论埃德加爱伦坡对哥特小说的影响和发展.doc

求真学院外语系学生毕业论文

题 目On the Inheritance and Development of Gothic Fiction by Edgar Allan Poe
论埃德加 · 爱伦·坡对哥特小说的继承和发展

专 业 英 语
班 级 060532
学生姓名 徐 雯 娴
学 号 06053212
指导教师 鲜 文 森

2010年 5月 30日
12

On the Inheritance and Development of Gothic Fiction by Edgar Allan Poe

Presented to
The Faculty of Foreign Languages
Huzhou Teachers’ College
By Xu Wenxian
Under the Supervision of
Mr. Xian Wensen

May 20

Contents

Acknowledgements i
Abstract in English ii
Abstract in Chinese ii
1. Introduction 1
2.Gothic Fiction 1
2.1 Root of the word “Gothic” 1
2.2 The Development of Gothic Fiction 2
2.3 Features of Gothic Fiction 3
3. Edgar Allan Poe 4
3.1 Inheritance 5
3.1.1 Atmosphere and Settings 5
3.1.2 Murder and Death 7
3.2 Development 7
3.2.1 Protagonists In Poe’s Tales of Psyche Thriller 8
3.2.2 Poe’s Tales of Ratiocination 9
4.The Influence of Poe on Later Writers 10
5. Conclusion 11
Bibliography 11

Acknowledgements

I owe the completion of this paper to many people.
First and foremost, I am especially grateful to my respectable, responsible supervisor, Mr. Xian Wensen, for his sense of responsibility, enlightening guidance, and patience during the whole course of my writing.
Besides, I would like to express my gratitude to the staff in the School Library who helped me find the reference books. I should also thank my friends who have helped me in finding the materials in the ocean of books.
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to express my deepest thanks to my family. Thank you all!

Abstract
As one of the typical writers of Gothic fiction, Allan Poe was influenced by Gothic genre. He did inherit a lot from the traditions of Gothic literature, for example, gloomy atmosphere and settings, murder and death, supernatural phenomena, etc. can be seen through his works. He also broke bravely new ground to create his own horror tales of psyche thriller. So many reseachers put the emphasis on the point of view of psychology while lacking of universality and allsidedness. This paper will make an multi-angle comparison with Poe’s tales and Gothic fictions so as to make clear Poe’s inheritance and development of the field of Gothic fiction and a clear acknowledgement of Poe’s influence to the American literature even the world literature as well, including the writers who were regarded as the landmark of the modern literary history such as Baudelaire and Faulkner.
Key Words: Gothic fiction, Poe’s tales, inheritance, development

摘 要

爱伦坡作为歌特式小说的代表作家之一，创作受歌特小说的影响甚深，他的小说里随处可见歌特小说的烙印，谋杀与死亡，阴郁幽暗的背景和气氛，超自然现象等等歌特元素充斥其中，而且他对歌特体小说的要素进行革新，把关注的焦点由外部的恐惧转向内在的心灵恐惧。因此许多人把研究的重点放在从心理学角度来解读爱伦坡的作品，缺乏广泛性与全面性。因此本文将对爱伦坡的短篇小说与歌特小说进行比较，从多角度进行剖析，力图阐明坡对歌特小说的继承和发展。使能够清晰的认识到坡在美国文学史乃至世界文学史上的影响，包括波德莱尔福克纳等大批在现代文学史上具有里程碑意义德作家。

关键词：歌特小说，坡的小说，继承，发展

On the Inheritance and Development of Gothic Fiction from Edgar Allan Poe

1. Introduction
No doubt there existed many similarities between Gothic fiction and the mysterious breath-taking tales of Edgar Allan Poe’s. It was true that under great influence of this “Dark Romanticism”, as critics always called it, that Poe wrote down these tales filled with features of Gothic fiction such as gloomy atmosphere, terror and death. Poe himself also perfected this genre by his indelible tales concerning distorted love and murder, horror inside man’s soul, and disintegration of one’s inner life, etc. Besides, Poe went far beyond. Not only did he inherit from the realm of Gothic fiction, but he also developed it by his tales of psyche thriller and inventing a new genre of fiction, that was, the modern detective story, which Poe himself called “tales of ratiocination”. It was not exaggerated that Poe was a genius of imagination in his “probe beneath the surface of normal existence”( 常耀信， A Survey of American Literature). Then, what was Gothic fiction? What did Poe inherit from this realm of literature? To what extent did he develop it? These were the questions that I would try to answer in this paper.

