The issue of the deeper meaning of life in the world of a book or story can easily be gleaned through a story’s tone. In the case of some works of Gothic horror, tone is an excellent way to indicate the helplessness and inexorable darkness at the heart of life. William Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much With Us,” Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein all create dark, sinister tones in their works in different ways, evincing a distinct heaviness and sense of terror lying at the deeper meaning of life.
Wordsworth, in his poem “The World is Too Much With Us,” this particular cynicism towards man’s relationship with nature and the world is shown through the narrator’s anger and frustration. The opening line, “The world is too much with us,” succinctly sums up man’s relationship to the world, which he argues is too close, ignoring the spirituality of nature (Wordsworth line 1). According to Wordsworth, all of the wonders of the world are lost on us; “it moves us not” (Wordsworth line 9). By displaying this negative outlook on how we relate to the world, and being angry about it (cursing in lines like “Great God!”), the poem takes on a frustrated, dark, cynical tone about the future of mankind.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein takes a somewhat similar tone, with a very similar outlook to the treatment of man towards nature. In this respect, this is explored through the cruel treatment of mankind toward the Frankenstein monster, whose attempt to interact with the world around him is met with violence and horror. Even after he saves a girl from drowning, the townspeople try to kill him, leading him to his ultimate declaration of mankind as evil: “This was then the reward of my benevolence! I had saved a human being from destruction, and as a recompense I now writhed under the miserable pain of a wound which shattered the flesh and bone” (Shelley 169). This sense of foreboding and dread permeates the novel, from Walton’s letter to his sister to the fatalistic nature of Dr. Frankenstein himself – there is an ongoing sense that events conspire against these characters to lead to bad ends for them.
This sense of foreboding destiny is also present in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” as right from the start, the world is described as “dull, dark and soundless” (Poe 3). There is a distinct bleakness to the environment and the characters’ description of setting that makes life in the story feel meaningless. Still, the tale is told without the same level of anger or fear as the other two stories; instead, the horrors come from a place of calm contemplation. The narrator simply acknowledges that there are crazy, supernatural things occurring, and this must be taken as a simple fact of life. When the brother’s corpse is revealed, he is described in a very clinical way, being “a victim to the terrors he had anticipated” (Poe 25). Even through the amazing things that happen – like the fissure that swallows the house whole at the end of the story – the clinical nature of the storytelling makes these events somewhat mundane, which conversely makes them all the more horrifying.
In Poe’s work, as well as that of Shelley and Wordsworth, life is something that is full of terrors and horrors – some of them manmade, others stemming from nature. While all three authors vary slightly in their reaction to it, the tone of the works all share a cynicism and a willingness to commit to the terrors of a bleak, hopeless life.
Works Cited
Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Elegant eBooks. 1839.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Penguin, 1818.
Wordsworth, William. “The world is too much with us.” Poetry Foundation.
