considered to be the father of horror, science fiction and detective stories. As a critic, his theory of “pure poetry” and “single effect” inspired many adherents and remain a remarkable influence even on today’s literature.
The originality of Poe’s writing style is way ahead of its time. Poe believes that the function of literature is not to summarize and interpret earthly experience, but to create a mood in which the soul soars towards supernal beauty. “An immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man is thus plainly a sense of the Beautiful….There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above.” ① From his themes about neuroticism, the glorification of death and the afterlife, to his sarcastic tone when speaking of love and human emotions, Poe develops a unique aesthetic perception.

Chapter Two Gothic Writing Style
Gothic literature starts from the 18th century in England, and gradually forms a special school in literary world. Among the numerous celebrated Gothic classics, Poe’s horror tales remain the most grotesque and unique. Compared to the other Gothic writers, Poe deepens the connotation of Gothicism by exploring the themes of death, guilt, revenge, incest and morbid psyche as well as the supernatural mystery in these tales. Poe intends to psychologize the Gothic and has commenced to modify the traditional Gothic relationship, in which the direction of horrifying averts from outside to inside, from setting to self. The characters are more like creative originator of the terrifying rather than passive victims or witnesses of their appalling plight, while the circumstances are merely the products of their imaginative mind.
In The Masque of the Red Death, Poe leads the readers into a filmic Gothic scene. The castellated abbey, in which Prince Prospero and the company had sealed from the pestilence, was a typical Gothic structure. It seems that only in such a gloomy and sinister atmosphere can the author conspire such a bloodcurdling fiction. In addition to the seventh room in which the very tragedy occurs, the whole building is shrouded in an air of eeriness and unearthliness, “…the apartment were irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite.” ② Gothic setting is such an important ingredient representing its dark feature for the tale. Poe even wrote an essay entitled The Philosophy of Furniture, which throws some light on his Gothic effect. Poe takes the imagery of terror: the blighted oppressive countryside, the ancient house, the bleak walls, the vacant eye-like windows, and decayed trees. Natural setting of gloom accounts no mere a sporadic event in his works.
It is with Poe that the old “German” Gothic is finally brought into the contemporary setting. Darker and gloomier than the 18th century Gothic, Poe’s performance for novelty in composition for the theme of death achieves the uniqueness of his Gothic stories and the sole effect of terror that “comes not from Germany, but from the soul”. ③

