can anyone suggest their views on the interpretation of gothic through the use of characters, settings, narrators etc, in Bram Stoker's "Dracula" and a variety of Poe's short stories. Thanks alot!!!

-- Anonymous, December 04, 2001

Answers

Curiously, it is Stoker who reverts to the earliest form of the novel using the method of narrating the story by correspondences and journals of the various characters. Poe would not use such a variety of viewpoints nor did he like to write at such length. Both men at times tried to put the gothic into a contemporary setting and the element of detection and mystery is just as important as the atmosphere and shocks of horror. Many of Poe's characters have a wasted, vampiric look on the edge of death but the supernatural is not physically as evident as with the monster Dracula. Though Stoker seems more advanced it is Poe I believe who has the deepest and most literate use of the gothic to probe the limits of life and death. In Dracula the morality play and the salvation of the innocent is more conventional an approach. Not all Poe's stories end so fortuitously.

-- Anonymous, December 05, 2001