Research Paper on:
Poe/Usher & Ligeia

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
a jaded modern reader gooseflesh. This fact is evident in two of Poes short stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Ligeia," which are thematically and  stylistically very similar. Both stories set their tales of horror within a sense of foreboding and decay. Both concern preternaturally beautiful people whom seem, even by their appearance,  to be beyond the scope of regular human experience. Both stories concern death and, from a certain point of view, resurrection of the dead. However, examination of these tales also  shows that they differ in a significant manner in that "Ligeia" encompasses Poes obsession with the loss of a beloved lover, while Roderick Ushers story pivots around the death  of his sister. Poe sets up the tone and atmosphere of each story early on. The unnamed narrator of "Ligeia" tries to recall when he first met his beloved  wife and cannot seem to quite recall although he believes their first meetings were in a "large, old, decaying city near the Rhine" (Poe Ligeia). Similarly, Poe stresses  the "sense of insufferable gloom" that pervades the narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher," as well a the fact that the Usher house is set on the  banks of a "black and lurid tarn" (Poe Usher). As the narrator in both stories is fully aware of who he is, he never bothers to inform the reader and  both remained unnamed. In both tales, Poe describes the person who is the focus of the narrators attention as being beautiful, but also somehow strange. Ligeias husband describes his  wifes incredible beauty in great detail, but also emphasizes that being in her presence was rather like being in an "opium-dream" and that Ligeia had a "strangeness" about the