论文总字数：30822字

摘 要

泄密的心，黑猫，厄舍古屋的倒塌是爱伦坡的短篇小说的杰作之三。这三篇短篇小说具有三个方面的共同点，都是用了美学，第一人称和意象。这三个

点是爱伦坡小说的重要组成部分。

在第一部分，我介绍了爱伦坡和他的作品。在第二部分我介绍了爱伦坡的一些写作特点以及写论文的目的。在第三部分我介绍了爱伦坡小说中美学的作用以及在黑猫，泄密的心和厄舍古屋的倒塌的作用。接下来我解释了第一人称以及它在这三个作品中的作用。接下来我介绍意象以及它在这三个小说中的作用最后我进行了总结。

关键词：《泄密的心》 《黑猫》 《厄舍古屋的倒塌》 美学 第一人称 意象

Some Features of Allen Poe’s Short Stories

1. Introduction

1.1 About the author

Edgar Allen Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) is an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic who is considered part of the American Romantic Movement. He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; he was orphaned young when his mother died shortly after his father abandoned the family. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. He attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. After enlisting in the Army and later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point, Poe parted ways with the Allans.

Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. He was further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

1.2 About his works

Poe's publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian". Then, Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move between several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In Baltimore in 1835, he married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin. In September 1939, Poe published the horror tale “The Fall of the House of Usher”. In January 1843, Poe issued his short horror tale “The Tell-Tale Heart”. This short story narrated how a person killed an old man in the autumn. And he published other short horror tale” The Black Cat”. This short story told how a kind person lost his mind and killed his wife. These three short stories are mostly involved with horror, murder, violence and death. And Poe used the first person narration in these short stories. Meanwhile, Poe used symbolism and analogies to tell stories of death. Apart from these three short horror stories, Poe wrote many horror tales Hop-Fog, The Cask of Amontillado, The Imp of the Perverse, Thou Art the Man, The Gold-Bug and so on. All these horror tales earned him the title “The Father of Horror Tales”. This thesis mainly analyzes The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat.

Poe and his works influenced literature in the United States and around the world, as well as in specialized fields, such as cosmology and cryptography. They appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums today

1. Literature Review

2.1 Some features of Poe’s stories

At Poe’s time, he was a controversial person. Allen Poe’s slashing reviews and sensational tales made him widely known as an author. However, he failed to find a publisher for a volume of burlesque tales. But recent years more and more scholars home and abroad have tended to study and analyze Allan Poe’s short stories and put focus on some features of his short stories. But different scholars conveyed varied opinions on these features of his short stories. These features that I will put focus on paper include the aesthetics, the first person narration of stories and the use of symbolic images. The horror of these three stories can easily draw readers’ attention. The reason is that Allen Poe was a master and forerunner of the horror tales. They are The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat.

Actually, Allen Poe makes use of aesthetics. Besides, the first person narration is

also a bright feature of his short stories. The first person narration makes us as the murder in these stories and it seems that we did whatever the protagonist do in the story. And the last feature is the symbolic images employed in theses short stories.

In China, many scholars studied the works of The Tell-Tale Heart，The Black

Cat and The Fall of the House of Usher. Sheng Dan (2008) studied the work “The

Tell-Tale Heart” from the perspective of morality which gave us a fresh point of view

in studying Allen Poe’s short stories. She put forward an idea that the heartbeat of the old man symbolized revenge, which resulted in disclosing the crime.

Feng Jia (2014) analyzed the symbolic images of “The Black Cat”, which elaborated the images of the short story and offered their ideas of these images. In the story, there were two different cats with similar appearance. The former named Pluto used to be the protagonist’s favorite pet. But it was killed by the protagonist. This cat was an image to present the kind protagonist in childhood and early years of marriage. Later, “I”, the protagonist of the story, cut one of its eyes and killed it, which meant the protagonist gradually lost his mind and became crude. The later cat which was similar to Pluto was another image to symbolize the last humanity of the protagonist and justice. At first, the protagonist liked the cat because of the guilty to the former cat. Then, he was afraid of it and disliked it. Finally, he was discovered by a policeman due to the later cat. In addition, there was an important image-fire that might be neglected by readers. Apart from these images, there are other images in the story.

Li XuWei and Wang Qian(2012) put their focus on the aesthetics of The Tell-Tale

Heart and The Black Cat. Most of us think that these two short stories have rare

connections to aesthetics. Actually, Poe depicted a beautiful picture in each story. All

colors ,images, background and so on construct the aesthetics. In addition, In their

paper, they put forward an idea that the first person narration limits readers’ forecast

of the stories.

Ji Kaixuan(2013) proposes that the first person narration plays an important role in Poe’s short stories. The first person narrator directly goes into the protagonists’ world which makes the story more realistic and vivid. And the first person narrator can easily and directly arouses readers’ attention to the story and their senses of reality, so that it fully demonstrates the distinctive charms of the language in Poe’s short stories.

