Dark Romanticism In The Tell Tale Heart

Great Essays
Poe Paper Edgar Allan Poe was widely known as one of the best authors of the Dark Romantics era. The dark and creepy characteristics of his stories and poems presented the characters as sinful in his works and looked into the dark side of the mind. Poe’s works are influential today as they are studied all over the world and used as the basis for the subgenre of the Dark Romantics and what the era of stories and poems really represented. Not only Edgar Allan Poe, but Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville were the main writers during this century that focused works madness, humanity, and nature. Poe seemed to embrace the genre and type of storyline the best as his works always created a similar feeling or impression on the reader. Poe …show more content…
The characters in “The Tell tale Heart” contribute many different elements to the building of the atmosphere of fear and horror. For instance, the old man with the vulture eye, that creates fear in the heart of his caretaker. The old man is blind and the eye demonstrates the horror that the eye can see everything that is happening even though the old man cannot. This is how the character creates the common atmosphere. Also, the caretaker of the old man is extremely paranoid and to some degree mentally unstable when it comes to the old man’s eye. The fact that the caretaker stalks the man while he is sleeping creates that creepy and fearful sense. To point out, another one of Poe’s stories contains characters that are essential in creating this atmosphere. The characters from “The Black cat” help in establishing it as one of the characters is a ghost. The cat that is owned by the narrator is killed early on by the narrator himself and then reappears as the story progresses to cause him problems. The ghost like essence of the cat adds to the atmosphere of horror that is portrayed as the cat haunts and torments the narrator and causes him to get locked up. Furthermore, the narrator helps to create this atmosphere too, as he is writing the story from his cell and since he was a major alcoholic during the time of the story. This character establishes the atmosphere well with his horrifying actions towards his pet cat and towards his wife who he kills with an axe. He is looked upon as unpredictable and that creates fear in the story. The characters also from “The Fall of the house of Usher” depict the atmosphere pretty clearly as some of them are mentally disturbed in some way. For example, the character Roderick Usher who is the brother of Madeline Usher is said to be physically and mentally ill as he takes precautions in the story to

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    In the short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, he uses dark, fearful, and unwelcoming words to define the outside and inside of the Usher household. Also, the main characters are Roderick Usher, Madeline Usher, and the narrator whose name is not mentioned. The main character and owner of the house, Roderick User is suffering from an emotional illness. For this reason, when Roderick is foreshadowing his death, he states, "…the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR." (pg 18)…

    • 581 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Suspense In Poe's Liigeia

    • 416 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Edgar Allan Poe is known for the horror in his poems and short stories due to the building of suspense. He writes so that the suspense quickly builds and then he ends his work off usually with a sudden realization. This sudden realization allows for the tension to quickly unravel and leave the reader with a sense of relief and satisfaction. Poe builds suspense in his short story Ligeia through the death of a beautiful woman, the tone of the story, and being descriptive.…

    • 416 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe describes Roderick Usher in a way that uses all of the senses. “He suffered much from a morbid…

    • 1216 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most eccentric and famous writers of the 19th century. Poe was tormented by the idea of death, not only physical but also spiritual. His anguish, mixed with the excessive use of alcohol, opium, and a marked obsession for women, projected him in a dark and travailed word of ghosts, fear, and visions. This darkness marked his entire life, and consequently all of his work as an artist. Proof of that are his famous short stories, in fact they are the real and only expression of his afflictions.…

    • 1242 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    On the other hand, The Fall of the House of Usher deals with gloom and being mentally disabled. Insanity affects Roderick by the way he perceives certain things. Roderick has a negative, hopeless outlook on life, especially that his sister Madeline might die due to his illness. Insanity affects Roderick another way because he is very isolated from society. Roderick does not have good social skills and suffers from that.…

    • 631 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    As Edgar Allen Poe once said, “we loved with a love that was more than love.” With this quote Edgar Allen Poe showed the meaning of love and romanticism. “Romanticism, more than anything else, is the cult of the individual--the cultural and psychological nativity of the I--the Self--the inner spark of divinity that links one human being to another and all human beings to the Larger Truth” (Romantism par. 2). In the Romanticism era of American literature there were many meaningful and important artists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Emily Dickinson, and James Russell Lowell. In particular, romantic author Edgar Allen Poe exemplifies the romanticism era two characteristics of insanity and fear, in his stories “Tell Tale Heart”…

