浅析爱伦坡短篇小说的死亡主题英语论文

浅析爱伦坡短篇小说的死亡主题【关键词】爱伦坡；死亡；思想；痛苦I. IntroductionEdgar Allan Poe, the American 19th-century writer of fiction, poet, literary critic, reviewer, journalist, editor and philosopher has exerted a substantial influence on American and world literature. However, Poe is misunderstood by his contemporaries and their followers for quite a long time. Mark Twain declares his prose to be unreadable. Henry James makes the ruthless statement that“an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive state of development.”1 And Whitman has mixed feelings about him: he does admit Poes genius, but it is“its narrow range and unhealthy, lurid quality” that most impresses him. Ironically, it is in Europe that Poe enjoys respect and welcome.“Swinburne, Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence and W?H?Aduen all admired and spoke highly of himPoe was, Shaw said on the centenary of his birth,the greatest journalistic critic of his time; his poetry isexquisitely refined; and his tales arecomplete works of art.” 2The research on Edgar Allan Poe at abroad is very popular now. There is renowned academic journal which specializes in studying Poe with the name Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism. It includes essays and notes on every aspect of Poe, the man and the writer: bibliographical studies, source and influence studies, short essays and notes on Poe in the context of international Romanticism etc. In a word, it probes into every facet of Poe and his writings. Besides, there are many monographs on Poes works, among which the famous one is The Purloined Letter which includes the well-known controversies between Jacques Lacan and Derrida.Although Poe and his works have now been studied and analyzed in several respects, still there are some fields, for example, his death theories that need further research, especially in China. There is seldom specific study of the theme of death in Poes short stories. This paper attempts to discuss the theme of death in Poes short stories by making a brief analysis of Poes works. Generally, Poe had an obsession with the theme of death and his unique views on death are different from others. While in this thesis, the theme of death in Poes representative short stories were a raw portrayal of Poes theory. To a certain extent, according to the brief analysis of Poes life experience, the social situations of his time and the characters and plots in his short stories, readers would get better understanding about Poe and his death theory.II. The Main Causes of Poes Theme of DeathPoes miserable life experience and the social situations in his time shaped his sensitive and fragile personality, and made the theme of death involved in most of his short stories when the positive theme prevailed in American literary world at that time, so that Poe was misunderstood by many people, becoming one of the most controversial writers in the American literary history.A. The Influence of Poes Life ExperienceEdgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809, the child of struggling traveling actors. Poes mother, Elizabeth Arnold, had been a prominent actress, who was abandoned by his husband when Poe was one year old and died in December, 1811. The premature death of his mother was the first death that Poe encountered in his whole life. As Wolf Malkovich said the death“gives birth to the imagery that harasses him and his works”. 3Then, as an orphan, Poe was taken into the home of John Allan, a wealthy merchant of Virginia, but he was never formally adopted. At that time, pains of losing his own parents and a dark shadow of his poor origin always laid in Poes little heart. At seventeen years old, Poe entered the University of Virginia to study literature. During this period, Poe began to fall into the bad habit of drinking and gambling. Because of John Allans excessive thrift and bad temper, the relation between the father and son became worse and worse. Finally, Poe had to leave the family and live on his pen, writing poems, stories, literary criticism and working as an editor for a number of magazines. At twenty-seven, Poe married his beloved thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia, whose long-time progressing illness made him suffer from both heavy financial burden and spiritual torment. However, Virginia Poe, not yet twenty, burst a blood vessel in her throat and died five years later. Then, Poe became extremely grieved and bitterer than ever before, though he felt somewhat relieved from“the horrible never-ending oscillation between hope and despair.” 