ss of the setting. The actual location of the House of Usher is never specified, and as such the reader may imagine it to be practically anywhere: Germany, Ireland, Scotland, or even America. This element of a remote and unknown location adds to the feeling of suspense. This technique is echoed in the story "Ligeia" as well. Although "Ligeia" begins with a description of a character and not a place, the narrator sets the scene early on by stating that he thinks he "met her first and most frequently in some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine" (Poe 38). After the death of the Lady Ligeia, the narrator moves to a desolate abbey, the location of which is vaguely described as "one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England" (Poe 45). The eeriness of the setting is further enhanced by the narrator's statement that the "gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building . . . had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into that remote and unsocial region of the country" (Poe 45-46). Again, Poe has used atmospheric description to give the reader a sense of the psychological state of his character.
The vague intimations of the locale are in contrast to the highly detailed physical descriptions of the structures wherein which the stories take place. Gothic stories are so-named because they are typically set in Gothic buildings. Walpole's Otranto Castle, for example, "is a cobwebbed ruin full of underground passages and massive doors that slam unexpectedly" (Kennedy 176). Furthermore, Otranto is filled with "awful objects: a statue that bleeds, a portrait that steps from its frame, a giant helmet that falls and leaves its victim 'dashed to pieces'" (Kennedy 176). Poe's narrator describes the abbey in "Ligeia" as "semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical" (Poe 46). The use of Gothic architecture as a literary device is also present in the "Fall of the House of Usher," where the narrator enter...