2.Gothic Fiction
2.1 Root of the word “Gothic”
Originally the word Goth referred to the Germanic tribe -the Goths- in Northern Europe. During the great immigration in which the Teuton race gushed into Southern Europe, the ferocious and belligerent Goths had been the main force in the fighting and destroying of the Western Rome Empire. Their acts of bloodiness and mercilessness left miserable and terrible impressions on the memories of Southern Europeans, especially Italians. Therefore, scholars of Renaissance used the word Gothic-an adjective derived from Goth- to designate the architecture style of the Middle Ages, which in their eyes represented backwardness, barbarism, and darkness. Gradually the word Gothic, the adjective form of Goth, was connected with derogatory meanings like barbarism, horror, backwardness, mystery and so on. (爱伦坡哥特小说源流及其审美契合,朱振武 王子红)
2.2 The Development of Gothic Fiction
In the middle of 18 th century, a new kind of novel appeared. Again the word Gothic was used to name this new category of novel, plots of which were gloomy, mysterious and frightening. It was called Gothic fiction not because it had some relation with the Goth race, but mainly because the first mature book of this category, The Castle of Otranto, written by Horace Walpole and published in 1764, held a subtitle as A Gothic Story.
Attention should be paid to The Castle of Otranto as it had played a role of foundation in the history of Gothic fiction. Set in an antique but magnificent castle in the Medieval southern Italy, it told of the fall of Manfred family, whose ancestors once usurped the castle from the old lord Alfonso and was cursed with a prophecy that “the Castle and Lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it”. (Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto) This dark prophecy drove the offsprings of the Manfred family living nervously under its shadow. Then the prophecy seemed to become true as the only son of Manfred, Prince of Otranto, was crushed dead by an enormous helmet on the very day of his wedding. To preserve the family asset and retain the posterity, Manfred tried to desert his amiable wife, Hippolita, and marry Isabella, fiancée of his son Conrad’s. To reach this goal he made use of everything and even killed his daughter by accident. Eventually the prophecy took the upper hand and the Manfred family was no more: Isabella was married to Theodore, who was discovered to be the son of Alfonso and rightful heir to the estate, while Manfred ended up in seeking penitence in a monastery.
Full of supernatural phenomena such as walking portrait, shuddering armor, dreadful thunderclap, and strange sighing of statue, The Castle of Otranto lacked nothing as regards gloomy atmosphere, thrilling plots etc., which led it into a sensational success. Thus this novel set a general form for the writing of Gothic fiction. And the author of it, Horace Walpole was “the actual founder of the literary horror-story as a permanent form”, as H. P. Lovecraft pointed out in his Supernatural Horror in Literature.
After the success of The Castle of Otranto, many writers took great interest in it and wrote their own Gothic novels. Clara Reeve followed Walpole's lead with The Old English Baron. William Beckford combined a Gothic atmosphere with oriental romance History of the Caliph Vathek. But the heyday of Gothic fiction came in the 1790s,with the publication of The Mysterious of Udolph(1794) and The Italian(1797) by Ann Radcliffe, The Monk(1796) by Matthew Lewis. Between the late 18 th century and the early 19 th century, the Gothic fiction had already secured its status in the sea of literature: with the prosperity of Romanism, the Gothic fiction bloomed. Besides, a large number of famous scholars, poets and novel writers throughout England and Germany, enthusiastically devoted themselves to Gothic writing, producing their own Gothic fictions or fictions with Gothic style. Among them were Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Dickens, Shelley and Keats, etc. Their participation paved the way for the development of Gothic fiction and affected many Gothic writers afterwards.
2.3 Features of Gothic Fiction
As a type of novel writing, the conventional Gothic fiction had its formula like the descriptions of deserted enormous castle, inexplicable supernatural phenomena, and so on, which seemed to become the symbols of Gothic fiction. In fact, it was because of these symbols that covered the Gothic fiction with a special garment of attraction.
Then, what were these special features?
Like the other genres of novels, the most distinguished, common, and everlasting theme of Gothic fiction was the conflict between good and evil. However, writers of Gothic fiction had no intention to express directly their blueprints of ideal society and life, instead they tried to illustrate it by exposing the dark sides in society. They probed, sought, and searched for the existence of sense, morality and rationality under the madness, immorality, and irrationality. They even questioned the existence of the supernatural and the nature of God in their works, e.g., in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, the fiend seemed so powerful that no one could conquer.
Except the theme, perhaps the most obvious features of Gothic fiction were reflected in its gloomy atmosphere and frightening plots. Both of them contributed a great deal in evoking readers’ sense of fear, which was the special garment of attraction that Gothic fiction reflected. To inspire this sense of fear, this “oldest and strongest emotion of mankind”(H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature), Gothic writers devoted a lot to the descriptions of gloomy atmosphere and frightening plots. Locations of Gothic fiction were typically wild and remote (castles, mountains, a mysterious country). Graveyards were common settings as were medieval locations, which aroused a less rational and circumscribed age of romance, barbarity, and superstition. Tortuous narratives, mysterious incidents, horrible images, specters, monsters, frail and endangered heroines, corpses, evil aristocrats, scientists, oppressive fathers and husbands, madmen and criminals were not unusual in Gothic fiction, too. For example, the frail and pretty heroine endangered by a dark evil force adventured series of horrible incidents and finally was rescued by a brave hero, showing a love overcoming the evil.
In a word, Gothic fiction had put forth a challenge towards the boundaries of acceptability, transgressing aesthetic notions that literature and art should be clear, rational and ordered. These boundaries were those of reason, morality, social and sexual propriety. It showed a fascinated preoccupation with the passionate, the imaginative, the irrational, the supernatural and the brutal. It also showed a fascination with sexual, criminal, emotional and immoral behavior that transgressed the norms of propriety.

