Abstract
The age of Enlightenment and the industrial revolution both affected people to doubt many old beliefs and form a new mentality. Man disregarded the spiritual side, imagination, and fantasy; the dominant concepts in society became logic, fact and science. This led to the death of the spiritual side in people. It turned to be a worrying subject to Intellectuals during the nineteenth century. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe attacks modern man’s misconception believing that he can find an explanation to every phenomenon in the universe according to science and logic. He manages, through using grotesque elements, such as mystery, distortion, and the supernatural, to make the protagonist disregard his old belief and realize that cosmic, immeasurable, and, infinite powers do exist. This article aim is to analyse the story showing how the writer invested the elements of grotesque to create a broken fearful world which provokes horror inside the reader; to make him feel the possibility of having a similar experience to the one his protagonist has gone through.
Highlights
The age of Enlightenment and the industrial revolution both affected people to doubt many old beliefs and form a new mentality
Modern critics identify the characteristics and situations of grotesque in literature to be : “ the distortion of persons and objects, the yoking of incompatibles, the fusion of the fearsome and ludicrous ”, in addition to “ inducing in the reader a sense of dislocation and insecurity ; ” (Nettels 1974 : 144) the reader here feels himself in a different world that is frightening and threatening
Usher‟s “ eyes and web-like hair ”, as many critics have elucidated, are in great resemblance with “ the windows and the fungi surrounding the house of Usher ” (Fenlon 1994 : 2) .The “ vacant eye-like windows ” motivates fear for it inspires the image of a skull
Summary
Critics have given variety of definitions and suggested many features to grotesque works. The world-vision in which we have everything is normal and has predictable values and links , turn to be over thrown in grotesque work through “ giving full reign to the illogical and the absurd ” (Kayser, 1963 : 59). For this reason , the suitable background for a grotesque “ is one of darkness and obscurity, suggesting something ominous or sinister ” (Timm 1972 : 79). Poe presents these features in The Fall of the House of the Usher to create a strange world in which he forces his protagonist to realize and admit the supernatural in the world
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