the stifling fumes of the damp earth "the clinging to the death garments.the rigid embrace of the narrow house.the blackness of the absolute night.the silence like a sea that overwhelms.the unseen but palpable presence of the conqueror worm."(63) .
Imagine enduring all this with no hope of ever escaping because no one realizes you remain alive. The fear of premature interment encompassed the lives of many, so Poe used it in his favor when writing Gothic stories. The Gothic structure creates a realistic scenario for the reader. Even as they are putting Madeline to her final resting place the narrator makes note of her appearance saying, "the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death."(138). If she truly died, whether dead for days or hours, the blush on her cheeks would diminish, and her face would appear lifeless with no emotion. .
But if the narrator noticed the little life left in Madeline, why would they proceed to bury her? Poe, made famous for his Gothic imagery within his writing, knew that this would affect audiences more dramatically. This quote proves Poe's fascination of living inhumation. Here one can connect Madeline's apparent death to those that occurred in reality during the 1800's. By addressing Madeline's apparent death this way, Poe is questioning the knowledge of his society. How could society have such little knowledge about death that so many people are put to rest by accident? .
After the two buried Madeline, Roderick began feeling unbearably guilty. Deep down, somehow, he knew Madeline was still alive. As she breaks out of the tomb, "a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound "the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon's unnatural shriek as described by the romancer." Both the narrator and Roderick hear the sounds of her escape very clearly.
