Are you Scared?
Has it occurred to anyone that The Raven is actually meant to be a really scary story?
I don’t know if it’s just me, but the text just doesn’t make me feel scared. I’ve got a feeling this blog post is going to be the first one where I look at text, culture, value(s). Because, if this was written in 1845 with the intention to scare and instil fear, but that effect is not seen “today’, the surely there has been a definite shift of opinions and values from then to now. I have been really intrigued by this concept since I first watched the Simpsons’ episode when Lisa, at the end, muses whether people were easier to scare back then.
I can definitely see a truth to this in the sense that back in 1845, people appeared to be more easily scared than people are now. With such supernatural occurrences as ghosts and consequent superstitions accepted in daily life with not as much skepticism as we see today, what else were people of then to believe other than what the heard and, in this case, what they read. I guess that this wasn’t really helped by the lack of certain scientific explainations for these occurrences.
Now, relating all this back to the actual poem of The Raven, we see that much of this superstition is used. Although, something that is really interesting is the fact that Poe actually doesn’t imply that he thinks these supernatural things exist, through what he writes. Instead, what he appears to have done is subtly alluded to these occurrences and things as if it is a logical progression of thought; something that may be falsified today, but understood back then. What I’m trying to get at here is the vernacular that Poe uses. The use of ghosts, souls, and angels seems so flowing in what he has written, but would be such a struggle to replicate today. The line “And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.” from the second stanza just seems to flow, but the use of the word ‘ghosts‘ seems almost foreign to me in such a phrase. And yet, appears to have just simply flown from Poe’s pen.
So basically, all of that stuff that I have written above boils down to the fact that Poe was writing to conventions and standards that are completely different from this day and age’s literature. Irrespective of whether it is scary or not now, that’s how it was back then; he may not have known how to scare people further, due to these superstitions and supernatural occurrences not having ‘plausible’ scientific explainations.
I feel as though I have really wasted the first four paragraphs of this blog post, because in the end the answer is so simple, and I can’t believe that I made such a big deal out of something that I could have explained in three lines. But I’m sure that there are other explainations; so does anyone have other ideas as to why this isn’t as scary as it was back then?
