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Edgar Allan Poe and The Gothic
And a Reading of The Black Cat
Lecture Notes

An introduction to the Gothic
The idea that the Gothic is a reaction to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on ‘reason
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Passion,
excitement and sensation transgress social proprieties and moral laws
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Drawing on the myths, legends and
folklore of medieval romances, Gothic conjured up magical worlds and tales of
knights, monsters, ghosts and extravagant adventures and terrors
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’ (Fred Botting, Gothic, 1996
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3)
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o The gothic genre relates to the darker side of life – fear, terror, disturbances
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Key Points on this definition of the Gothic
1
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It has a close association with Romanticism
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2
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3
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4
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o There is an emphasis on history with a return on past sins
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By the 18th century there were 13 British colonies in America
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American Revolutionary War – 1775-1783
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‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed’
United States Declaration of Independence (1776)

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This produces gothic themes in America
Revolution – no place in parliament, no rights, declaration of independence,
establish new values
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Rational link to
enlightenment
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Equality and gender of men
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How can a new nation be Gothic?
Here Hawthorne explains why he does not set his novel in America
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No author, without a trial, can conceive of
the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no
antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a
commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with
my dear native land
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Romance and
poetry, ivy, lichens, and wallflowers, need ruin to make them grow’
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eldritchpress
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html
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Struggle to set in America, as the nation had no history
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America’s Haunted History
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Slavery reveals the irony of the American declaration of Independence
The indigenous American people – there was people living on the land before
the ‘discovery
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America is gothic because
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It has a haunted history – previous inhabitants of the land were marginalised
and supressed
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There was an anxiety about persecution – a guilt for past crimes and a fear of
retribution

Hawthorne’s comments in genuine
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 Are slaves not men?
Slaves were treated like animals – ironic of the land of the free
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America was not a new nation
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There were bloody battles
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They were slaughtered, forced into communities had their
land removed and were murdered
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America is built on anxieties
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He was born in Boston in 1809, his mother was an actress, and she died from
tuberculosis when he was 3
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He dropped out of university in Virginia due to gambling debts
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He battled constantly with John Allan over finances
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He was fired from this job because of alcoholism
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He achieved some fame with his writing but he struggled with poverty and
alcoholism
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 This was in Baltimore, it is a mystery as
he was missing for several days prior
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He spent most of his life in poverty struggling with alcoholism
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Conflict with father figure  older men
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Key Themes of Poe’s Work
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Dead or dying women: ‘The death of a beautiful woman […] is unquestionably
the most poetic topic in the world’
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Philosophy of

Composition’ (1846)

http://xroads
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edu/~HYPER/poe/composition
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 Women mostly dead or dying
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There are recurring themes of persecution and paranoia
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Representation of blackness as sinister
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o ‘the most wild, yet most homely narrative
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o ‘unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute
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 Themes of blackness as sinister, slave/master relationship, metaphor or
allegory?
 Brute – ambiguous, human and animal
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Relates to when African people were seen as uncivilised and
savages, the view that some races closer to animals
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Is the final scene a return of the repressed?
o ‘the hideous beast […] whose informing voice had consigned me to the
hangman
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Hanging audience linked directly to slavery
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Slavery – black people linked to violence, slave owners frightened of their
escape
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