Pu Songling, Edgar Allan Poe, and the garden of good and evil in Chinese and American literature

Lei Jin, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation examines the garden images depicted in Pu Songling’s supernatural stories and Edgar Allen Poe’s Gothic tales. Beginning with the garden in Western literary tradition, this study traces the origin of several key terms related to the garden and examines the perfect and harmonious garden in the biblical tradition, the pleasant, yet sometimes dangerous garden and landscape in Greco-Roman classics, medieval and renaissance works, and the doomed garden in nineteenth-century Gothic literature. In surveying the garden in Chinese literature, the comparison between the literary garden and fantastic mountains and islands depicted in early Chinese literary texts and the Western biblical tradition and Greco-Roman classics highlights the cultural differences that the Western garden tends to derive from the Biblical tradition of paradise, and Chinese gardens do not. Considerable attention is given to the gardens and nature in the Six Dynasties’ zhiguai stories and Tang chuanqi tales. Poe’s poetic visions—dreamscape, Gothic landscape, and the paradisiacal landscape garden are investigated. Focusing on the desolate landscape, the dilapidated mansion, the imagined haunted palace, as well as the fear, horror, and terror they evoke, the discussion of Poe’s famous Gothic tale “The Fall of the House of Usher” provides an allegorical interpretation of the outer and inner dark landscapes of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe employs the Gothic landscape as a vehicle by which to explore the realms of unconscious, epistemological and psychological perplexities. Poe also supplements his visionary terror with a vision of beauty and the supernal. Using “The Domain of Arnheim” as an example, the study demonstrates that Poe’s apparently contradictory visions are two complementary parts of the author’s vision of the universe and man’s relationship with nature, by which Poe projects his concern, frustration, and hope as a poet of dark Romanticism. This study contrasts Poe’s work to the enchanted, contested, haunted, and illusive gardens created in Liaozhai zhiyi, a collection of 17th-century Chinese supernatural stories. Pu Songling employs the garden as a significant site from which to explore the concept of qing, the Chinese term for emotion, sentiment, love, desire, and passion. He also contests the intellectual issues of his time, demonstrates his literary talent, and constructs and mocks self-identity. In the process of constructing literary gardens, Pu Songling dissolves the boundaries between normal and abnormal, reality and the ideal, death and life, and order and disorder.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Hsieh, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Comparative literature|Asian literature|American literature

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