Selected Tales (Oxford World's Classics)
Page 46
Novalis: the late eighteenth-century German romantic writer, Friedrich von Hardenberg.
grisette: French term for a seamstress, identified by her grey (gris) smock. By assuming the sexual immorality of such a class of women, the term can also mean, more colloquially, ‘prostitute’.
n. 1 Nassau Street: Poe’s Paris is not geographically accurate. Although his notes provide the real names for most of the characters, they do not do so for Madame Delue, the guilty innkeeper who actually arranged for the disposal of Mary’s body after the failed abortion.
émeutes: French for tumults or uprisings, in particular the revolutionary activity of 1830.
sequitur: Latin for ‘it follows’, most commonly in the phrase non sequitur.
de lunatico inquirendo: the Latin name for the legal writ calling for a jury inquiry into the defendant’s sanity.
n. 1 Landor: William Landor, pseudonym of Horace Binney Wallace. The quotation is from Wallace’s anonymous novel Stanley (1838).
El hinc illæ iræ?: Latin for ‘And hence this anger?’
fatal accident: the reference to the possibility of death at Deluc’s inn is one of Poe’s late additions, trying to adjust his original solution to the real-life fact of the fatal abortion. On Poe and abortion, see Van Leer, ‘Detecting Truth’.
The Tell-Tale Heart
The tale first appeared in January 1843 in James Russell Lowell’s The Pioneer. It was frequently reprinted, but not collected by Poe himself.
The Gold-Bug
Poe’s tale won a contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, in which it first appeared in two instalments on 21 and 28 June 1843. It was frequently reprinted and collected in Tales (1845).
All in the Wrong: the motto is Poe’s own, and not, as claimed, from Arthur Murphy’s eighteenth-century comedy.
scarabæus: Latin for scarab, a family of beetles, whose sacred image ancient Egyptians frequently used as ornaments.
scarabæus capul hominis: scarab with a human head.
connected with it: end of first newspaper instalment.
Captain Kidd: the buried treasure of the Scottish pirate William Kidd (c. 1645–1701) was a popular legend in mid-nineteenth-century America. It is alluded to as well in works by Irving, Thoreau, and Melville.
a table: although Poe’s tabulations are not correct, his cryptography is fundamentally sound.
The Black Cat
The tale first appeared in August 1843 in the Philadelphia magazine The United States Saturday Post, later renamed The Saturday Evening Post. It was collected in Tales (1845).
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
The tale first appeared in Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book for April 1844.
serious fact: the Swiss-German physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1733–1815) popularized the therapeutic potential of hypnotism, which he called ‘animal magnetism’. Part of a more general spiritualist revival in mid-nineteenth-century America, the fascination with mesmerism was also treated in novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry James. On Poe and mesmerism, see Sidney Lind, ‘Poe and Mesmerism’, PMLA 62 (1947), 1077–94.
dream: Novalis, ‘Fragmente, Paralipomen zum Blütenstaub’, no. 121.
Warren Hastings: the British governor charged with putting down the Benares insurrection. Poe drew many of his details from T. B. Macaulay’s review of G. R. Gleig’s biography of Hastings.
The riots … his life: Poe’s fundamentally accurate account of Cheyte Sing’s insurrection of 1781 derives from Macaulay’s essay. On orientalism in Poe, see Malini Johar Schueller, ‘Harems, Orientalist Subversions, and the Crisis of Nationalism: The Case of Edgar Allan Poe and “Ligeia”’, Criticism, 37 (1995), 601–23, and more generally John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
sangsues: French for leeches; the poisonous variety is Poe’s invention.
The Purloined Letter
This third and final Dupin tale first appeared in The Gift: A Christmas, New Year, and Birthday Present, dated 1845 but issued in September 1844. It was collected in Tales (1845)
Nil sapientiae…: Latin for ‘Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than cleverness.’ The source of the passage, ascribed to the Roman philosopher Seneca, has not been identified.
au troisième: on the third, or what Americans today call the fourth, floor.
the Minister D—: the similarity between the minister’s name and Dupin’s own has led some critics to posit a symbolic and even a biological relation between the two characters.
hotel: used in the French sense, where hôtel can mean ‘private mansion’ as well as ‘public hostelry’.
Rochefoucault… Campanella: La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère were French moral philosophers, famous for their ‘maxims’. Machiavelli and Campanella were Italian political philosophers, the former ruthlessly practical, the latter dreamily Utopian. The famous discussion of ‘evens and odds’ has been of considerable interest to modern theorists, who compare it to the fort/da episode in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. See Jacques Lacan, ‘Le Séminaire sur “La Lettre volée”’, in Écrits I (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 7–75; Jacques Derrida, ‘Le Facteur de la Vérité’ in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 411–96; Barbara Johnson, ‘The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida’, in The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhelorica of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 110–46; and especially Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
non distributio medii: the fallacy of the undistributed middle mistakenly argues from a premiss—if a then b (all fools are poets)—to its converse—if b then a (all poets are fools). In so doing it fails to acknowledge the middle possibility—some bs are not as (some poets are wise).
