The Dark Psyche of Self-Destruction in Poe’s Haunted House and Landscape

Abstract

As J. O. Bailey notes, Poe held a “land of dreams in his mind.” Poe’s dark, mist-wreathed landscape resembles the gloomy atmosphere in his haunted architecture that confines human beings within a grotesque world. If this weird geography, his haunted house, is “a peculiarly personal land of dreams” (Bailey), then Poe reaches out for a psychological journey or dreams of humanity through an eerie nature, inter-crossing the weaker realm of humanity and the realm of Spiritual universe/sublimity (Dennis W. Eddings) or terminating in an abyss. This article will concentrate on Poe’s scheme of self-destruction in dreams and the psychological journey of the imp of the perverse. This perverse demon, possessing the power to de-materialize the outer stable state, is allegorized as a decayed house or a haunted landscape in the ambience of sadness where an ethereal character completes its self-destruction in a secluded place.