4The death of Virginia was another fatal blow for Allan Poe who had been struggling with fate in poverty. Since then, Poe got seriously ill and drank much more. On October 3rd, 1849, Poe was found senseless near a polling place in Richmond. Taken to a hospital, he died on October 7th, 1849, of congestion of the brain.B. The Influence of Social Situation of that TimeEdgar Allan Poe is a writer with very salient characters in the American Romantic literature. He is culturally informed, rather than isolated, reclusive, and warped. The conflicts in his inner heart reflect the features of his time.At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution spreads to the United States from Britain. For some Americans at that time, the industrial development symbolizes the independence of economy. But for some other people, the development of factories may lead to the avalanche of various social problems, such as the expansion of the gap between rich and poor, the growing destruction of the environment and the moral depravity. Poe could see the crack between the old world and the brand-new world. America has not only been liberated in politics, but also in its fields of ideology and culture. And it begins to develop its own national features. However, as a southerner, Poe is infatuated with the past, and he is also quite sensitive to the new things. He highly praises the aristocratic politics and is suspicious of the democracy. He vindicates slavery, and has an antipathy against the development of industry and the commercial economy. He hates the cheat between people in the commercial society, hates the worship of money in the primary stage of the industrial civilization, and hates the mutual excessive praises in political activities and celebrity circles of the publishing fields. Poe expects to find a stand for himself in the traditional society. However, this society pushes him to the opposite side.Thus, Poe is filled with despair about reality, only to escape, but the most extreme form of escape is death. The inclination of decadence and depravation in Poes works reflects the declining emotions of the system of slavery to collapse in the whole southern society. Perhaps, the death, for Poe, means some sort of new hope.In short, the theme of death in Edgar Allan Poes works is the personal portrayal of Poes rough and rugged paths of life; above all, Poe witnessed many deaths in his life, so he cared little about death, he was not afraid of death and death often appears in many of his works. At the same time, the influence of social situation of the time also makes a huge impact on such people as Poe.III. Poes Obsession with the Theme of DeathDeath, the ending of an individual life and all perceptual feelings, has long been a puzzle and a focus of interest for human. And it has always been one of the most eternal and favorite motifs of literary creation. But the theme of death seemed more meaningful for Allan Poe than it does for most of us.A. A Brief Introduction to Poes Theme of DeathEver since Edgar Allan Poe begins writing in the early 1830s, his work has become synonymous with terror, death, and Gothic horror. Clearly he has an obsession with the topic of death. The vast majority of his poems and his tales deal with death in an extremely macabre way. There are few writers whose works are so penetrating on the theme of death as Poes. Above all, his miserable life experience and the continual deaths of his beloved people left him such a big scar, which made him particularly obsessed with the theme of death.Poe is particularly obsessed with the theme of death. Whatever means he uses to better his life and career, he failed in the end. He could only realize his dreams in the world created by his own pen. The theme of death is the only choice for him, and the only vent of his bitterness and desperation. Allan Tate has remarked,“Everything in Poe is dead: the houses, the rooms, and the furniture, to say nothing of nature and of human beings.”5 Indeed, the atmosphere in Poes stories is always motionless and dead, and the characters are almost invariably living under the shadows of haunting death, like those in The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, Morella, Ligeia and so forth. Even in a few cases in which the heroes obtain narrow escapes through luck or intelligence, as in The Pit and the Pendulum and A Descent into the Maelstrom, the dread of death at all time prevails. The theme of death reaches such an insurmountable intensity in his stories that death is everywhere, not only near, about, or around Poes characters, but in their minds.But for whatever reason, there can be little doubt from reading Poes fiction that he derives not only titillation, but a peculiar comfort, from the idea of death. Consequently, it is not strange that the most contradictory judgments have been passed on Edgar Allan Poes personality and works.B. Poes Aesthetic PerspectivesPoes aesthetic perspectives are unique and distinctive. Although his opinions are different from the main stream of his time, they are not till-founded. His aesthetic ideas influence to a large degree his favor of the theme of death, or contrarily, his stories with the theme of death best manifest his aesthetic perspectives.As a matter of fact, few people would relate Poes tales