Poesque Transmutation Of Gothic Elements

Poe's Gothic stories symbolize a modern transmutation of Gothic fiction,In the first place, Poe deserts pure moral, religious didactics and shifts his attention from an exterior terror to an interior, spiritual terror. In Poe's works, morality is not the ultimate purpose but only a media to convey a certain effect. Of course he inherits the legacy of Gothic fiction and maximizes this legacy to an extreme. However, what is deliberately disguised under the Gothic "masque of the red death" is the writer's ultimate concern on the living condition of modern men. Being tortured by mental delirium, his protagonists are alienated men unregulated by social norms and religious disciplines. From time to time they are involved in the whirlpool of modernity and spiritual panic. Religion and ethics gradually lose their original significance in the progress of social modernization. Poe sensitively seizes the impulses of this social modernization and tries to convey his meditations on it.In the second place, Poe's works reveal the literary theory of "effect" and "unity" proposed by himself. For him, "effect" and "unity" mean an attempt to return to a new spiritual tranquility in the process of a chaotic social modernization. This textual "unity" is probably a solution to the psychic problems occurring in the background of social modernity. Poe creates a unity in his texts in a rational, pseudo-scientific way in order to dispel his apprehension on the psychical disorder within the texts. His attitude towards science and rational thinking is controversial: he resists the destruction of natural beauty and human imagination science bring about; whereas he is also charmed and inspired by science. Only with the help of modernity itself can Poe accomplish his of resisting the invasion of social and literary modernity. The dialectical relationship between Poe's works and modernity exactly demonstrates Poe's crucial position in the modern transmutation of Gothic fiction.