Ligeia and Annabel Lee
"Ligeia" and "Annabel Lee"
Through his short stories and poetry, Edgar Allan Poe was one of the forefathers of Gothic literature in the United States. Through his unique writing style, and his interest in the macabre, Poe established a literary canon that had the capacity to intrigue and terrify his audiences at the same time. A recurring theme among Poe's short stories and poetry is the death of a beautiful woman, the eternal connection that the narrator of each respective work had with the deceased woman, and the supernatural. Both "Ligeia," a short story published in 1838, and "Annabel Lee," a poem published posthumously in 1849, integrate these elements into their narratives.
In "Ligeia," Poe writes about the death of not one, but two women. In the short story, the narrator experiences the loss of two of his wives, Ligeia and Rowena Trevanion. It is clear through the…...
mlaWorks Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. "Annabel Lee." Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York:
Vintage Books, 1975. pp. 654-666. Print.
-. "Ligeia." Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York:
Vintage Books, 1975. pp. 957. Print.
It is difficult to believe such a love exists but it is easy to understand how some people can feel as though their love is unlike any other on the face of the earth.
The poem captures the mystery of love with images of the sea, heaven and angels. The meter of the poem works to its advantage. It allows the poet to establish a romantic and mournful mood. The poem, similar to a ballad, successfully conveys the poet's innermost emotions with several repeating stanzas. The beauty of the maiden and the love of the poet offer two unique aspects that the poet hopes to express with utmost importance. These are the things that angered the angels and led to their separation. Annabel Lee is dead but not in such a way that she is separated from the poet. Readers ponder on what this actually means but the mystery involving…...
mlaWork Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. "Annabel Lee." Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Minneapolis: Amaranth Press. 1981. p. 740.
This poem is interesting in that the poet uses humor along with images of nature to illustrate his point. For example, the poet tells us that his lover's eyes are "not at all like the sun" (Shakespeare 1). In addition, her skin is not white like snow. Furthermore, using more humor to make his point, he goes on to say that he knows very well that red roses are lovely and his lover has "no such roses in her cheeks" (6). hile this poem seems like a slam on his lover's beauty, the poet is actually pointing out the power of his love with his unusual comparisons.
In "A Red, Red Rose," Robert Burns expresses the same type of sentiment as Poe does in that love is beautiful like things of nature. He wants his lover to know how much he loves her as well as be aware of how…...
mlaWorks Cited
Burns, Robert. "A Red, Red Rose." Book Name. City: Press. Year.
Poe, Edgar Allan. "Annabel Lee." Book Name. City: Press. Year.
Shakespeare, William. "Sonnet 130." Book Name. City: Press. Year.
Annabel LeeIntroductionEdgar Allan Poe was a master of the Gothic genre and often used themes of love and death in his works to probe the psyche and the line between sanity and madness. One of his most notable poems, Annabel Lee, offers a disturbing examination of these themes. The poem uses repetition of sound and words, alliteration and assonance, throughoutalong with vivid imagery and startling contrasts to depict joyful youth driven into maddening despair. This paper explores the structure, plot, and significant poetic elements of \\\"Annabel Lee\\\" to uncover how Poe reveals that it is a thin line between happiness and love, and death and madness.Structure of the PoemAnnabel Lee is a lyrical ballad comprising six stanzas with varied lengths. The rhyme scheme alternates between lines in a pattern of ABABCB in most stanzas (Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, 2013). For instance, in the first stanza, Lee (B) rhymes…...
mlaReferencesEdgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. (2013). The Poe Library. Retrieved from S. (2004). Edgar Allan Poe Revisited. Twayne Publishers.Poe, E.A. (1849). Annabel Lee. Retrieved from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174151 Roppolo, J.P. (1954). Meaning and \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'The Masque of the Red Death\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'. Tulane Studies in English, 3, 103-118.Silverman, K. (1992). Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance. Harper Perennial.Wardrop, D. (1998). Review Essay: Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson. The Emily Dickinson Journal, 7(2), 115-117.http://www.eapoe.org/index.htm Peeples,
American Literature
Listen to Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God preached. Discuss in the discussion group.
