Dark
Romanticism and Poe
The
Cask of Amontillado and
The Tell-Tale Heart
“For these Dark Romantics, the natural world is dark, decaying, and mysterious;
when it does reveal truth to man, its revelations are evil and hellish. ……
works of Dark Romanticism frequently show individuals failing in their attempts
to make changes for the better (Wikipedia).” Edgar Allan Poe is the typical
author of Dark Romanticism, as he expresses it through his stories. For him
humans are “evil and hellish,” and the main character of the two stories is
insane.
However, the first impression I got from The Cask of Amontillado and The
Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar
Allan Poe was that Poe is clever. It seemed like he wanted to make the whole
process of murder a work of art. Nor the screams and the bones were something
that impressed me first; it was how Poe makes the crime in his pieces so
elaborately. Poe may have wanted to show these two things: first, as well
known, the dark side of human instinct such as vanity, greed, brutality, and
second, how a murder can be such elaborately-eventually in some ways,
beautifully-held.
The dark romanticists saw the world as it is full of evil, and
they revealed that ideas in their pieces by showing how ugly human instinct is.
Like them, Poe wanted to expose the greed, vanity and brutality of human
instinct that people does not usually show on their outside. Those ideas are
clued on parts where Fortunato calls Luchesi “ignoramus,” and when Fortunato
keeps on asking to see the Amontillado, though Montresor warned him a couple of
times. Montresor played the role of Poe in the story, who tries to reveal the
ugly instinct of humans at the bottom, because he knew Fortunato would not stop
though he warns since it was Montresor himself who talked about Luchesi and
made Fortunato to be in vanity. And though he knew, he kept on warning in order
to expose the ugly side of humans- vanity and greed, for instance.
The next part is that
for me Poe seemed to be beautifying murder with such elaborate descriptions and
constructions. It seemed to me that Poe wanted to make his writing a piece of
art rather than just a brutal murder story. His wonderful selection of words,
which almost every word he used gives horror to the readers, and his elaborate
foreshadowing that not only frightens the readers extremely but also makes them
awe at Poe, are what made me think of his work a piece of art. Eventually I got
to feel of murder in Poe’s story as something beautiful, as a part of art,
something different from ordinary murder. Murder in his story is not just a killing act, but a masterpiece that is drawn out of tons of elaborate plans
and vivid descriptions. To explain,
take Montresor’s warning: they come up in horror at the end of the story,
letting the reader to feel what really Montresor had meant. Also, the careful
foreshadowing such as: “And I to your long life” from The Cask of Amontillado and the talented descriptions like:
“Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up
from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that
distracted me. I say I knew it well” and “So I opened it-you cannot imagine how
stealthily, stealthily-until at length a single dim ray like the thread of the
spider shot out from the crevice and fell upon the vulture eye” from The Tell-Tale Heart show how the story was so elaborately
planned and described, eventually making the readers feel it close to their
skins. Did Poe want his writings to be a work of art? I can’t say for sure, but
it is sure that surely he wrote his stories very carefully.
Not only those two stories, but The
Pit and the Pendulum also
have these points. The protagonist of the story feels the extreme anxiety that
he feels when the huge pendulum comes down from the ceiling, swinging fast. He
tried to reveal humans’ urge for survival, gave a lot of foreshadowing at the
beginning of the story, and a whole bunch of wonderful descriptions about the
man’s extreme nervousness and panic.
Comments
Soho: Umm… I got your
point, but I feel kind of confused what “beautiful murder” means…… Does it mean
that the process of murder itself was elaborate and carefully-planned, or that
the descriptions in the story are kind of ‘non-violent’ or not radical? You
might give some quotes from the story.
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기