Known primarily for his morbid short stories, many of Edgar Allan Poe’s popular works primarily revolve around victims of vain delusions or insanity. Verified through psycho-analytical research and an analysis on Poe’s reputation and his tales, “Victimization: Power and Powerlessness” is one of the main themes in Poe’s works. In The American Journal of Psychology, Lorine Pruette begins her paper by introducing us to Poe’s life. “Poe’s father was a victim of consumption and his mother died shortly afterward, “leaving her three small children to the mercy of strangers (A Psycho-Analytical Study 371).” She later describes Poe’s heroes as “melancholy men, pursued by unrelenting fate, they are neurotic, hypochondriac, monomaniac, victims (A Psycho-Analytical
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Therefore, Montresor never needed to “push his victim towards destruction… it is the victim who does all the pushing” to his own self-destruction (104). Montresor does not merely wish to kill his victim, he wishes to do this with cruelty and impunity. In the end, the powerless victim was a victim of his pride and jealousy which led to his death by …show more content…
“The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Raven” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature are excellent examples. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the protagonist decides to accompany his friend Roderick Usher who suffers from what is now known as hypersensitivity. Poe later elaborates upon this by stating that “he could wear only garments of certain texture, the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light… To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave (657).” In conclusion, “The Fall of The House of Usher” almost completely revolved around Roderick Usher who was imprisoned and enslaved by his own hypersensitivity, his mind, and his very own, eerily “living” house. The true aggressor being uncertain. It could have been Usher’s hypersensitivity or the collapse of his sanity (and with it, his
Therefore, Montresor never needed to “push his victim towards destruction… it is the victim who does all the pushing” to his own self-destruction (104). Montresor does not merely wish to kill his victim, he wishes to do this with cruelty and impunity. In the end, the powerless victim was a victim of his pride and jealousy which led to his death by …show more content…
“The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Raven” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature are excellent examples. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the protagonist decides to accompany his friend Roderick Usher who suffers from what is now known as hypersensitivity. Poe later elaborates upon this by stating that “he could wear only garments of certain texture, the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light… To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave (657).” In conclusion, “The Fall of The House of Usher” almost completely revolved around Roderick Usher who was imprisoned and enslaved by his own hypersensitivity, his mind, and his very own, eerily “living” house. The true aggressor being uncertain. It could have been Usher’s hypersensitivity or the collapse of his sanity (and with it, his