The Wastelandic Voice

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an excellent poet, short story writer and critic in the19th century of American literature. He was also one of the most controversial figures in American literature. His works are laden with death, horror and arabesque. His unique taste for beauty and pointed critical articles gathered many enemies and unrecognition. But he excelled at concerning on the "vaults and cellars" of the human psychology and perceiving the wastelandic tendency of the human spirit. This ignorance in the Poe’s contemporary historical context has been paying more seriously attention by the modern people now. Allan Poe predicted the puzzlement that haunted modern people and proposed his worry---the human life will be wastelandic. And this wastelandic tendency is masked by the death, horror and arabesque theme in Poe’s works. This perspectiveness can be best reflected in his masterpiece The Fall of the House of Usher.Allan Poe expressed his pursuit for a completed family in his works, for example Ligeia and The Masque of the Red Death. And this family is a distorted and fragmental image that delivered through Allan Poe’s wastelandic voice. Through the close reading of the text, this thesis takes the image as the entry point to make an analysis from the view of wastelandic image of the family which would be the presentation of Poe’s consciousness hidden deeply in his mind. The wastelandic image could be the best embodiment of his disappointment about his broken family and his wish for a united and harmonious one.The "image" that discussed in this thesis is actually an ecological landscape with the features of a wasteland. And the word "wasteland" has the figurative meaning of the infertile statement of the human spirit and intellect. The wastelandic image can be interpreted from three aspects:the physical, the biological and the spiritual, i.e. the isolated house of Usher, the disintegrated Ushers and the wandering Usher soul. The three aspects collage together to show us a whole image of Poe’s own "family". Allan Poe reflected his disappointment about his family through the fallen Usher house and the disintegrated Usher sibling to surcease his sorrow. From this, we can feel the deep thought that Poe had about his ideal family.