“Delusion of Modern Man” A Study of Grotesque Elements in Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher

Abstract

     The age of Enlightenment and the industrial revolution both affected people to doubt many old beliefs and form a new mentality. Man disregarded the spiritual side, imagination, and fantasy; the dominant concepts in society became logic, fact and science. This led to the death of the spiritual side in people. It turned to be a worrying subject to Intellectuals during the nineteenth century. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe attacks modern man’s misconception believing that he can find an explanation to every phenomenon in the universe according to science and logic. He manages, through using grotesque elements, such as mystery, distortion, and the supernatural, to make the protagonist disregard his old belief and realize that cosmic, immeasurable, and, infinite powers do exist. This article aim is to analyse the story showing how the writer invested the elements of grotesque to create a broken fearful world which provokes horror inside the reader; to make him feel the possibility of having a similar experience to the one his protagonist has gone through.