discuss the representation of the house in poe's writing

-- Anonymous, February 11, 2004

Answers

I am sorry for the delay in responding. Anyway, the house as such has an aspect of temple of the mind or the actual head in a vague symbolic sense. Most clearly it is an organic symbol in "The Fall of the House of Usher" as played in miniature in the poem within the tale "Tha Haunted Palace", the palace being the inner mind. The sense of trap and confinement, dangerous madness and decay, characterize being within walls in general in Poe, at least in Gothic horror tales. However the other side of Poe is also revealed in happier tales of idealized houses that typically he goes to as refuges, and often containing the ideal woman "Landor's Cottage" even as he he has to wander through storm or mist "To Helen". From the ideal greek temple that symbolized his visits to Mrs. Stanard's house for literary discussions to the cottagge of domestic bliss that became his and Virginia's little American dream these are the antithesis to the dark Romanticism of the haunted mind, gigantic dark and fantastic architectures of doom and repression.

-- Anonymous, February 26, 2004