Poe

Fall of the House of Usher:

• Gothic and horror themes, suspense, dejection, melancholy
• Psychological illnesses
• Madness: Usher has schizophrenia or split personality
• Frontier gothic: confusion in the night, constricted society, huge mansion
• Symbol of crumbling mansion, which seems to have its own sentience (eye-like windows, perceive things)
• Beautiful young woman dies
• Plenty of symbolism in mansion, status of minds, etc. Also foreshadowing through pink color of Madeline's cheeks

Berenice:

• Evident psychological illnesses, hallucinations
• Blurred barriers
• We doubt the reliability of the narrator
• Liminal space once again of love and death
• The beautiful woman dies a violent, horrible death, just like "Usher." Is this to create a more heart-wrenching ending or is a comment on the beautiful and prized things in life?

Tell-Tale Heart:

• Use of sounds to build suspense: from silent and still to shrieks, screams, and groans; beating heart and ringing; only he hears the heart beating
• Obsession with the eye similar to the obsession of the narrator in "Berenice" to teeth
• Affliction of the nerves
• Relation of insanity and morality
• Very intense and long descriptions of paranoia, fear, guilt, horror, and more; Poe's gift is his description of emotion and setting
• Undermining of rationalism in American Gothic: perversity of the self, whether it is acknowledged or not
• Punishment within religion and American Gothic; punishment isn't always justified, although this narrator attempts to; grotesque punishment
• Major theme within American gothic is the murderer's fixation: very concerned with the here and now as opposed to higher reason
• Because the narrator's motive can't be ascribed to logic or reason, it blatantly defies the themes of reason and rationalism in this era
• Ambiguity is another characteristic of American Gothic literature: what happens to our narrator? How do the police react to his outburst?
• Comedic irony: insistence on rationality and attention to detail
• Evil eye: also references to this in Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu faiths as cause for unexplained illnesses or misfortunes; to counteract such misfortune, extraction and distraction serve to dissolve the evil