Dystopia is
defined as an anti-utopia, which means an imaginary place or situation in which
everything in society is extremely bad, while Gothic is understood in two
fundamental ways: first, as a fictional genre, encompassing the strands of
historical romance, horror and tales of psychological obsession and haunting;
and second, as a discourse of wider resonance, utilising images of disorder and
monstrosity that embody cultural anxieties. The shared perspective of dystopian
and gothic texts can be found in their tendency to human suffering by violence
and oppression in dystopia and by internal terrors in gothic.
Although one of
the most important dystopian novels, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published in 1949, Edgar Allan Poe, in
1839, published a tale that can be identified as deeply dystopian, which is The Fall of the House of Usher. This
tale was written while Poe was living in Philadelphia with his new wife
Virginia. During this time the social and political order was highly unstable;
slavery was a huge topic and a terrible economic depression affected America in
1837. It is not a surprise that all of this affected Poe’s work.
The story of The
Fall of the House of Usher starts with a description of the house; the home of
the Usher dynasty reflects its decay, even though it was marvellous once. Later
on we can be witness of Lady Madeleine and Roderick’s mysterious disease; a
disease that can be seen as a fear of people because of economic uncertainty. And
by the end of the tale, when the house is falling down, we can perceive the
storm as a wind of change that affected society forever.
All in all, we
can connect the story of the House of Usher to the dystopian future that Poe
and many other Americans feared because of the political and social turmoil. Therefore,
even though Edgar Allan Poe would not have described his tales as dystopian, I would
label this gothic text as an ancestor of modern dystopia.
Sources
The Fall of the House of Usher - Edgar Allan Poe (1839)
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