ABSTRACT
Engaging in dialogue with casual readers of periodicals is the goal of a group of Poe’s tales here designated as the light gothic. Each of these tales appeals to readers on either side of the Atlantic by showing up a “heavy father” or “boastful soldier” figure from the Jacksonian or Antebellum United States.1 One of the striking features of British Gothic novels is their indirect commentary on their own hackneyed plots, whether directly by holding a mirror up to vice, as in the case of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796) or indirectly by the prodigious use of Renaissance quotation, as in Ann Radcliffe’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and The Romance of the Forest (1791).2 In comparison to these, the plots of Poe’s light gothic tales are less refined.3 Throughout this chapter, the term “light gothic” is written in lowercase letters as a reminder that the tales offer social commentary in frivolous form instead of hewing, in the manner of Poe’s “Berenice” (1835) and “Ligeia” (1838), to Gothic archetypes.