    • 1165 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe had different ways of expressing his constant struggles with everyday life through his work which shaped the way he wrote. Poe was a man with many challenges to overcome and with a little help of his deranged imagination produced infamous pieces of literature. In “A Tell Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Masque of the Red Death” Edgar Allan Poe draws on his own experiences with mental illness and death to create unique works of gothic fiction that explore guilt,religion, and mortality. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston Massachusetts on January 19, 1809. Poe’s parents, who were actors, died when he was a young child.…

    • 1014 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout the story, it is clear that there is a strong connection between the house and Usher’s insanity which culminates in the house’s collapse after his and Madeline Usher’s deaths. Usher himself realizes that the house is somehow tied to his declining mental state, going so far as to claim that it is alive. The narrator’s relationship with the house follows this pattern in that he feels fearful and sees evidence of the supernatural in the house’s appearance. At the start of the story, the narrator states, “I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.” (Poe 234).…

    • 1037 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The life of Edgar Allan Poe was nothing short of a series of unfortunate events. He was a gifted man who got dealt a bad hand by fate. Though most of his work found success after his death, the very few literary works that did get recognition did not bring him the success he so rightfully deserved in his lifetime. With over 100 stories, poems and short stories published under his belt Poe became a major influence to many literary styles and authors. He is said to be the creator of the genre of detective-fiction and with his amazing works he truly is still one of the greatest authors this world has come across.…

    • 1269 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The thing that caught my eye the most in The Tell-Tale Heart is the constant use of repetition of adverbs and adjectives to not only intensify the occurrence but to place and draw the reader deeper in the mad mind of the narrator. The narrator is carefully planning the murder of the old man that he felt had an evil eye, the reality of the eye being evil and being the eye of vulture is not the focus of the story, we follow the narrator's logic and perception. The reader is made aware of the narrator’s unstable mind through the use of repetition throughout the entire story that intensifies his paranoia and nervousness and being scared of the old man's eye to the point of killing him for it even though the man never did anything wrong to him.…

    • 996 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    After Madeline returns from the dead and takes the life of her brother, the House itself collapses. Through Poe’s decaying descriptions of the House, it is evident that the House and its surrounding landscape is a symbol of the Usher family lineage (Robinson 69-70). The end of the Usher family lineage is represented by the falling of the House of Usher. The presence of a gruesome death is also apparent in “The Tell-Tale Heart”. In this story, Poe describes in detail the preparation for the murder, and the extent of detail develops fear.…

    • 1313 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Throughout American literature there have been many influential writers whose common purpose involves directing readers to a certain frame of mind. Whether authors are motivated by religion, culture, or politics will coincide with the values of the era in which they are writing. The Enlightenment era which emphasized the importance of the individual, critical thinking and introduced the use of emotions in literature, inspired Romantics. The Romanticism movement focused profoundly on the emotional aspects of life. By portraying nature, death and one’s overall outlook of life throughout its work, romanticism allowed individuals to make personal connections to literature.…

    • 1595 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Tell Tale Identity Essay

    • 785 Words
    • 4 Pages

    One of the main questions that we are faced as readers when reading this text is whether the narrator is insane or not? Upon first reading we note that yes his speech and actions are strange but when we then look further into the text and the way Poe portrays this narration then we begin to see the finer cracks appear in the narrators persona. Self-narration is a literary device often employed by Poe when writing his short stories, allowing him creative freedom whilst also being able to write from a perspective that can directly relate to the audience if readers. Throughout the text the narrator is constantly trying to convince both themselves and the reader of their sanity and the justification of their own actions against the old man. Throughout the novel the narrator is constantly reminding us that they are not insane however due to the nature of Poe’s writing and authorship we can straight away tell that this is not the case “You fancy me mad.…

    • 785 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe utilizes his famously grim writing to tell the story of an unnamed narrator witnessing the literal fall of the Usher family -- Roderick and Madeline of Usher. While the plotline itself is dark and mysterious, Poe employs various literary devices to fully express the creepiness of the story. One useful literary device used in this story is setting. The setting amplifies the emotions and state of the characters and helps to clearly define themes throughout the tale. Poe uses an ominous and eerie setting to convey the central themes relating to madness, family, and fear while unifying the story under the single effect of terror.…

    • 996 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Edgar Allan Poe is often referred as the father of Gothic and horror stories. He has wrote many works of mysterious characters and very bizarre plots lines. Of all his morbid works, they all have a commonality in setting, characters, and Gothic elements in The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Masque of the Red Death. Moreover, Poe has written work with similarities in settings. They all compose of a dark, mysterious atmosphere usually during the night and consisting of a natural event happening.…

    • 504 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays

Related Topics