Poe's Supernatural Ambiguity: A Historical Stylistic Study

Abstract

Recent Gothic and stylistic studies have shown a gap between the characteristic of ambiguity in Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic works and his stylistics. This thesis aims to combine these two individual areas of Gothic and stylistic studies and strengthen the intersection of Poe’s Gothic ambiguity and his stylistics, investigating the ambiguity, under the themes of horror, the uncanny, and terror, created through Poe’s wordplay in his Gothic poems and fictions, a usage that often generates double meaning and results in unresolved equivocation between supernaturalism and natural effects. In this thesis, I argue that the supernatural ambiguity in Poe’s Gothic works is a reflection of his Gothic, critical, and rhetorical contexts. His adoption and application of the devices of literalisation, repetition, polysemy, and antithesis, which evoke a sense of supernatural ambiguity in his Gothic writings, can find correspondences in sources in his time. The methodology of historical stylistics is adopted to fulfil the aims of my project: earlier and contemporary Gothic writers as well as the critical and rhetorical theories of Augustus William Schlegel, Hugh Blair, and Henry Home, which were influential and contemporaneous to Poe, and essays and reviews published in the early and mid-nineteenth century are employed to recontextualise Poe and examine how his supernatural ambiguity emerged and was, at the same time, informed by those historical texts. Through exploring Poe’s Gothic ambiguity in its context and how he engenders the effect of ambiguity via certain stylistic devices of double signification, this study sheds light on the interrelation between Poe’s ambiguous Gothicism and stylistics, bridging these two important areas of studies of Poe’s writing and filling, thus, the gap in the scholarship of his stylistics of Gothic ambiguity.