Essays 121 - 150
in the Broadway Journal (Magistrale 81). Steeped in Gothic tradition, the theme involves one mans descent into total madness, whi...
that both of these individuals were perhaps depressed, at least a few times in their lives, and thus their work examined the darke...
little concern for the development, the past, of the relationships that play a very important part in the stories. One could well ...
WILL you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them" (Poe). He describes himself as "v...
when it overwhelms everything, even the narrator who is trying to avoid being caught. Perhaps the most hideous thing about the sto...
at 4 a.m., his guilty conscience elicits the narrators confession. Is this an example of another Poe murder mystery or does it re...
that country is assuredly America" (de Tocqueville). de Tocqueville discusses universal suffrage, which he says "had been adopted...
"In the nineteenth century, Poe influenced Ambrose Bierce and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others. Twentieth-century writers who ...
Are the descriptions of the narrator reliable or do they represent hallucinations brought on by a deteriorating mental state? In ...
wife Virginias slow death, the narrator focuses on every detail of his wife Ligeia as she lies dying: "The pale fingers became of ...
1836 he married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year old cousin and went to Philadelphia to edit Burtons Gentlemans Magazine, to which he c...
"loved the old man" and had "no desire" for his gold (Poe "Tell-Tale Heart"). Why then, did he become obsessed with the idea of mu...
his murder: he piles the bones against the wall and leaves the chamber, leaving the now-quiet Fortunato to die (Poe). He says "For...
a disease but madness surely is. And, his insistence that this "disease" has actually increased his skills and his awareness is fu...
any particular theme, any symbolic reference, other than the story itself. It is a poem that clearly reflects the work of ...
before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers, of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph" (Poe). ...
thou noble youth, / The serpent that did sting thy fathers life / Now wears his crown." Ham. "O my prophetic soul! My uncle?" (I, ...
Davis also indicates that many scholars find Mary Shelleys Frankenstein to be incredibly fascinating and a far darker story than h...
that he despises genius, "the greater the genius the greater the ass" (Poe). At this point, Proffit sounds like a particularly pom...
lower crime rates, that reductions in crime must originate within individuals. Adding greater numbers of police all too often is ...
an ever-present element in "The Cask of Amontillado", Poe manages to keep it just below the surface of the plot until that final ...
grief-stricken protagonist/narrator who is mourning the loss of his beloved, Lenore, and has perhaps taken to drink much as Poe ha...
banks of a "black and lurid tarn" (Poe Usher). As the narrator in both stories is fully aware of who he is, he never bothers to in...
work following the writing will also help ensure all points have been added and may trigger some more ideas. Once the work is wr...
the age of 24 left her son with deep emotional wounds that never completely healed. It is believed that there is a little of Eliz...
death. Not simply because death equates with grief, but there is also the element of terror, the fear of a small child at the loss...
a "filmy" eye, and in the narrators mind, it became an "evil" eye (Poe). The narrator, who is obviously mentally ill, decided he ...
such as "bleak walls" and minute fungi overspread on the whole exterior" to describe the place of which he speaks. There is defin...
very fast and uncontrolled manner - all signs of the narrators questionable mental state. The narrators obsession with th...
"These sketches will . . . will include every person of literary note in America; and will investigate carefully, and with rigorou...