Open Access
American Research Journal of English and Literature
ISSN (Online): 2378-9026
DOI: 10.46568/arjel
The Gothic Body and Resurrection in Wuthering Heights and The Fall of the House of Usher
Abstract
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) are the best
representative of the Gothic works in British and American literature. Not only do they inherit the Gothic traditions, they
also put forward the genre by creating their own country’s styles. Poe founds the traditional writing mode of American
psychological and introverted Gothic by creating “the terror of the soul”, meanwhile, Brontë undercuts the distinction
between Gothic and domestic narratives in the nineteenth century British literary history. In depicting Madeline Usher’s
Gothic death, mysterious resurrection and the disembodiment and mental breakdown of Roderick Usher, Poe, presents
the incest-taboo, his view of after-life and the ghost haunting the House of Usher, the text and democratic America.
Brontë, on the other hand, portraying Catherine Earnshaw’s death and ghost, Heathcliff’s revenge and dubious identity,
suggests the instability caused by slavery, racial and colonial issues, Gothic and domestic novels, which makes the novel
becomes the dark secret at the heart of the history of literature.
