The Autobiographical Elements In The Works Of — страница 2

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and eventually killed him. He then dismembered the body, took out his heart, and buried the man under the house. He later confessed to the police because he believed he could hear the heartbeat of the man. Formed very early in his life, Edgar Allan Poe had quite an attraction to females. It began when his father left him at the age of two and never returned, thus he never had a real father role in his life. A second contribution to his attraction to females evolved from his deep love for and close relationship with his foster mother whom he adored much more than his foster father. Poe’s closest friend, Virginia Clemm, was also his cousin and his wife. Poe’s works were greatly influenced by his deep admiration for the female gender. In “The Raven”, the narrator was

extremely distressed over his lost Lenore. In the poem, “Elizabeth,” Poe had a secret hidden message. The message spelled out the name “Elizabeth Rebecca” using the first letters of each line moving down, vertically. This poem was a tribute to one of his lost loves. A tribute to his foster mother was found in, “To Her Whose Name is Written Below.” In this poem, Edgar used the second letter in each line to spell out “Frances Sergean Rosgood.” He also wrote a poem entitled, “Lenore” to his lost love, Virginia. This poem spoke about how beautiful she was, how young she was when she died, and also how he mourned for her. In, “Annabel Lee,” written to his beloved Virginia, Poe states, “This maiden she lived by no other thought than to love and be loved by

me.” Edgar Allan Poe had a genetic tendency toward alcohol. His cousin viewed alcohol as the “curse of the Poes’.” Disregarding much warning, he began to drink as a young man. His drinking became worse when he attended the University of Virginia. His reason for drinking was to escape the drudgery and disappointment of his life. According to Thomas Poulter, Poe stated: I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness, and a dread of some strange impending doom. (2) Poe’s drinking had three major effects on his life: he lost his

health, he lost his jobs, and he lost his dream of a magazine of his own. “Poe was the first in a long series of American authors who felt a need to drink. Alcohol ruined his life. He had no good jobs. He had no stable world. He had nothing to anchor him to reality, so he induced fantasies and drowned his fears with a bottle” (Poulter 4). Poe’s works reflected what he thought about the evil of drinking. Liquor played a major role in The Black Cat and The Cask of Amontillado. The narrator of The Black Cat was a chronic alcoholic who in a drunken stupor gouged out his cat’s eyes because he thought it was avoiding him. In The Cask of Amontillado, Fortunato was lured by his love for wine to his death. Poe attacked the use of alcohol because it was overpowering and

destructive. The characters in his works reflected his inability to enjoy the drug like most people and his regard for alcohol as an instrument of destruction. The most defining factor in the path Edgar Allan Poe chose for his literature was the death of a loved one. He experienced death at a very young age with his biological mother and possibly his father passing away before he turned three. Another key loss was that of Virginia Clemm, his wife and cousin, at a young age. Probably the most devastating loss in Poe’s life was his foster mother, Mrs. Frances Allan. One of the most popular topics for Edgar Allan Poe was that of death. According to Steve Whitlatch, “Poe loved life, but his focus was mostly on death” (1). He wrote some of the most horrific stories of all time

including The Murders in Rue Morgue, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Fall of the House of Usher. The Murders in Rue Morgue was considered the first deductive mystery story about a detective who solved a series of murders in the Rue Morgue of Paris, France. Another example of death in one of his works was The Tell-Tale Heart. In this book, Poe spoke of a psycho who killed a man and buried him under the floor. In his short story, The Black Cat, the main character killed his cat for avoiding him and accidentally killed his wife with an ax. A prime example of his showcasing death as the major theme is found in the allegory, The Masque of the Red Death. The main character, Fortunato, attempted to avoid the Red Death by pinning himself and 1000