Jonathan Edwards gives us a perfect example of the Calvinist beliefs of the Puritan settlers in early New England. Edwards studied theology at Yale University -- where today there is still a dormitory named after him -- but then became a noteworthy preacher in the Great Awakening, which exhorted an entire generation to renew their Christian faith. Edwards' skill in preaching lies in using literary imagery to get across abstract theological concepts. Calvinist theology believes in "total depravity" -- in other words, because of Adam and Eve eating the apple, human beings are fallen, and stained with "original sin." The most memorable image in Edwards' sermon -- the image of the spider being held over a fiery pit -- is meant to be a metaphor to enable the listener to imagine how God feels…...
Not only was Annabel Lee's love strong, but she was beautiful as well. This notion of beauty and love are linked in a continuous dream-like state for the speaker. This speaker's first wife was able to make him experience a type of love that he had never known before her or since knowing her. Even though Annabel Lee is gone, the speaker tells us that she is still a powerful force in his life and:
Neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee. (30-3)
In "Ligeia," we see the ephemeral attached love.
hile human hearts may not stand the test of time, we know that love will surely prevail as one of the constants of the universe. In fact, the pleasure and pain of love are two things that Medieval audiences share with audiences from any era. Heroic love is…...
mlaWorks Cited
de France, Marie. "Equitan,"
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Macmillan Publishing Company. New York. 1974. Print.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "The Birthmark." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Cassil, R.V.,
ed. 1981 W.W. Norton and Company. Print.
Such evidence as there is can be taken up at a later time. But of one thing we can be sure. If Virginia was the prototype of Eleonora she was not the model for Morella or Berenice or Ligeia."(Quinn, 255)
These feelings can also be inferred from Poe's letters to Mrs. Clemm, Virginia's mother:
I am blinded with tears while writing this letter-- I have no wish to live another hour. Amid sorrow, and the deepest anxiety your letter reached -- and you well know how little I am able to bear up under the pressure of grief -- My bitterest enemy would pity me could he now read my heart -- My last my only hold on life is cruelly torn away -- I have no desire to live and will not but let my duty be done. I love, you know I love Virginia passionately devotedly. I cannot express…...
mlaWorks Cited
Felman, Shoshana. "On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Psychoanalytical Approaches." In Edgar Allan Poe: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 119-39. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.
Hayes, Kevin J. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Hoffman, Daniel. "O! Nothing Earthly...' / the Poems." In Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.
Kaplan, Louise J. "The Perverse Strategy in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'," in New Essays on Poe's Major Tales, ed. Kenneth Silverman, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 45-64.
Emily's only social imperfection in her eyes was remaining unmarried, and to remedy that when she could not possess Homer arron, she murdered him. The loss of her father is replaced by an obsession with another man. Emily literally cannot live without a man, even if she must become a kind of "threatening" and murderous harpy to have a husband (Clarke 6).
Faulkner's Emily lives for love. She follows the expectations of society in a perverse fashion: she kills a man so she will not lack a male presence in her life. In the story, there is no self-expression and freedom to live outside of social constraints and the expectations of how a woman must act. Love is not liberating. Emily is a symbol of a vengeful woman, and an outdated form of false Southern gentility. She seems to have no existence beyond the need for male approval. Although both…...
mlaBibliography
Clarke, Deborah. Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner. University Press of Mississippi,
2006.
Fowler, Doreen & Ann J. Abadie. Faulkner and Women. University Press of Mississippi,
1986.
Poe, Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" is perhaps the best-known American entry into the genre of Romantic and Gothic tale, yet it is worth asking what elements actually identify it as such. Spitzer describes the level of Gothic excess here:
Roderick and Madeline, twins chained to each other by incestuous love, suffering separately but dying together, represent the male and the female principle in that decaying family whose members, by the law of sterility and destruction which rules them, must exterminate each other; Roderick has buried his sister alive, but the revived Madeline will bury Roderick under her falling body. The "fall" of the House of Usher involves not only the physical fall of the mansion, but the physical and moral fall of the two protagonists. (Spitzer 352).
