Research Paper On Poe Phobias

Edgar Allen Poe is Scared: Phobias in his Short Stories. Edgar Allen Poe is well known as the most important originator of the genre of horror literature. From Stephen King to Joyce Carol Oates, writers of horror and the grotesque are inspired by Poe. The question remains: what inspired Poe to write his tales of fear, terror, and horror? One way to answer this question is to inquire about Poe’s own fears and phobias, which clearly informed his writing. This paper will explore ideas of phobias and how these phobias informed several of Edgar Allen Poe’s most famous short stories, including The Tell Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Fall of the House of Usher. Phobias are irrational fears that don’t match the

Upon seeing her, her brother Usher died from fright. The narrator fled the home in time to see it entomb itself under the earth until not a trace of the mansion was left to be seen. Usher and Madeline are thus buried under the ground in the gloomy house forever. A final fear readers can see in Poe’s work is claustrophobia, or the fear of being in tight, enclosed spaces. Poe’s work The Pit and the Pendulum is an example of this type of phobia. Punter writes about the pit and pendulum’s reality: “the impossibility of escape, the claustrophobia, the pit and the pendulum” (90) where the narrator is a captured revolutionary who is sentenced to death. After falling into the insensible. The narrator wakes up in a pit where he experiences deep fear of darkness, or nyctophobia. Eventually the narrator escapes the pit, but he then wakes up underneath the pendulum. For the pendulum, the narrator is placed on a platform upon which he is held down by leather straps. Above him, a sharp pendulum swings ever lower and will cut him in half lest he escape. Rats are all over him, chewing on the leather in what the narrator hopes is time for his