THE RAVEN

setting: A cold, dreary, bleak December night, at the home of the narrator - fire is dying
- he is looking over books. The living space seems lonely. The setting makes one
immediately feel the cold, lonely, and despairing tone of the poem. It is dark (midnight) and sad
(dreary), and this sets the mood of the poem. The poem is set in the chambers of a young male
student who has apparently lost his lover fairly recently. It is midnight on a stormy night in
December. ... It is Midnight on a dreary, bleak December night.

characters:
● Poe’s unnamed narrator is a scholar who is mourning the death of his beloved, Lenore.
The narrator is a scholar, learned and reasonable, yet his logic and knowledge do not
much help him to recover from the impact of Lenore’s death or to escape his desperate
hope to see her again. His desperation leads him to emotional extremes, from
depression to near euphoria and finally to depression once the Raven pronounces that
he and Lenore will be apart forever.

● The Raven is a bird that enters the narrator’s house, while the narrator is grieving over
his lost love in the middle of the night, and lands upon the narrator’s bust of Pallas. To
everything the narrator says, the Raven responds with just one word: “Nevermore.” The
bird acts in no other way, neither attacking the narrator nor seeming to wish him harm,
but the narrator views it as at best supernatural and at worst demonic. Further, the
narrator interprets the Raven's repeated “Nevermore” as a refusal of all his desires to
be reunited with Lenore.

female heroines: Critics consider Lenore, the narrator’s lost love, to be a representation
of Poe’s own deceased wife Virginia. While Lenore never actually appears in the poem and
nothing is revealed about her other than her status as the narrator’s beloved, her presence
looms over the text, as the narrator cannot prevent himself grieving her passing and wondering
if he might be able to see her again.

central themes: The main themes of Edgar Allan Poe's narrative poem “The Raven” are
devotion, loos and lingering grief that cannot be diminished. As with many other of Poe’s works,
“The Raven” explores death. More specifically, this poem explores the effects of death on the
living, such as grief, mourning, and memories of the deceased, as well as a question that so
often torments those who have lost loved ones to death. Ultimately, the poem does not take
sides on whether its events should be interpreted as either entirely supernatural or entirely a
result of the subconscious
 THE HOUSE OF USHER

setting: The setting of “The Fall of the House of Usher” plays an integral part in the story
because it establishes an atmosphere of dreariness, melancholy, and decay. The story takes
place in the Usher family mansion, which is isolated and located in a “singularly dreary tract of
country.” The house immediately stirs up in the narrator “a sense of insufferable gloom,” and it is
described as having “bleak walls,” “vacant eye-like windows,” and “minute fungi overspread [on]
the whole exterior.” The interior of the house is equally dreary, with “vaulted and fretted”
ceilings, “dark draperies hung upon the walls,” and furniture that is “comfortless, antique, and
tattered.” Roderick is also disturbed by the setting, believing that the house is one of the causes
of his nervous agitation. The narrator notes that Roderick “was enchained by certain
superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many
years, he had never ventured forth.”

characters:
● The narrator says little directly about himself or his character. He doesn't share where
he came from, what his own family life was like, or even his name. However, his
thoughts, his conversation, and his actions tell readers a great deal about him. He and
Roderick were friends when they were boys but haven't been close since. Despite this
distance, he cares enough to travel to visit Roderick at his family home. He is at ease
with a wide range of books and music. He also experiences the world through an
abstracted lens. This can be seen in the story's opening paragraphs when he tries to
see the landscape around the house of Usher in terms of the sublime. The narrator's
concern for Roderick is evident throughout the story, from the fact that he visits, to how
he takes on some of Roderick's nervous condition, and how he tries to care for Roderick
as his condition
● In many ways, Roderick Usher is the House of Usher: with his sister, Madeline, dying,
Roderick is all that remains of this ancient house. And both local custom and his own
beliefs link Roderick the man with the physical house in which the Usher family has long
lived, as if they were one and the same. Roderick is an educated man and an
intellectual. He reads widely and plays music. However, almost the whole of his
existence is consumed by his sorrow over his sister's illness, his own illness, and his
resulting mental condition and pervasive fear. His visiting friend (the narrator) finds
Roderick tremendously changed by what he has gone through. He's very pale, and his
eyes shine brightly. He's very thin, and his hair is wild. Because of his condition,
Roderick is extremely sensitive to external stimuli, which limits what he can eat, hear,
see, and smell without pain. Though Roderick is "onstage" throughout the story and
Madeline largely isn't, Roderick as a character is bound to Madeline. As twins, they
were born together. As adult siblings, they live together. As people who are functionally
two parts of a single whole self, they also sicken and ultimately die together.