I will focus on three features of Allen Poe’s short stories which are aesthetics, the

first person narration of stories and the use of symbolic images

2.2 Purpose of writing

The Tell-Tale Heart，The Black Cat and The Fall of the House of Usher are classic short stories of Allen Poe’s short stories. These three short stories can express the essential features of Allen Poe’s short stories and the study of these three stories clearly offer us a deeper understanding of Allen Poe’s short stories’ features and enable us to better understand his short stories.

1. The Aesthetic effect of Poe’s stories
   1. The Aesthetic effect in general

Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that studies the principles of beauty, especially in art. And it uses different kinds of images, colors, backgrounds and etc. to create a whole environment or construct.

3.2 Analysis of the effect in Poe’s stories

Allan Poe chose “sacred beauty” as the core of his aesthetic thought. The beauty is detached from the other side of the reality, to combat the evil in the reality. The main ideas include that Poe stressed aesthetic effect making horror as an art. His aesthetic orientation is toward the life and death dimension bridging aesthetic value between horror narration and the concept on death (Zhu xiaohong, 2011). In his specific creation practice, he follows the basic principle and the aesthetic concept. Depression and horror are two main aesthetic styles of Poe’s short stories. All of these make aesthetics in Poe’s short stories different from aesthetics in other writers. Poe tried to show what a doom, depression environment or atmosphere was. Unlike the traditional aesthetics, which are close to beautiful things such as sunshine, flowers and something like these, Poe set up his own aesthetics. I will analyze the first feature of these short stories.

3.2.1 The effect of aesthetics in The Black Cat

In The Black Cat, Poe perfectly mixed death and beauty together. On the one hand, he never stops expressing his ideas and impression on beauty and life; on the other hand, he keeps an anxious silence about his obsessions with death, revenge and madness in his works. At first, he described a happy life of “I” in the story. Later, the protagonist is addicted into alcohol and became evil. One day, he dug out one of Pluto’s eyeballs and finally killed it. Then, the protagonist looked for another cat like Pluto and got it. One day, he also wanted to kill the new cat, but he killed his wife instead because his wife wanted to stop him killing the new cat. Poe employed shocking scenes and images of death to shape the horrific beauty in the story. The first horrific scene appeared on the second day of the big fire. The second horrific scene happened in the cellar of the old building. The third scene still happened in the cellar. The terror was throughout the whole story and these three horrific scenes culminate the horror in the story, which made Poe achieve the expected terror effect and perfectly express the horrific beauty in this story.

3.2.2 The effect of aesthetics in The Tell- tale Heart

“The Tell- tale Heart” is another representative horror story of Allan Poe’s which tells that a young man who has nervous psychopath hates his neighbor, an old man, due to the old man’s eyes. The narrator always feels that whenever the old man’s eyes looking at him, his blood run cold. And with the hatred growing more and more, the narrator determines to kill the old man and then he can get himself off the old man forever. When the policemen come to ask the narrator about the old man, at first, he is calm. Then, he puts his own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the old man. But later, the narrator always hears sound of heart beating. Finally, the narrator’s nerve breaks down and he confesses his crime. Poe deeply depicts the character’s crazy and morbid minds using constantly changing of sound and rhythm. He aims to render the horrible atmosphere and pushes suspense step by step to the climax of the story with an abruptly ending, which offers readers a boundless and memorable shock. All of these display the aesthetic effect, horrific beauty, in the story.

3.2.3 The effect of aesthetics in The Fall of the house of Usher

In The Fall of the house of Usher, Poe draws a horrible and gloomy picture: an old house, dark surroundings and a dim interior room. Besides, Poe describes the Usher and his sister’s weak bodies and Usher’s anxious nerves. In order to achieve the effect of terror, at the beginning of the story, Poe depicts a “dull dark and soundless day in the fall of the year”. In western countries, autumn is a season of death. Then, the narrator sees the simple landscape features of the domain, " a few white trunks of decayed trees”,” mere house” ” a few rank sedges”,” the bleak walls” and “ the vacant eye-like windows” besides(L12, P1), the interior of the house is gloomy too. The furnishings in ancient house send out a feeling of darkness and depression. All in all, Poe puts his black scenes and dark protagonists under extreme environments and turns terror into air, ugliness into beauty with unique performative means in order to impress readers, stimulate them and allows them to find a sense of beauty in horror and mystery, to purify their souls in surprise and shock and to achieve aesthetic effect in his short stories.(Zhu Xiaohong,2011)

1. The first person narration and the effect of such narration
   1. The general effect

The first person narration has its unique effects that are different from the second person narration and the third person narration. Compared with the calm and objective third person narrator, the first person narrator can cover up or reduce the fabrication in works, which easily and directly arouses readers’ attention to the story and their senses of reality.