3. Edgar Allan Poe
With a little game of transposition, Edgar Poe’s name could be exhibited as the words “a God-peer”. “Mr. Poe had,” James Russell Lowell described, “that indescribable something which men have agreed to call -genius- … there is none who is not inevitably aware of its presence and its power.” (James Russell Lowell, Life of Poe) And Poe, the poor genius who had been neglected for a long time, exhibited in his tales both his magnificent techniques of writing and his enormous capability of imagination.
Throughout his short yet prolific literature life, Poe had written down nearly seventy tales. Many of them were more or less indebted to some influence of Gothic fiction. But Poe was such a genius that he not only inherited from the realm of Gothic fiction, but he also developed it as well. Besides, he also created a world of his own illustrated by his “tales of ratiocination”.
To show the particular relation between Poe and Gothic fiction, I would try to illustrate in this paper in two parts, titled as inheritance and development.
3.1 Inheritance
Evidences had showed that Poe owed not a bit to Gothic fiction. As an omnivorous reader, he had engrossed himself in works of Romantics, many of which were greatly connected with the prevailing genre of Gothic fiction at that time. He had read and absorbed poets such as Coleridge, Byron, etc. And he responded to the aesthetics of the European romantics. Of course he had also read and absorbed a lot Gothic fiction. He was familiar with the cult of horror in German literature, e.g. he referred more than once to Faust, the typical character representing Gothic fiction. In his tales such as Ligeia and The Oval Portrait, we could find the influence of Gothic writing through such description of the gigantic Gothic castle. “The works of Mrs. Radcliffe and Maturin were not unknown to Poe.” as Richard H. Hart presented in The Supernatural in Edgar Allan Poe.
Now that Poe himself had such intimate relation with the works of Gothic fiction, no wonder that Poe himself liked to compose tales of mysterious plots, of death and murder and so on. In deed, he did inherit some traditional elements of Gothic fiction as were showed in his tales-- the gloomy atmosphere and settings, murder and death, and supernatural phenomena.
3.1.1 Atmosphere and Settings
Atmosphere and settings were unanimously of great importance in the writing of fiction, as both of them helped to outline the story. Atmosphere and settings concerning those basic elements such as tone, time, and place provided for the fiction with a specific environment in which the protagonists lived, and thus settled the style of the fiction. According to this, writers had to rack their minds to create appropriate atmosphere and settings for their novels. This was no exception in Gothic fiction. It was known to every Gothic writer that to write a frightening Gothic story, first of all an appropriate type of atmosphere and settings with the same power of fright and terror should be created. Therefore, gloomy atmosphere and settings had become distinguished features of Gothic fiction. And the two were connected deeply together. The descriptions of the gloomy settings, which were always castles, graveyards, etc., helped to originate and heighten the gloomy atmosphere. In this sense, settings of Gothic fiction meant and even equaled the atmosphere.
Of course, Poe realized and paid great attention to atmosphere and settings. Aware of the connection between them, he was careful to select the settings. Next were some of these typical settings in his tales: the vaults, old mansion, and rooms.