“Il y a à parier…”: ‘One can bet that any popular idea, every accepted convention, is a foolishness, since it has convinced the majority of people’; from the Maximes et Penseés of the eighteenth-century French author Sebastien-Roch Nicolas, who wrote under the name of Chamfort.
ambitus … honesti: despite the similarity to English terms, in Latin ambitus literally means ‘seeking office’ and rehgio ‘superstition’, while homines honesti is Cicero’s term for men of his own party.
Bryant…: Jacob Bryant, A New System of Antient Mythology (1807).
facilis descensus Averni: ‘The descent to Hades is easy’; from Virgil, Aeneid, vi. 126.
as Catalan! said: Angelica Catalani, nineteenth-century Italian opera star. The source of her comment is unidentified.
monstrum horrendum: a terrifying monster, according to Virgil, Aeneil, iii. 658.
Un dessein si funeste …: ‘So deadly a scheme, if not worth ν of Atreus [the avenger], is deserved by Thyestes [the criminal]’; from Atrée et Thyeste (1707) by Prosper-Jolyot de Crébillon. For Poe’s use of the passage, see Johnson, ‘The Frame of Reference’.
The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
The tale was first published in Graham’s Magazine for November 1845.
the autumn of 18—: the temporal setting refers to the widespread prison reforms after the great revolutions in both America and France. According to Foucault, the great symbolic act in this reconceptualization of punishment was Pinel’s removal in 1794 of the chains from inmates at Bicêtre.
Monsieur Maillard: some of the characters’ names seem ironic. Stanislas-Marie Maillard led in the overthrow of the Bastille. Paul de Kock was a French novelist who sensationalized city life. Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace was the astronomer whose nebular theory Poe celebrated in his cosmology Eureka. ‘Petit Gaillard’ means a hearty little fellow. ‘Desoulières’ alludes to souliers or shoes, which would not cook well into a pumpkin pie. Georges-Louis Leelere de Buffon was a famous naturalist; although ‘Bouf
fon le Grand’ means ‘the great idiot’.
Bellini: the great opera composer Vincenzo Bellini represented his heroines’ descents into madness through a beautiful, but dramatically inappropriate lyricism. Finding the composer’s personal demeanour as tepid as his characters’ psychologies, the poet Heine dismissed Bellini as ‘a sigh in dancing-pumps’.
reductio ad absurdum: a rhetorical strategy which disproves an argument by demonstrating the absurdity of its more extreme cases.
vieille cour: literally ‘old court’; the phrase often refers to the aristocratic regime before the French Revolution.
the Anakim: the giant sons of Anak; Numbers 13: 33.
nil admirari: Latin for ‘to be astonished at nothing’; from Horace, Epistles, 1. vi. 1.
monstrum, horrendum, informe …: ‘a horrible, malformed, huge monster, deprived of light’; from Virgil, Aeneid, iii. 658, where it refers to the Cyclops blinded by Ulysses. Poe quotes part of the passage near the end of ‘The Purloined Letter’.
Demosthenes’… Brougham: Henry Lord Brougham was a nineteenth-century polemicist and Lord Chancellor of England. Although he quoted from the Athenian orator Demosthenes, he could not be said to look like a Greek from the fourth century BC, of whom no representations survive.
the Medicean Venus: a statue notorious for its nude depiction of the goddess.
bulls of Phalaris: a hollow brass statue of a bull in which the king Phalaris burned people to death. As they died, their screams sounded like the roarings of the bull.
Pandemonium in petto: Pandemonium is the assembly hall of hell, where the devils noisily (and foolishly) debate in the opening books of Milton’s Paradise Lost; in petto means ‘in the breast’ or ‘private’.
Yankee Doodle: though now degenerated into a children’s song, ‘Yankee Doodle’ originally embodied the impudence of the colonies, and is here linked with the antitraditionalism of post-revolutionary France.
The Imp of the Perverse
This tale first appeared in Graham’s Magazine for July 1845.
Spurzheimites: Poe casts his tale as a revision of phrenology, which associated personality traits with the shape of an individual’s skull. In addition to cranial lobes marking hunger (‘alimentiveness’) or self-defence (‘combativeness’), Poe’s narrator isolates a new organ of ‘perverseness’. Dr Johann Gaspar Spurzheim was one of the discoverers of phrenology and its chief advocate in the United States. The references to ‘moral sentiment’, ‘pure intellect’, and ‘the principia of human action’, however, connect the particular pseudo-science of phrenology to eighteenth-century faculty psychology in general, alluding to Isaac Newton, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant. On phrenology, see Edward Hungerford, ‘Poe and Phrenology’, American Literature, 2 (1930), 209–31; on the philosophical implications of perverseness, see Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary.
