Tomb or Womb: The Freudian Approach to Live Burial in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and The Premature Burial

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: A, University of Graz, language: English, abstract: There is a certain clever rhetoric from the buried protagonist in the introduction The Premature Burial , Edgar Allan Poe’s tale: The boundaries which divide Life from Death, are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and the other begins? (Poe 322), as he finds himself buried in what he believes to be a coffin, as the story starts to intrigue us with one of the most terrifying and arguably uncanny experiences - live burial. The narrator is obsessed, a walking dead man , who eventually saves himself from the terrifying experience and exaggerated fear, but not from the uncanny feeling. It is as much dreadful as when we as readers perceive the buried-alive Lady Madeline Usher breaking the vault steel door of her coffin, uttering eerie sounds and appearing bloody at her brother Roderick’s door in Poe’s even more gruesome tale, The Fall of the House of Usher . The protagonists too are quite different, as are the representations of the motive of live burial in both stories - one hand we deal with, as this essay will try and prove, an evident incestuous relationship and perhaps Roderick’s certain repressed wishes, and on the other hand the exaggerated, almost satiric general fear of a seemingly cataleptic state and death.