Examples Of Setting In Gothic Literature

The best examples of Gothic literature and how setting contributes to Gothic literature are “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe, and “Where Is Here” by Joyce Carol Oates. The purpose of setting in Gothic literature is to set up an environment that is full of grandeur, darkness, and decay. When this environment is complete it gives the author the power to deliver their intended message. Setting is one of the key elements of both modern and classic Gothic fiction, since it enhances the atmosphere, and the message it is supposed to deliver. As seen in “The Fall of the House of Usher” the setting is described as dark, dreary, with little elements of the supernatural at work. Poe tells the reader how the night is filled with gloom and dread that hangs over the main character “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of evening dew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher”. The main character then looks over and describes the house itself in detail, Poe uses many words such as “bleak”, or “desolate” to tell the reader how the house is in such

The story shows a bleak image of a normal suburban house at dusk, nothing seems out of the ordinary until a stranger comes by to visit. Instantly the stranger is shown to be off putting and worries both the parents with his presence “It was as if a force of nature, had swept its way into their house!” The stranger continues to have a supernatural element about him until he is forced to leave even then he leaves something dark in every room he visited and it festers inside the house like a cancer “… the patterned wallpaper seemed drained of color; a shadow lay upon it shaped like a bulbous cloud or