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The following text will focus on analysis of the environmental and psychological Gothicism in The Fall of the House of Usher based on his “Effect theory”.
4.2.1 Poe’s “Effect Theory” —The Unity of Terrifying Effect
Different from most of the other horrible novel writers, Poe doesn’t directly describe blood and violence in his works. The charm of his novels lies in his application of the unity of effect. The principal of Poe’s works is “The Effect Theory”. Poe maintains that a poem must please the ear while expressing genuine emotions, or passions. “The Unity of effect or impression” is of primary importance and the most effective story is one that can be read at a single sitting. As Poe sees, a short story writer should deliberately subordinate everything in the story—characters, incidents, style, and tone-to bring out of a single, preconceived effect. (Fan, 2009:36)
Poe’s principals for short stories are perfectly shown in his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, that every event, every detail, and even every word and sentence can reach a unified, preconceived and impressive effect.(McMichael,1980:996) He strives to explore the internal principal that can trigger the excited effect. And terror is one of the most fundamental emotions of humans.(Liu, 2009:79) What is people’s most scared thing? Death, obviously, is the answer. He chooses the death as the terrifying theme of his works. Poe ponders that the description of death can create the effect of beauty with the most grotesquery in the most unharmonious atmosphere.(Liu, 2009:79) Through the descriptions of the unusual environment and personalities, he tend to trigger a sense of terror from the psychology. The Fall of the House of Usher is one of the best representatives of his principal of the unity of effect. In the whole story, he chooses a series of gloomy, cloudy and decaying environment and images to advocate an atmosphere of psychological terrors.
This work, it begins with a long periodic, which leads readers right into the strange and claustrophobic house of Usher. Poe. From the very outset, Poe describes the gloomy surroundings beside the house of Usher. Melancholy is the tone of the story under which the effect of terror is achieved gradually.
4.2.2 Environmental Gothicism
In this work, Poe, with a vivid description of terrifying environment, creates a horrible atmosphere. There is no doubt that the description of the horrible environment plays an indispensable role in creating the terrifying atmosphere. Poe maintains that different combinations of very simple natural objects may produce different effects. So he puts the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, the vacant and eye-like windows together to show an atmosphere of gloom and decay. He insists that such combination can have a power to affect people’s emotion and feeling.
For example, in the opening paragraph, Poe stresses the descriptions of the gloom and decaying environment.
“During the whole of a dull, dark, soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was-but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible”(Edgar,1985:1356).