female heroines: Madeline barely exists in the story except in two ways: as Roderick's
sister and double, and as the embodiment of illness. Her doctors don't know what is wrong with
her, only that she is wasting away and is subject to fits of catalepsy when she becomes
completely rigid and doesn't respond to the outside world at all. At those moments it is like she
is already dead. When she isn't suffering one of these spells, Madeline is barely more life-like:
she drifts from place to place without speaking to people or seeming to see them, as if she were
a ghost. Madeline's major appearance in the story occurs after she seems to have died. She is
buried alive and then comes back covered with blood, having clawed her way out of her tomb.
She embraces her brother, and they die together as the house collapses.
central themes: Sanity versus Insanity
Poe guides readers to speculate about how the characters' minds work (or don't work). This
narrative pressure starts with the narrator's becoming aware of how the landscape and the
House of Usher shape his mood: "with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable
gloom pervaded my spirit." It has more power over him than it [Link] concern for
Roderick's sanity deepens once he sees his old friend again, as Roderick changes from one
mood to another very quickly and reports some disturbing ideas, such as his belief about how
his family house is shaping his mind.

The narrator questions the sanity of Roderick and Madeline as they slip further from reality, and
he begins to worry about his own mental health. He has reason to worry. From the moment he
enters the area around the house, the narrator feels it affect his spirit inexplicably. The longer
the narrator stays in the house, the more his own mental state is affected. While the narrator
tries to distract Roderick after Madeline's apparent death, Roderick even calls him a madman
for not recognizing what is going on. Since Roderick may be correct in this moment, the
question of who is crazy and who isn't shifts: maybe Roderick's senses truly are heightened and
the things he hears are real.

Deterioration
Both the literal, physical house of Usher and the dynastic House of Usher are falling apart. The
house's physical decay is mirrored in the state of Roderick and Madeline. Both twins are
suffering from strange illnesses that parallel the house's condition. As the house is crumbling
away, so Madeline seems to be wasting away. As the house is discontinuous and contradictory
(according to the narrator's reports in the story's first chapters), so is Roderick warm and
friendly, yet pale as a corpse. Both Roderick and the house itself fall apart after Madeline's
death. Roderick increasingly loses control of his emotional and mental faculties, growing more
sensitive and nervous. He later dies when Madeline reappears and collapses on him. The
house, in turn, then collapses, falling into the lake.

Fantasy versus Reality

setting; In "Ligeia," the world is gray and most everything is old and decaying. ... That same
hard-to-define, odd, almost "ghastly" beauty can be found throughout the story, in Ligeia's home
city, in the abbey and its bridal chamber, and, perhaps most importantly, in Ligeia [Link]
noted in the introduction, the setting is in an old castle in an unknown or remote part of the
world; in its dark interior, there are huge ottomans and tapestries and, outside, the wind is
blowing the casement curtains, causing strange configurations. Likewise, there are strange
noises, producing an eerie, "phantasmagoric" effect on the inhabitants. Everywhere there is
"verdant decay."In Ligeia, the room in which the narrator stays with his second bride Rowena.
The room is garishly decorated in gold with black designs, which causes much distress to
Rowena during her illness until her death. It is in this room that she rises from the dead as
[Link], the castle as Poe's setting sits molding on the Rhine, conjuring up all types of
gothic visions for us; later, he replaces this moody setting with yet another gothic touch: a
forlorn abbey located in some remote part of England. The walls there are "elaborately fretted
with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of semi-gothic" that the narrator has ever seen.
This mood, as well as the suspense that Poe creates, is sustained.

