“The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe and “Where is Here?” by Joyce Carol Oates are both pieces of Gothic literature. However, Oates is a modern Gothic writer as Poe is not, and Gothic literature traditionally uses grandeur, darkness, and decay in their tales. So, the question is; does the setting of traditional Gothic tales matter so much in modern Gothic stories?
First of all, we start with one of the traditional Gothic writers, Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote “The Fall of House of Usher,” which is a tell of a character whose name is unknown to us, that visits his old childhood friend, Roderick Usher, who is the last of his family after his sister had died, who is now buried in a vault. Now, Poe’s “The Fall of House of Usher” uses a lot of the traditional settings of Gothic tales, the beginning of the story first starts with; “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback,
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However, the gloom furthers itself when the main character finally arrives upon the House of Usher property where he sees that the house has bleak walls, vacant eyelike windows, white trunks of decaying trees, and there is a crack that zigzags from the corner roof of the home to the opposite bottom corner, which the house later is a symbol of Roderick Usher and his mental health. Roderick