• 1. Analysis of the effect in Poe’s stories

Allan Poe employs the first person narration in his terrific stories to play a more powerful effect in rendering of terrific atmosphere so that readers can explore the inner heart of the protagonists of his stories and clearly understand their minds (Zhu Xiaohong, 2011). The horrific scenes vividly reappear in the story in order to achieve the soul terror effect. The first person narrator directly goes into their inner worlds, which makes the whole story more realistic and vivid. Besides, Allan Poe uses the first person narrator to make readers totally immerse into the plot Poe designs in the story in order to make readers feel themselves as the protagonists of stories and experience what the narrators in stories do. In addition, someone may think that the plot is out of order, but only if we find the clues of the protagonist in the story, we can find the plot is in order.

• • 1. The effect of first person narration in The Black Cat

In the story, Poe uses the first person narration to tell the whole story. Poe describes the murderer’s complicated and paradoxical psychological feelings of the two black cats. The protagonist kills his wife and finally he is caught by the policeman due to the latter black cat. The whole story is narrated by the first person narrator, which makes the story vivid. And more important role played by first person narrator in the story is that it leads readers to read and to think at the same time. Readers can not stop thinking what will happen and what the protagonist will do. And it fully exhibits the psychology of the protagonist of the story.

When we read the story narrated by the first person narration, it seems that everything happens in the front of us. And we can not stop thinking what will happen and what the protagonist will do. Sometimes, we are likely to think that we are at the spot and we are the protagonist of the story. I think it is the key point of the first person narration that Poe wants to convey.

In addition, someone may think that the plot is out of order, but only if we find the clues of the protagonist in the story, we can find the plot of the story is in order. In the beginning of the story, the protagonist says something about his childhood and then something about his marriage. Following, he narrates the changing process of his mood, temper and his bad, wrong action. He tells people about his childhood and marriage, which is paving the way for the following contents. The plot of the whole story develops step by step from the clues of the protagonist.

• • 1. The effect of first person narration in The Tell- tale Heart

The whole story is narrated by the first person narrator, which makes the story authentic. It seems that everything happened in front of us. And we can not stop thinking what will happen and what the protagonist will do. Sometimes, we are likely to think that we are in the spot and we see everything happening with our own eyes. I think it is the key point of the first person narration that Poe wants to convey.

In addition, someone may think that the plot is out of order, but only if we find the clues of the protagonist in the story, we will find the plot of the story is in order. In the beginning of the story, the protagonist says something about himself and then the reason why he dislikes the old man. Following, he narrates his preparation for killing the old man and the changing of his psychology. Perhaps, someone think that the plot of the story is out of order, but if we find the clues of the protagonist of the story, the plot of the story is in order. He tells people about himself and the reason why he dislikes the old man, which is paving the way for the following contents. The plot of the whole story develops step by step from the clues of the protagonist.

4.2.3 The effect of first person narration The Fall of the House of Usher

In the story, Poe describes Usher’s sick psychology in the first person narration. Unlike the second and the third person narration, the first person narration makes the whole story more authentic. If Poe uses the third person narration to narrate Usher’s sick psychology, readers may feel that the description is not the first hand and the story may lose authenticity. But Poe uses the first person narration to narrate the entire story including the description of Usher’s sick psychology, which makes the story more authentic. It seems that everything happened in front of us. And we can not stop thinking what will happen and what the protagonist will do. Sometimes, we are likely to think that we are at the spot and we experience everything personally. I think it is the key point of the first person narration that Poe wants to put forward.

In addition, someone maybe think the plot is out of order, but only if we find the clues of the protagonist in the story, we will find the plot of the story is in order. In the beginning of the story, the protagonist says something about his friend called Usher and then something about his sister and his family. Following, he narrates the atmosphere of the house of Usher and its surrounding. Perhaps, someone think that the plot of the story is out of order, because the protagonist tells something at first and he narrates something else later. But if we find the clues of the protagonist of the story, the plot of the story is in order. He tells people about his friend and his family as well as why his friend Usher wants him to accompany Usher, which is paving the way for the contents following. The plot of the whole story develops in logics from the clues of the protagonist.

5. The symbolic images and the effect of them

5.1 Analysis of the symbolic images

Symbolic images have a lot of functions. Among these functions, three functions are important.

The first is narrative function. Symbolic images further deepen the connotation of novels. Authors often convey something by means of using symbolic images instead of conveying them directly.

The second is structure function. The core symbolic images control the whole structure of stories. The corresponding images can support one another. All of these make a story more structural.

The last is aesthetic function. Symbolic images can shape a picture.

请支付后下载全文，论文总字数：30822字