to the word“Beauty”, as he has emphasized it repeatedly in his criticism and poetry. Hardly can anybody forget the world of terror he creates, which often makes our hair stand on head. The world of Poes tales is a nightmarish universe, where you come across wasted lands, silent, forsaken castles and their morbid dwellers, where both life and landscapes assume an air suffocating and depressive. It seems difficult to dig out any Beauty in his tales. As a matter of fact, the features of Poes tales reveal another part of his perspectives of beauty. He intends to describe in his tales the inner world of the characters and analyze their spiritual states which have been ignored all the time.Firstly, Poes short stories are excellent examples to illustrate his search for symmetry and unity in art, which he locates in concentrated effect, or the bearing of every word, line, and paragraph upon the reactions of the reader. Poe stated that a short story was a mood piece with every sentence contributing to a“totality” or“unity of effect”, to the impact of the whole structure on the conscious and unconscious responses of the reader, gained from an uninterrupted reading in which every detail was subordinate to the“pre-established” design. By stressing the design of the writer and the effect he deliberately and systematically set out to achieve, Poe unmistakably argued that the writer of fiction was a craftsman whose success as an artist depended on his technical skills, and the impact of his creation on readers. Then what theme could most evoke peoples excitement and achieve the best effect that he wanted? Of course its the theme of death. It can absolutely and straightly activate the basic feelings of human beings: sadness, sympathy, anxiety, fear, and sometimes even a strange pleasant sensation arising from watching others sufferings.The world in Poes tales is a nightmarish universe. The terrible images of death, corruption of the flesh and insanity relentlessly haunt readers subconscious mind. Take the surroundings in The Fall of the House of Usher as an example. There is nothing alive in the story. Poe again and again tries to make us experience a sense of insufferable gloom, the same feeling as the narrator. This irrational fear which rises gradually and eventually invades the whole being leads the protagonist to insanity and death, as in many other stories of Poes. Here and there they catch sight of a lugubrious feudal building, suggestive of horrible and mysterious happenings.“Dull”,“dark”,“soundless”,“melancholy”,“bleak”,“decayed”,“black”,“lurid”,“gray”. 6 all these words create a sickening of the heart of the narrator as well as those of the readers and pluck their heart strings to the greatest extent.Whats more, Poe is the type of person who has to escape from the vulgarities of practical life or else would go mad. Poe asserts that the range of imagination is unlimited and its materials extend throughout the universe. For Poe, the sole purpose of his artistic representation is to produce a particular unified effect, namely, a“pleasurable excitement” which“elevated” the soul. Every word, every sentence is an aesthetic production of imagination. And Poe believes“beauty” is arts sole object and its inevitable test. By“beauty” Poe means not the conventional attributes of that term, but an all-embracing consistency among the constituent parts of the experience in a literary form. Spelling out his personal agonies in fictional terms, Poe is concerned with the supreme beauty of death, the association of unbearable tensions, pleasure, cruelty and the fascination of blood.Poes morbid tales of death reveal his alienation from the“spirit of the age”，the faith in progress. The pain of facing the coming death and the hideous and horrible death scenes are magnified in his fiction and become a strange sort of beauty, revealing the other side of life and widening readers aesthetic vision. Hugo once concluded the phenomenon of the coexistence of different aesthetic objects as“Ugliness is beside beauty; deformity is closing to elegancy; the unshaped hides itself behind sublimity; beauty lives with vice; brightness exists together with blackness.” 7IV. Poes Unique Reflections on Death in His Short StoriesA. The Destructive Power of DeathDeath in Poes short stories is always destructive. All people, with no exception, have to be exterminated by death. This destructive power is most obviously illustrated by his well-known story The Masque of the Red Death published in 1842.At the first glance, The Masque of the Red Death seems simpler than Poes other stories, but its simplicity is virtually deceptive, for this relatively short story is highly symbolic. A virulent disease called the“Red Death” is sweeping through the country, and the ruling prince, Duke Prospero seals himself and a thousand followers into an abbey, an enormous fantastic building, to escape the plague. Life in the abbey consists of a round of