To a certain degree, this marks Poe's story out for particular interest, particularly for…...
mlaWorks Cited
Allison, John. Coleridgean Self-Development: Entrapment and Incest in "The Fall of the House of Usher." South Central Review 5.1 (1988): 40-7.
Bailey, J.O. "What Happens in The Fall of the House of Usher?" American Literature 35.4 (1964): 445-66.
Butler, David. "Usher's Hypochondriasis: Mental Alienation and Romantic Idealism in Poe's Gothic Tales." American Literature 48.1 (1976): 1-12.
Damon, S. Foster. Thomas Holley Chivers: Friend of Poe. New York: Harper, 1930.
Nature of Death in Life
In the novels Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, death stands as a continuous presence, serving as a motivator, a metaphor, a threat, and a theme all at the same time. Death enters into each story as it takes one or more characters and so becomes something with which the remaining characters must cope, but even more than this, death stands as a constant presence in life, always threatening to end it, coloring the choices made by the main characters, and giving them reasons for making the choices they make.
In Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov explores both a vision of contemporary America and the internal psychology of the characters, looking both outward and inward at the same time. Indeed, the novelist links the two so that the liberal but plastic landscape of American life is both decried and emulated by Humbert. He sees through…...
mlaWorks Cited
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Scribner, 1994.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: G.P. Putnam's, 1958.
Barbie doll top ten viral commercials as of 2013 rely mostly on You Tube, Dailymotion, Facebook and Twitter.
The third doll brand, subject to this study is Bratz. As evidenced from the four commercials assessed in the course of this study, Bratz deploys a slightly different mode of advertising, which involves marketing adult entertainment to kids. Social psychologists have argued that this strategy is very effective within the realm of modern-day material culture. Adult entertainment, which often involves depiction of violence, sex, strong language and obscenity, has become very popular among children
. For Bratz, one of the most popular commercials involves cowgirls in Texas fighting crime modelled along the risque film group Charlie's Angels. The use of guns to depict violence is central to this commercial, which has since increased the brand's digital reach through pervasive advertising on TV and in the internet. In a similar commercial, Bratz acquired the…...
mlaMeyers, Laurie. "Dangerous dolls? Psychologists push back against market forces and products that sexualize young girls." American Psychological Association September 2006, Vol 37, No. 8
Eglinton, Kristen Ali Youth Identities, Localities, and Visual Material Culture: Making Selves, Making Worlds New York: Springer, 2013
Doeschka, J. Anschutz and Rutger, C.M.E. Engels. "The Effects of Playing with Thin Dolls on Body Image and Food Intake in Young Girls" U.S. National Library of Medicine
Thomas Paine was an earlier conqueror of the special association that was formed between America and France. His part in this association was initiated with his responsibility of the post of American Congress Secretary of Foreign Affairs where he continually used dialogue to make relations between the two better. He retained this post throughout the American evolution. Paine, however, is better noted for his works written throughout the American and French evolutions Eras. In his writings, Paine offered spirited protection of accepted autonomy, human rights, and the republican government. Both Common Sense (1776) ights of Man (1791-1792) stick out as the most broadly read political areas from the era. Paine's distinctive global thought also can serve as the building blocks for liberal cosmopolitanism in worldwide relations. His unrelenting faith in aspects of democratization, free trade, and respect for human rights being the factors that cut back worldwide conflict stands among…...
mlaReferences
Fruchtman, Jack, Jr. "Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature." Johns Hopkins University Press . 1993.
Fruchtman, Jack, Jr. "Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom." Four Walls Eight Windows. 1994.
Keane, John. "Tom Paine: A Political Life." Little, Brown. 1995.
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