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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
In three pages this paper examines the emergence of Southern Gothicism in these two short stories and how it is defined and reinforced through symbolism and allegory. Three sources are listed in the bibliography.
Page Count:
3 pages (~225 words per page)
File: TG15_TGpoefau.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
spoke. Gothicism in literature, however, did not become popular until the mid-eighteenth century when British authors began to combine horror with Romantic fiction. In America, Gothic literature became
popular in the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), who developed a style in such tales as "Ligeia" (1838) and "The Oval Portrait" (1850) that is often called Southern
Gothic. This is because the characters are often wealthy gentlemen that reflect the upper-class social structure of the American South before the Civil War. Nearly a hundred years
later, William Faulkner (1897-1962) wrote novels and short stories about a fictional place known as Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, where like in his 1930 short story "A Rose for Emily," there
were people grieving over the loss of the class system that defined many of the proud wealthy Southerners before the war killed their way of life. In all of these
stories, symbolism is used to create the mood necessary for Gothic horror tales. Each story is an allegory of life and death. Poe was always interested in the
changes to the human body at the time of death, and this is reflected in "Ligeia." Like Poe himself, who watched his wife Virginias slow death, the narrator focuses
on every detail of his wife Ligeia as she lies dying: "The pale fingers became of the transparent waxen hue of the grave; and the blue veins upon the lofty
forehead swelled and sank impetuously with the tides of the most gentle emotion. I saw that she must die" (Poe 1502). Although he remarries, to Lady Rowena Trevanion
of Tremaine, the narrator is still obsessed with Ligeia. He only becomes interested in his new wife when she becomes ill and he can watch her dying: "I had
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