festivities and celebrations, while the plague rages outside. At the last costume ball, a figure garbed like a victim of the plague appears, horrifying and enraging the spectators. Prospero confronts and attacks the figure but falls dead, and the figure is revealed to be empty cerements. Everyone thereupon dies of the Red Death. The end of the tale is apocalyptic:“And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” 8Obviously the story deals with humans failure to stave of death. This essential theme is manifested directly and with extreme economy. Poe emphasizes his theme by suggesting the folly of the people who consider erroneously they can escape death by such physical barriers as high walls and iron gates. Within the abbey, the Prince has created a lively world filled with masked figures. The contrast of the gaiety within and the ravaging death outside contributes to the overall effect. The irony of the tale is that Prince Prospero, the ruler and builder of this dream-like world, has a name that connotes happiness, prosperity and good fortune, but the fact is totally not the case.Many critics have looked for a consistent symbolic pattern in the seven rooms in which the ball is held. The seven chambers extending from the east to the west, each lighted by a different colored window, suggest the progress from youth to death. Despite the six gaily-colored chambers, the significance of the seventh innermost room cannot escape readers attention. The color of black usually symbolizes death. Moreover, in describing the black dcor of the room, the narrator says that it is“shrouded” 9 in velvet tapestries.“Shroud” is a word usually referring to death. Likewise, the window panes are“scarlet-a deep blood color.” 10 This is an obvious reference to the“Red Death”. The effect is so extreme that few of the company are bold enough to set foot in it. When the masked Death makes his appearance, he moves rapidly from the eastern room, symbol of the beginning of life, to the western room, symbol of the end of life, in which Prince Prospero and other masqueraders end their lives. Man is thus mortal and the menace of death is inextricably bound up with mans consciousness of his fatal involvement with time and ages.As a story about the supernatural visitation of Death, The Masque of the Red Death most vividly depicts the destructive power of death and is among Poes clearest dramatizations of mans futile efforts to affect his own salvation, to survive the malevolent perversity of death. One cannot escape fate, and hiding is of no avail. Poe achieves a total, unified effect in the story, showing the close proximity of the revelry of life to the inevitability of death itself. He reminds readers that death may now be beside each of us“the unearthly sovereign” is the one“whose reign is over all, whose domination is unlimited and whose name isdead.” 11B. The Irresistible Death InstinctFreuds theory of instincts underwent a crucial shift in the course of his career. He stated that there existed in the psyche an innate, regressive drive for ending life: the death instinct. Contrary to the life instinct, the constructive impulse to survive and develop oneself, the death instinct is the impulse“which seek(s) to lead what is living to death” 12, and so is the source of destructive urges. The interaction of the two instincts thus produces all the variations of human activity.Great minds think alike. Freud and Poe, living in different times and different places and having interest in various fields, both drew an astonishing picture of humans innermost minds and so caused great disturbances in their times, Poe visualized Freuds theory of the death instinct in his neurotic protagonists while Freud later explained the motivations of these murders in Poes tales from a theoretic perspective. Although Poe was severely blamed for his bare presentation of the dark side of human nature, and many critics criticized Freud for his unilateral exaggeration of the natural side of human character which was called“instinct determinism”, the two men bravely asserted that the aim of human life was death. 13In Poes stories, the death instinct is always firstly diverted to the external world, for instance to terrify and kill the benevolent old man in The Tell-Tale Heart. As in his other tales, Poe writes The Tell-Tale Heart from the perspective of the narrator, who is meanwhile the murderer of an old man whom he is supposed to be taking care of. When Poe makes the protagonist tell a personal account, the overall impact of the story is heightened. There is no real motive for the murder. Just because one of the old mans eyes is pale blue with a film over it, resembling the eye of a vulture, and the sight of that eye makes the narrators blood run cold, so as a result, the eye(and with it the old man) must be destroyed. After careful preparation, the narrator finally executes the murder and disposes the body under the floor planks.“His