It is, probably, a mistake to use the word "influence" when considering how Poe developed the Gothic genre in his own literature in light of his predecessors. The overtones of 'derivative' in the word risk unfairly discrediting the influence Poe himself had on the genre. It should not be forgotten that Poe is widely recognized as one of the first authors to consolidate the American Gothic into a more powerful and tangible form. In considering the influence of his predecessors, it is therefore very useful to examine how Poe built on, and indeed improved on, the legacy of European and American Gothic literature that preceded him. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay At the risk of making arbitrary comparisons, the stylistic traits of Gothic fiction that Poe inherits are almost immediately evident in both his works and those of his predecessors. In her book The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Eve Sedgwick lists several "certain characteristic concerns" of Gothic fiction, among which she includes "the doubles...unnatural echoes or silences, unintelligible writings, and the unspeakable...nightscapes" and the "story within a story", which can be traced back through the Gothic legacy to Poe. Gothic landscapes are an immediate example of this. The frequent pathetic fallacy in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, such as the "dreary November night" in which Victor Frankenstein's creation is brought to life, the backdrop of castles and monasteries in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and The Monk, and the " gnarled and fantastic "The tulip tree by which the main horrific action of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow takes place are all natural ancestors of the memorable opening passage of The Fall of the House of Usher "the dingy walls.. . the empty eye-like windows... a few rancid sedges" and the subsequent storm that surrounds the climax of the story. The employment of layered narrative in Gothic novels is also a clear legacy. Poe's preferred use of the first-person narrator, even as a stylistic trait, can be seen as taken directly from novels such as Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, narrated by Clara, and Frankenstein, which at one point reaches a narrative layer very complex when Shelley is telling the story of Walton recording the story of Frankenstein remembering the story told by his creation. The narration of the main theme through a life story in the manner of these novels is used by Poe in stories such as William Wilson (itself a variant on the Gothic theme of the double). Irving similarly loved to use layers of narrative through the medium of the discovered manuscript, another brand of Gothic, for example, in the stories of his alter ego Diedrich Knickerbocker, collected and edited by his "other" alter ego Geoffrey Crayon in The Sketch Book. The "discovered manuscript" device is obviously used by Poe in the manuscript Found in a Bottle, the fragmented diary format of which can be seen echoed in another Gothic novel, Bram Stoker's Dracula. The manuscript found in a bottle is also an excellent example of the other Gothic trait mentioned by Sedgwick above, namely "the unspeakable". While the narrator's story and the Discovery's journey are inexorably drawn toward "exciting knowledge, an undisclosed secret, the attainment of which is destruction," the fractured, interrupted format of the narrative similarly creates a sense of omission. to the piece, that curious details, despite the narrator's meticulous recording, are necessarily excluded due to the bizarre situation in which he is trapped. The pervasion ofThe "unspeakable" in Gothic fiction can be traced back to European novels. Frankenstein's refusal to reveal the secret of life he has discovered, because it will inevitably lead to "destruction and unfailing misery", is a prime example. Even more exceptional is Walpole's dramatic and schematic use of the technique in the Castle of Otranto. Passim, says that "words cannot paint the horror" of the story he records. Isabella "cannot speak" of Manfred's evil divorce-and-marriage plan, while Manfred himself ultimately "cannot speak" the terrible crimes he has committed as he tries to repent to Hippolita. In addition to dramatically increasing the atmosphere of unholy horror regarding the unfolding events, Walpole uses it to prevent vital plot points from being revealed, thus prolonging the tension. An excellent example is Isabella's rescue by the mysterious figure who appears to be Theodore, where the two are constantly interrupted by the discovery of each other's identities by the action around them. On a more careful level, we could look at specific cases of direct influence. In his introduction to The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, David Galloway points out that we can "trace the growth of the detective story" in the work of Poe, to whom he cites Arthur Conan Doyle as a debtor of gratitude. This growth nominally refers to the investigations of Poe's logician C. Dupin in stories such as The Murders in the Rue Morgue. The tone of this particular tale is likely inspired, at least in part, by passages in Gothic fiction such as the account Frankenstein gives of the murder of his friend, Henry Clarvel. The evidence is presented to the reader in the formal tones of a police report. The corpse turns out to be a handsome young man, about twenty-five years old. He had apparently been strangled, as there were no signs of violence except the black finger mark on