A Shift Away From the Gothic

Initially, what makes this passage seem not at all like a Gothic piece compared the excerpt from “Maule’s Well,” is that the scenery described here has none of the grotesque connotation that has been portrayed in that part, but as well as the rest of the book. Hawthorne deliberately wants the reader to see the darkness that the characters are living in, and to almost give the reader this sense of fear and foreboding that the characters might feel living in the house. There are just too many positive things that Hawthorne is stating about the kitchen and the house in general for there to be any context of Gothic literature in this opening of chapter seven. For example, when Phoebe is taking in the scent of the house coming from the kitchen, she describes it as such:                             

            If any volume could have manifested its essential wisdom, in the mode suggested, it

would certainly have been the one now in Hepzibah’s hand; and the kitchen, in such an event, would forthwith have steamed with the fragrance of venison, turkeys, capons, larded partridges, puddings, cakes, and Christmas pies, in all manner of elaborate mixture and concoction. (98)

from this description of the initial scent of the house that Phoebe has from her aunt cooking, the description depicts all positive smelling foods, such as “Christmas pies,” and not anything negative like that of mold cheese, or rotten eggs, both of which when describing a kitchen from the Gothic period, may give off the idea that the kitchen smells like a dead body.

In terms of interpreting the Gothic, this shift away from that format of a story, to me, could catch the reader off guard. Everything seems so sweet and happy at this point in the story and it is as if it is prepping for the worse to come, trying to catch the reader off guard by thinking that everything is okay for these two characters in the good-smelling kitchen.

Gothic Literature

Gothic literature, as portrayed in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” shows the darker side of literature. During the Gothic era, much of what was going on in the pop culture was a sort of interesting darkness in literature. Many of the things that were written in Gothic books had a dark twist to them, a tragic ending, taboo subjects, and very grotesque imagery used to describe the setting of places. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” all of these parts of Gothic literature are portrayed in the short story.

As far as imagery goes for Roderick usher’s house, it just reeks of dark, damp, and unwelcoming features. The unnamed narrator of the story describes the house as follows upon seeing it.

“I looked upon the scene before me- upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain- upon the bleak walls- upon the vacant eye-like windows- upon a few rank sedges- and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees- with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium…” (Poe 1)

From what the narrator has told the reader, this house just foreshadows doom, and hints that something tragic will happen at this place. Of course, something tragic cannot happen in a Gothic story without a twist in the tale. In the case of Usher, his twin sister Madeline, whom helps make up the taboo duo and helps create a super-closeness that tends to put people off, falls ill and dies while the unnamed narrator is still visiting the House of Usher. From there, things start deteriorating mentally for Usher, and soon has a meltdown while being read to by the narrator, reveling that Usher may have buried his sister alive. Next thing the narrator knows, the sister is behind the door, running into the room, covered in blood from her struggle of getting out of the coffin, and scaring her brother literally to death.

All in all, this story written by Edgar Allen Poe represents the very idea of the Gothic era, and the literature that this era produced.