简论爱伦•坡的建筑意象(3)
Poe made the Gothic genre popular in the 18th and 19th centuries and many writers had become influenced by Gothic literature, such as writers Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and Ray Bradbury. He had earned a widely reputation for his musical poems such as Annabel Lee and The Bells. His obsession with darkness and death were mainly studied. He was also a popular contributor to the detective mysteries. Much of his popular works comes from his life of hardship, as a child he was abandoned by his father and lost his mother to disease and did not get along well with his foster father and had not included him in his will. The death of his thirteen-year-old cousin and wife Virginia really struck him; he wandered aimlessly through an empty life but always ruined opportunities for himself. He suffered from mental illness that had put an end towards his life. Till today he still continues to highlight creative brilliance, and is known for appreciated literature that readers favor.
1.2 Effect Theory of Edgar Allan Poe
According to Edgar Allan Poe’s theory of composition, all the elements of a story should contribute to the accomplishment of one preconceived effect. The details of his own work, therefore, have an importance corresponding to the measure in which they further the design. Moreover, the recurring use, in a consistent manner, of a detail such as that of architectural background to obtain effects often leads to the establishment of a certain conventionality in treatment and significance: a romantic convention, depending for its success upon generally understood associations of ideas with familiar terms.
Poe can always create a variety of preset effects by using a variety of means to in the creation of poetry and fiction. It’s undoubtedly closely related to his full use of advantages and innovation. But Poe’s height of literary consciousness and creative ideas, especially the structure of effect aesthetics, is perhaps a more important reason for his work to produce good artistic effect. In his creation, Poe “almost always adjusts the theme and modifies the work mode from the aesthetic point of specific” (Elliot, 1994:215). In The Poetic Principle (1850), The Philosophy of Composition (1846) and Review of Nathaniel Hawthorn’s “Twice-Told Tales” (1842), the word “effect” is one of the most important keywords that always occupies the center of Poe’s aesthetic thinking. To impress the reader’s mind is the motivation of Poe’s “effect theory”, and “using language to trigger the reader’s emotion, and thus to reach his so-called ‘preset effect’”, is the creative principle of Edgar Allan Poe. (Sheng, 1992:15)
2 Gothic Literature and Edgar Allan Poe
Gothic architecture, or rather the romantic conception of it, was particularly suited to the production of many of the effects for which Poe worked; and its influence predominates in the settings for his tales, especially those intended to produce sensations of melancholy or horror. To the romantic mind, the significance of Gothic architecture lay not in its original glory but in the emotions called forth by contemplating its ruins. Poe found material for emotional effects in the spectacle of dilapidation: ivy on crumbling walls, half-fallen towers and battlements, an air of decay among evidences of former grandeur, antiquity, mystery, and remoteness from common experience. There were no Gothic ruins in America. As a matter of fact, his only first-hand acquaintance with Gothic architecture, so far as is known, was comprised in whatever dim memories he retained from the five years of his childhood passed in England. The rest of his information, such as it was, came from secondary sources: from earlier romantic literature, and from books of description which the current interest in Gothic architecture was made popular, such books as W. Howitt’s Visits to Remarkable Places