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Comparing Ligeia And The Fall Of The House Of Usher

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In Edgar Allen Poe's short stories, "Ligeia" and " The Fall of the House of Usher," it is helpful to view the characters as 2 halves of one persona. Ligeia and Rowana respectively represent the romantic and gothic writing styles as do Madeline and Roderick Usher. The characters cannot exist without their other half, just as the gothic writing style cannot exist without the romantic.

Often made clear in Poe's writing, it the use of gothic writing style includes romantic stylings without intention. the opposite is true as well because the 2 writing styles are tied together as 2 halves of one whole, dark romanticism. When Ligeia does not exist, Rowana ceases to exist just the same as Ligeia. When Madeline dies, Roderick soon
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Edgar Allen Poe is considered to be one of the leading writers of the Gothic Romantic period of literature. One of Poe’s famous short stories, The Fall of the House of Usher, creates a dark and sorrowful atmosphere, with a deep story of connection between brother and sister intertwined within. Poe conveys this atmosphere through powerful and elaborate use of diction, to tie into the overarching theme of tradition. Poe is renowned throughout history for his beautiful and elaborate use of diction and symbolism. He uses copious amounts of description to conjure up vivid scenes in the reader’s mind.

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991 Words | 4 Pages

All elements considered, both authors of these stories are able to successfully create Dark Romanticism. Poe used the house to symbolize Roderick’s deteriorating mental state. The veil which felt like, “preternatural horror was interwoven with the threads of the black crape” (Hawthorne) represented the secret and dark sins possessed by humans. The Fall of the House of Usher does represent Romantic literature in the way it includes elements like imagination and intuition over reason, and torment of the mind and body. But The Minister’s Black Veil has Romantic elements as well, such as talking about the supernatural, individuality, and psychological torment.

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612 Words | 3 Pages

In the short story “The Black Cat” and the short story “The Birthmark,” both main characters are similar to each other, but they also have differences. Each story grapples with sanity/insanity, how the main characters treat those around them, and each character's attitude towards life. Even with these similarities, the stories are different. The authors of these two stories, Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, are both writers who use madness and gothic often, but in different ways. In these stories, readers see how each writer uses madness and gothic in a creative and unusual way.

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1088 Words | 5 Pages

Edgar Allan Poe is a famous writer and poet from the 1800s. “The Raven” is one of his most well-known works. However, Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher are two of Poe’s short stories that make one feel uneasy. Both have a conflict of losing a woman who was loved by someone in some way. A sister in The Fall of the House of Usher, and a wife in Ligeia.

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649 Words | 3 Pages

Edgar Allen Poe’s writings are very dark and dispirited. A lot of his writings contain death and depression. Two of his writings that exhibit both of those topics are The Fall of the House of Usher and The Raven. In The Fall of the House of Usher, the narrator went to go visit an old friend named Roderick Usher. Roderick lived with his sickly sister in a dark, scary house.

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1192 Words | 5 Pages

With their similarities in writing styles, we see the struggle that the human mind goes through when dealing with dark obsession, an important aspect of the human condition. There are also some differences, for instance, there is death in both but they are a bit different, and one of the narrators has more control of their situation than the other. Not everything is as it appears, for example in Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart.”

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504 Words | 3 Pages

Literary doubling is found often in Edgar Allan Poe’s work as a way for characters to analyze their individual issues. In Poe’s short essay, Berenice, Egaeus discovers his double in his cousin Berenice; through her, he is able to recognizes his own monomania, furthermore, through the extraction of her teeth he attains a panacea for his ailment. While Berenice is Egaeus’ antithesis, there are insidious hints throughout the essay. Egaeus conveys in the opening that, “from Beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness” (7), placing himself in the center of both things. Berenice exemplifies beauty.

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516 Words | 3 Pages

In the “Fall of the House of Usher”, Poe uses again two sides of one self. At the beginning of the story, the narrator notices, “the remodelled and inverted images of

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993 Words | 4 Pages

Edgar Allan Poe is well known in America and around the world for the horror and mystery in his stories and the dark romanticism of his poems (Lyber et al.). Most of Poe’s gothics have one trait in common a narrator with a disturbed psyche, which is shown in The Tell-Tale Heart, Ligeia, and The Black Cat. Throughout his life, he wrote many dark stories and poems that would give him a permanent place in American literature. One of Poe’s more popular stories The Tell-Tale Heart portrays a narrator that is troubled by an old man's “vulture” like eye.

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947 Words | 4 Pages

People have many factors in their lives affecting their motivations and decision-making processes. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” the main character is a man named Roderick Usher. This man is affected by emotional influences, family illness, and a gloomy environment. The emotional theme of fear runs through the entirety of this story. Mr. Usher is influenced by an illness that affects his sister and his own self proclaimed mental illness.

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1734 Words | 7 Pages

The human body is physiologically made up of primarily three qualities. People paint each one in their own way; The conscious mind holds its walls up towards reality and rational occurances, while behind that layer is the unconscious mind that pushes the boundaries of our reality --perhaps even supernatural beings -- and both of these are tied to the soul: the purity and core existence for homosapians. Thus, this idea gets expanded on--even crosses the line--during the short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe. During the story, the narrator goes to visit his ill friend Roderick Usher in his home and while there, he experiences rather bizarre situations that is merely brushed away until the very arch at the end of the story. This story brings along the imagination, and those qualities of the conscious

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679 Words | 3 Pages

Edgar Allen Poe 's, "Fall of the House of Usher" symbolizes the narrator reaction to witnessing Madeline 's return from the grave and trying to comprehend the supernatural events that take place inside the estate. Also, this includes the narrator observing Roderick Usher losing his mind. His perspective is important because it is an interpretation of his surroundings while visiting the House of Usher and the allegories of the nature of art. From the very first paragraph, the overall suggestion of the story is that the tone is the story if going to be mournful and somber. This is supported by the narrator describing his journey on horseback towards the house.

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525 Words | 3 Pages

Poe and Hawthorne, two authors of Dark Romanticism and Gothic literature, were contemporaries and wrote within the same literary period in the 19th century. They have both left their mark and signature on various literary genres that are still studied and analyzed to this day. “The Fall of the House of Usher” and The Scarlett Letter were all of one brood , equally as imaginative and as metaphorical and symbolic. Both authors seemed to be obsessed with the power of blackness due to their dark view on life resulting from their harsh childhood; they both have been orphaned from an early age. They were known to write short stories that tackle themes such as seclusion (“Rappaccini’s Daughter”), guilt (“Ethan Brand”), obsession (“The Tell-Tale

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1001 Words | 5 Pages

The Role of Art in “The Fall of the House of Usher Art can be expressed within writing pieces, poems and short stories in various types of forms. Edgar Allen Poe uses music as a form of art to help the main character Roderick try to cope with his unstable state of mind. Roderick experiences moral dilemmas and music serves to distort his feelings unintentionally. Simiraily, the ancient greek philosopher Aristotle believed that for a balance of life one needs to encounter the bad experiences in order to feel better and move on to better times.

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1459 Words | 6 Pages

Of all gothic writers, Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most groundbreaking of them all. From The Cask of Amontillado, a story with integrated historical references of the time, to The Fall of the House of Usher, a deep and morbid story full of imagery. Anywhere from The Tell-Tale Heart, truly a story of both unique syntax and perspective, to The Raven, a poem full of symbols and eerie repetition. Through these and many more, Poe has been using his writing style to immerse people into his stories and poems alike since 1839. However, Poe is only able to accomplish this through his unique writer’s style, particularly his forceful imagery and meaningful syntax.

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