Opium this time, rather than alcohol. A dying woman confined in a turret rather than entombed in a wall. A guilt-stricken narrator. And a Gothic sensibility that pre-dates the Hammer Horror films of the 1960s by more than 120 years. How Gothic can an author be and yet get away with it? Try this from
Ligeia:
The room lay in a high turret of the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in
shape, and of capacious size. Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagon was the sole window — an immense sheet of
unbroken glass from Venice — a single pane, and tinted of a leaden hue, so that the rays of either the sun or moon, passing
through it, fell with a ghastly lustre on the objects within. Over the upper portion of this huge window, extended the
trellice-work of an aged vine, which clambered up the massy walls of the turret. The ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was
excessively lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic,
semi-Druidical device. From out the most central recess of this melancholy vaulting, depended, by a single chain of gold
with long links, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern, and with many perforations so contrived that there
writhed in and out of them, as if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of parti-colored fires.
The odd thing (it seems odd to me) about these Gothic tales (and the doom-laden poetry) is that they were mostly written before Virginia's death, not after. In 1838 when
Ligeia was written or 1845 (
The Black Cat and
The Raven) the horror of a young wife's death had not been visited upon Poe. If the chronology had been reversed, the wife's death (aged 25) then the Gothic writing, one might see a possible point of origin. But that's not how Poe's story went, so where did the tales spring from, I wonder?