his neck. There are distinct echoes of this tone and subject matter in Poe's newspaper account of the Rue Morgue tragedy: The body was rather hot... On the face there were many severe scratches, and, on the throat, dark and deep bruises indentations of the nails, as if the deceased had been strangled to death. Even more surprising is the inclusion of evidence in each story, in the form of accounts gathered from witnesses. In Frankenstein these include "Daniel Nugent... a woman... another woman" and "many other men" while in The Murders in the Rue Morgue the witnesses have been expanded to include a spectrum of different races and professions. In each text there is a new paragraph for the statement of each witness. We should also remember that the original murder of William by the creature in Frankenstein had an element of "whodunit", as the reader's suspicions are driven and it is only in the creature's narration that he admits to being the killer and the mystery is explained the photo in Justine's possession. While this is largely speculation, and it must be acknowledged that Poe develops the idea into a much more curious and tense mystery, there is nevertheless a distinct influence in the style and organization of the plot from the first story to the second. This point of development of ideas must be underlined, however, when considering Poe's works in the light of his predecessors. This is especially true when considering the influence of Frankenstein's early gothic conventions. In many ways this novel quite naturally displays the vestiges of the Romantic tradition, as it concerns the power of the imagination and the exploration of the self. Frankenstein himself describes passim how it was his "imagination" that sealed his fate and made the terrible events of the novel possible. Having discovered the secret of life, he comments "mineimagination was too elated by my first success to allow me to doubt my ability to give life to such a complex animal... as man." It is that same imagination that evokes the terrors should he succeed in finding a partner for his creation, deciding him to abandon his job and thus seal the fate of his loved ones. During these events, but especially in his early life, Shelley strives to examine moments such as the emotional speech on his first day in Ingolstadt that push Frankenstein to move forward, laying bare the psychology of the character. Yet in these vestiges of Romance we can see Gothic conventions emerge, and it is on these that Poe draws a story markedly parallel to Frankenstein William Wilson is a classic paranoid hero of the Gothic tradition. and his paranoia about his creation's actions is obviously fueled by his imaginative ramblings A similar, even more irrational hatred is inspired in Wilson (whose unrevealed real name is another testament to the "unspeakable"). gothic) towards his namesake, whose "affectionateness" he attributes to "a consummate conceit that takes on the vulgar airs of patronage and patronage". protection" and devotes considerable energy to humiliating, wounding and ultimately killing his double. Frankenstein and his creation, who are "bound by bonds dissoluble only by the annihilation of one of us", become two parts of the same creative entity and create that which Sedgwick calls a "mirrored monstrosity", where all of Frankenstein's most evil elements and indeed, humanity are displaced into his creation The "reflected monstrosity" that germinates in Frankenstein is brought to fruition by Poe in William Wilson, but with a darker and more complicated twist; the narrator himself seems to be the evil embodiment of Wilson, while his eternal adversary is his conscience, which hinders his indulgence in luxury and deception achieves in the classic Gothic convention of the doppelganger, as the antagonist finally reveals himself "even in his most absolute identity" as the narrator's inexplicable twin (and it is notable that, in doing so, Wilson ambiguously thinks he is looking into a mirror) . The narrator's chosen alias, "William Wilson," also contains the syllable "Wil" reflected in each half of the name. Sedgwick also discusses the conventional Gothic picture of two men Frankenstein and his creation being chased at the beginning and end of the tale. novel, but here too Poe excels in creating a spectacular picture. The climax of the story after the thrilling chase and sword fight sees the slain Wilson become the narrator's mirror image, bloodied and proclaiming "how completely you have killed yourself". In doing so, Poe not only creates a more melodramatic image, but also explores his gothic concern of the Imp of the Perverse, especially with the ambiguity of the mirror image, the whole story can be interpreted as a psychological illusion in which William Wilson is fighting. against himself and ultimately defeats himself. The power of imagination within a being is given even greater and more lethal force. Poe thus consolidates his issues, similar to those raised in Frankenstein, in a more palpably provocative and extreme way, engaging more with what would become the Gothic mode. Similar examples of the development of Poe's Gothic fiction from his predecessors can be found in the comparison between himself. and Washington Irving. In his introduction to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories (a reprint of The Sketch Book), William Hedges points out that Irving is "generally credited with inventing the short story as a distinct genre." Here Poe clearly owes a debt of gratitude for his consistent preference for the.