1) Unfortunately, relations between the Natives of the West Indies and the European settlers were never very positive. West Indians died in droves from Spanish savagery and contact, with the soldiers of Smallpox and Malaria filling graves faster than any European army ever could. Natives came to fear the pale-skinned newcomers as if they were death itself, as Columbus recounted in his letters back home to Spain ‘…there were small hamlets, with the people of which I could not have speech because they all fled immediately‘. The surviving Natives often faced a worse fate than those they’d buried, with over forty percent of them becoming enslaved within the first year of Spanish conquest in some parts. Hundreds of Native Americans were shipped across the ocean to awaiting sugar plantations and European households, further replenishing their dwindling population.
These atrocities, however, were far from being discouraged amongst the European population. Both colonizers and conquerors alike saw the natives as uncivilized and vulnerable savages, and thus needing a firm hand and a forceful shove in the right direction. What ever it took to ‘civilize’ and ‘humble’ these barbarians was justified.
2) Unsurprisingly enough, the European colonizers were no strangers to pleading and haggling with their ’purses’ back east, usually the nobles and rulers of their countries. They used any method they deemed necessary to get the results they wanted, whether it be packing their letters home with exaggerated sufferings to get more money or passing along hyperbolic tales of Native savagery to receive more manpower. In the case of Christopher Columbus, his letters to Ferdinand and Isabella served more as an example of shameless groveling than as a mediator between the two continents, the once great navigator humbling himself for the price of his freedom. Christopher packs on the pathos, using phrases like ’ I never think without weeping’ (letter to Ferdinand and Isabella Regarding the Fourth Voyage, paragraph 1) and ’the unmerited wrong I have suffered’ (paragraph 6) to appeal to the readers’, namely the king and queen’s, sympathy.
3) Explorers and Europeans alike were almost always awed by the breathtaking virgin stretches of land they encountered, many subconsciously expecting to be greeted with the smoking rooftops and crowded alleyways offered in their own native lands. ‘I went on the same course’ writes Columbus in his letter to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain ‘thinking that I should not fail to find great cities and towns.’ He later goes on to describe the reality of the island, which he later rechristened Isla Juana, as only a clutter of small hamlets, but is very far from being disappointed. ‘This island and all the others are very fertile to a limitless degree, and this island is extremely so. In it there are many harbors on the coast of the sea, beyond comparison with others which I know Christendom, and many rivers, good and large, which is marvelous….Esponola is a marvel.’
There were, however, limits to the ‘marvels’ described by Columbus, as later Europeans were soon to discover. In most cases, there were no golden cities in this new land, no untapped mines gleaming with precious jewels to be shipped back home. This left many a conquistador deeply embittered, and countless natives feeling the brunt of their fury.
1) The plot and the setting, as it turns out, seems to compliment and correspond with one another perfectly. The story’s protagonist, Desiree Aubigny, was raised in the elegant and physically beautiful Valmonde before downgrading to the outwardly unpleasant L’Abri. Her new residence was described in the text as ‘a sad looking place’, having been without female influence for some time. The author goes on to describe the house; ‘The roof came down steep and black like a cowl, reaching out beyond the wide galleries that encircled the yellow stuccoed house. Big, solemn oaks grew close to it, and their thick-leaved, far-reaching branches shadowed it like a pall‘. The plot of the story, it would seem, follows along these lines exactly. Desiree goes from a privileged daughter, beloved wife, and dotting mother to something tainted and undesirable in the course of a few pages, just as sudden as her marriage and move came about. This change in scenery can be seen a symbol of Desiree’s change in social stations, especially since they both were for the worse.
2) I think it’s to add to the suspense of the situation, to keep the reader second guessing their own assumptions until the end.
3) I think the restraint shown by Chopin heightened the sense of surprise and disbelief of the reader, making the impact of the protagonist and her infant’s death that much more powerful. Excessive detail might have ruined the elegant conclusion Chopin set up in the text, making it harder to provide an ending as pleasantly understated as the rest of the story. The subtleness employed in that one sentence can also have the effect of causing desired confusion on the part of the reader, forcing them to re-read and analyze the text, searching for clues pertaining to the fate of Desiree that they may have overlooked. (I sure had to :) )
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5) In the Antebellum South, much like the rest of the country, women are still treated as coveted possessions or with degrading patronization, meant to be cared for a looked after by the much more able men in their lives. In the form of Desiree’s baby, Chopin forces us to examine the possibility for a young woman to gain identity and independence through marriage, and ultimately dashes such hopes through her writings. Desiree, so desperate and dependant for the approval of her husband, chooses suicide when she felt she no longer had a place in left in society. Her hasty marriage ended up taking whatever vestiges of freedom society granted her, and when her ‘master’ rejected her and her child, it stole her will to live as well.
1) By failing to explicitly describe the horrors of the House of Usher, Poe creates a sense of foreboding and dread in the reader that he would not have been able to achieve otherwise; now he has his audience cautiously proceeding, for they know that the House is going to serve as a centerpiece of terror for the story, it’s just not there yet. The sentence ‘There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime’ alone provides the reader with a sense of trepidation and the house with an air of mystery that will greatly affect the outlook and effect of the story.
2) Edgar Allen Poe was and is world renowned for his frequent use of thrilling, graphic, and thought-provoking details. Sentences like ‘…an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued’ invokes equally powerful imagery on the part of the reader, something that is critical in all horror stories. He makes it so that the reader can see, feel, and hear every single detail described in the story, adding to the terror and fear his scenes create.
3) In my own opinion, the Narrator’s main motivations for going to the House of Usher are as ambiguous as Madeline Usher’s strange illness. Maybe he was driven to visiting the Ushers by a withered childhood relationship and the sentiments of guilt that followed. The narrator admits that Roderick Usher, the house’s proprietor, had been one of his ‘boon companions in boyhood’, but ‘many years had elapsed since our last meeting’. The relationship between the narrator and Roderick was never fully explained, but it would not be unreasonable to assume that an ‘acute bodily illness, a mental disorder, and a earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady’ would no doubt draw an old friend, no matter how distant, in for a short visit.
Regardless of the reason he came, I think the reason he stayed was quite obvious; he stayed to sate an ever-present curiosity about his elusive and emotionally distant friend. The reader becomes aware of his interest in the House of Usher on the first page of the story, when he describes the family with something akin to awe. ‘I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch’. This last visit might give him a first hand look at the strange House of his old friend.
He was also curious about the strange feeling he was getting from the house itself. ‘What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered.’ This, however, did not grant him with an answer he felt solved his mystery. ‘I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth.’ I think he had to stick it out, had to know just what it was about the house that bothered him, no matter what horrors he had to go through to get it.
4) Yes, I think Roderick was well aware that his sister was still alive when he buried her. The painting ‘a small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault of tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at the exceeding depth below the surface of the earth’, was obviously a coffin, perhaps the very one that was to hold his sister, who was already failing in health. Usher’s knowledge of his sister’s survival would also explain the zombie-like behavior Roderick showed after the burial of his sister, as well as Madeline’s angry reaction. ‘She gave a low, moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.’ If Roderick really did know, she might have been justified in her attack.