Chapter Three Vivid Psychological Description
Poe also has some famous fictional techniques merited the world’s attention. One of the most significant of Poe’s contributions to American literature derives from one of his most typical themes: the theme of psychological obsession embodied in a first-person narrator. ④ Poe transforms the ironically distanced and discursive first person narrator familiar to readers of Spectator essays and the stories of Washington Irving into a narrator who is so obsessed with the subject narration that the obsession itself becomes the thematic center of the story. Poe is very skillful at depicting human’s inner world and psychological activity, especially that of neurotic. As a consequence, he is regarded as the precursor of abnormal psychology.
Poe describes a most paranoid character in his short story The Tell-Tale Heart. In this story, the narrator murders another man and buries him beneath the floorboards in the chamber. At first all is well, but his sanity begins to deteriorate when he is visited by the local police officers. Quickly, the man begins to hallucinate that he can hear the dead man’s still beating heart. Describing it as a, “low, dull, quick sound -much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton”, ⑤ the man is unable to run from the sound because of the presence of the officers. Driven mad by the incessant noise, he finally screams, “‘Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more! I admit the deed! --tear up the planks! Here, here! --It is the beating of his hideous heart!’”
The Fall of the House of Usher is another typical representative short story of Poe. It tells of a twin, a brother and a sister, who live in a shadowy house. The sister is badly haunted by illness and falls into death. Her brother is neurotic for longtime psychological repression. After the death of the sister, the brother invites his friend Usher to accompany him. One heavily rainy night, the sister breaks out of the coffin and frightens her brother to death. Subsequently, the sister dies again. Finally, the house collapses, and the man usher escapes from it in fear. In the story, the sister symbolizes one’s physical illness, while the brother emblems one’s mental illness. Hence, they represent the death of a man in body and soul. Indeed, Poe set the backdrop on one fixed horrible place—the House of Usher. At the very beginning of the story, Poe creates an atmosphere of intension and melancholy, making readers feel horrible and nerve-strained. The house morphs into a horrifying character of its own and characters seem to be chained to the house; they can’t escape. In addition, the ending of the fall of the house echoes the beginning. Thus, it makes the story as a circle so as to impress the reader deeply. Chapter Four Death of Beauty
"From a proud tower in the town, Death looks gigantically down;" ⑥ Allan Tate remarks, “Everything in Poe is dead: the houses, the rooms, the furniture, to say nothing of nature and of human beings.” Indeed, the atmosphere in Poe’s tales is always motionless and dead; and the characters are almost invariably under the shadow of haunting death. His somber attitude, quick and witty comments, and sarcastic and sinister looks on human and mankind, are very recognizable in all his pieces of literature and fictions.
And in most of Poe’s works, the theme—death, is closely related with beauty. From The Philosophy of Composition, we might find a clue of the very effect of beauty that Poe wants to achieve. “When, indeed, men speak of beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect—they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul”. ⑦ The powerful description reveals that in Poe’s mind beauty is an effect that he endeavored to produce. Because this beauty is by definition unrealizable, it is not strange that he concludes that the death of a beautiful woman would be the most poetic topic in the world, for his idea of beauty is closely associated with eternity and immortality. Just as Poe has announced, “…I asked myself - ‘of all melancholy topics, what according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy? ’ Death was the obvious reply. ‘And when,’ I said, ‘is this most melancholy of topics most poetical? From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also is obvious - when it almost closely allies itself to Beauty’: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world-and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”
Poe himself thinks that Ligeia is his best short story, and many critics have regarded it as Poe’s finest creation. In the story, the narrator’s wife, Ligeia, is a perfect woman, who possesses exquisite beauty, expanded intellect and spiritual purity. Poe describes her beauty in details – her “rave-black, luminous hair”; her “low musical voice”; her “ivory skin, lofty forehead”; her “delicate nose, radiant smile” and “big, mysterious eyes”. ⑧ She is an idealized beauty, a mirror that reflects the narrator himself. After Ligeia’s death, the narrator marries another woman, Rowena, who represents the mortal woman, or reality. She is all flesh and the link for the narrator to the external world. The narrator wishes Rowena to death in order to bring Ligeia back. His longing for Ligeia, or his contemplation of the beauty, is the best example of Poe’s idea of “elevation of soul”.
When we look back over Poe’s tempestuous life, it is very obvious that on the whole his experience with women was very tragic. From the beginning of his life, he was haunted by the shadow of death. Most women he loved, either by birth, adoption, marriage or by ties of friendship and love, were ultimately deprived of from him. Apparently the cruel reality inspired him and he employed this theme into his works to create his own aesthetic theory of beauty. Poe is unfortunate, but it is those misfortunes and miseries that present his readers the unique style and effect. The image of the dead beauty will long linger in readers’ minds and be appreciated as time goes by.

Chapter Five Conclusion
Edgar Allan Poe is one of the greatest writers to have lived, and the literature and works he produced years ago, are still alive and well known today. For a long time after his death, Poe didn’t get the reputation he deserved, but his talents in literature has been gradually rediscovered and appreciated by now. He is well ahead of his time both as an author and poet, and as a great thinker, with topics and thoughts which were far too advanced for the average population, and the average education level, of those individuals living during the time his works were composed. Contemporary critics consider him as a pioneering aesthetician and psychological investigator, and his reputation with the reading public is more secured than that of any other major American writer of his time.

① The Poetic Principle – Edgar Allan Poe
② The Masque of the Red Death – Edgar Allan Poe
③ Gothicism in Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories – Li Xueqin
④ Study on the Metaphors of Allan Poe’s Horror Tales – Lu Qi
⑤ The Tell-Tale Heart – Edgar Allan Poe
⑥ The City in the Sea – Edgar Allan Poe
⑦ The Philosophy of Composition – Edgar Allan Poe
⑧ Ligeia – Edgar Allan Poe