characters:
● As is the case in almost all of Poe's short stories, the first-person narrator here is never
named; he has no family or friends. We know nothing about his background; we know
him only through his mental states that we witness in the story. This characteristic, as
noted, is often typical of the Romantic [Link] Narrator, a learned man enslaved to
the memory of a woman whose powerful will once triumphed over death itself to return
to him. Half insane through grief after Ligeia’s death, and addicted to opium, he
nevertheless remarries. Forgetful of Ligeia for a month, he abandons himself to Lady
Rowena; but memory returns, and love turns to hatred and loathing. He witnesses (or
so he believes) the dropping of poison into some wine he gives Rowena when she is ill.
After Rowena’s death, he is awed by the rising of her corpse, which he recognizes not
as that of Rowena but of his lost Ligeia.
● Ligeia, his first wife, a beautiful woman of rare learning and musically eloquent voice.
Tall and slender, she is quietly majestic whether in repose or walking with
“incomprehensible lightness and elasticity.” Her features are “strange” rather than
classically regular: the skin pale, forehead broad, luxuriously curly hair glossy and
black. Her nose is slightly aquiline; when her short upper lip and her voluptuous under
one part in a radiant smile, her teeth gleam brilliantly. Her eyes are most notable:
unusually large and luminously black, with long and jetty lashes and slightly irregular
black brows. Though Ligeia is outwardly calm and speaks in a low, distinct, and
melodious voice, a passionately intense will shows in the fierce energy of her wild
words. Her knowledge of classical and modern European languages leads her (and her
worshiping husband) into extensive metaphysical investigations. When Ligeia falls ill,
her wild eyes blaze, her skin turns waxen, and the veins in her forehead swell and sink.
With her dying breath she murmurs that humans submit to death only through
feebleness of will. When Lady Rowena later dies, Ligeia, through the power of her will,
returns from death and enters the body of her successor.
● Lady Rowena Trevanion, the second wife, fair-haired and blue-eyed. She falls ill and
slowly dies, wasting away while she becomes increasingly irritable and fearful, her fear
being increased by mysterious sounds and sights. (Her illness may be compared to that
which for five years tortured and finally killed Virginia Poe, the author’s young wife.)
female: This story is akin to "The Fall of the House of Usher" in that both the Lady Ligeia and
the Lady Madeline possess an inordinate and superhuman strength to live. Both women are
presumed to be dead, but both of them possess a will to live that will not let either one of them
remain dead. "Ligeia," published exactly one year before "The Fall," expresses this concept
even more directly than does the story just discussed. For example, note the quotation which is
placed at the beginning of the story; it is used two more times in the story by the Lady Ligeia to
express her belief that some type of life continues after the apparent death of the body. (As a
footnote, it is interesting that while Poe credited the quotation to Joseph Glanville, an author
who actually did live and who was a favorite of Poe's, the exact quotation has as yet not been
found among the author's works. It is suspected, therefore, that Poe made up the quotation and
merely assigned it to the writer.) The key words in this quotation, which the Lady Ligeia utters,
express her strong belief that the weak may die but that the strong do "not yield . . . unto death
utterly, save only through the weakness of [a] feeble will!" Whereas in "The Fall" the Lady
Madeline was able to break free of the iron that entombed her, the Lady Ligeia seemingly has
the ability to retain her will to live through periods of time and to cross barriers of land and water;
ultimately, it would seem, it is possible for her — and the dead — to assume the body of another
person.

themes: Edgar Allan Poe filled this story with allusions that he could hardly have expected the
average reader to recognize. The story’s primary theme, the incalculable potency of the directed
will, derives from Joseph Glanvill, the seventeenth century English philosopher and clergyman.
Glanvill held that will could survive the body if determined to do so, that God’s immortality
proceeded from the perfection of volition, and that humanity yielded itself to the angel of death
only when weakness of will could no longer sustain life. Ligeia has all the prerequisites to test
Glanvill’s thesis. Poe’s detailed character sketch gives her the timeless, strange, and ancient
beauty of Egypt, Greece, and Israel. Her eyes, which Poe describes in vivid detail at the
beginning and end of his story, combine the immortality of the twin stars Castor and Pollux and
that of the Turkish houri, nymphs of the Muslim paradise. She is universal intellect, Psyche, and
a true child of Apollo, and her broad and deep erudition implies her privileged place in the order
of creation.

Rowena is, by contrast, mediocre. Her beauty, though genuine, is conventional and superficial
compared with that of Ligeia. It is this mediocrity, not Rowena herself, which the narrator
loathes. Correspondingly, it is the force of Ligeia’s will, still alive after her death, which directs
the narrator’s own volition to Ligeia’s rebirth in Rowena’s body. Poe has, therefore, elaborated
on a traditional love-death theme to make a statement on the regenerative nature of the human
spirit and the indomitable, irrepressible nature of the intellect.