The Cask of Amontillado
This tale first appeared in Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book for November 1846.
Amontillado: a light-coloured Spanish sherry, not the finest of wines. Throughout the tale, Poe probably chooses specific wines for the sound of their names and not their alcoholic character.
‘Nemo me…’: ‘No one provokes me with impunity.’
masons: Freemasonry is a private fraternal organization that arose in the seventeenth century and continues to exist today. In the nineteenth century Americans feared its secret rituals, and the Masons were frequent victims of mob violence. Although many Masonic rituals refer back symbolically to the organization’s origins in stonemasonry, Montresor’s claim to be a Mason is purely ironic.
The Domain of Arnheim
This tale, an expansion of ‘The Landscape Garden’ (1842), was published in the New York Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine for March 1847. It has as its sequel ‘Landor’s Cottage’ (1840).
Giles Fletcher: from ‘Christ’s Victorie on Earth’ (1610).
perfectionists: Poe here associates the doctrine of the perfectibility of man with numerous eighteenth-century thinkers: the French statesman Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot; the English common-sense philosopher Richard Price; the English empiricist Joseph Priestley; and the French mathematician Marie-Jean Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. Since Poe is elsewhere sceptical about man’s perfectibility, this reference (and many others in the story) may be ironic and mark Poe’s reservations about Ellison’s aestheticism. See Joan Dayan, Fahles of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
n. 1 Muskau’s account: the story of the inheritance exists largely as Poe describes it in Prince Hermann Pückler-Muskau, ‘Four in England, Ireland, and France (1833). Poe rightly notes that a similar inheritance, secretly invested for heirs a century and a half later, lies at the centre of Eugene Sue’s The Wandering Jew (1844–5).
mute and inglorious: adapted from Gray, ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’.
Claude: seventeenth-century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain.
‘There are properly… human interest’: the paragraph is quoted from an anonymous review of a book on American Landscape Gardening in a contemporary New York magazine.
capabilities: a reference to Launcelot ‘Capability’ Brown, the eighteenth-century landscape gardener who popularized the term to describe an uncultivated setting’s potential for development.
Addison… ‘Inferno’: Cato is by the eighteenth-century playwright Joseph Addison, who is more famous for his Spectator essays. By comparing Addison’s play to the first part of Dante’s masterly Commedia and to the sublime symmetry of the ancient Greek temple, the narrator differentiates skilful fabrication from true inspiration, which transcends all learning.
De Staël: the eighteenth-century German writer Anne Louise Germaine Necker, better known as Madame de Staël, introduced German Romanticism to England and America.
Timon: in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, the misanthropic hero rejects society and lives in a cave.
Ætna: Mt. Etna in Sicily was celebrated by Romantics for its vistas.
Fonthill: the picturesque home of the extravagant eighteenth-century writer William Beckford, author of the oriental Gothic novel Vathek.
Hop-Frog
This story, Poe’s last full-length narrative, was published in Boston’s The Flag of Our Union on 17 March 1849. It derives from an anecdote in Froissart’s Chronicles.
rara avis in terris: ‘a rare bird in the world’; Juvenal, Satires, vi. 165.
Rabelais … Voltaire: Poe contrasts the effusive, bawdy sixteenth-century humour of Rabelais with the more restrained eighteenth-century satire of Voltaire.
Von Kempelen and his Discovery
This late satiric essay was published in Boston’s The Flag of Our Union on 14 April 1849.
‘Diary of Sir Humphrey Davy’: although Davy and many others named in the story are real, the publications are all fictitious. The ‘editorial’ brackets throughout are Poe’s own.
protoxide of azote: laughing-gas.
Presburg: for the association of Pressburg, Hungary with magic, see note to p. 21 above. The ironic tone of the essay suggests that Von Kempelen’s birthplace may also be a pun, and indicate his origin in the hyperbole of the media or ‘press’.
Mäelzel: the automated chess-player of Wolfgang von Kempelen, exhibited in the United States by J. N. Mäelzel, is the subject of Poe’s ‘Maelzel’s Chess-Player’ (1836). On the importance of Mäelzel in Poe’s detective fiction, see John T. Irwin, The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Story (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 104–14.
late developments in California: the ‘Rush’ to California after John Sutter’s discovery of gold in 1848.
MORE ABOUT OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
The
Oxford
World’s
Classics
Website
www.worldsclassics.co.uk
Information about new titles
Explore the full range of Oxford World’
s Classics
Links to other literary sites and the main OUP webpage
Imaginative competitions, with bookish prizes
Peruse the Oxford World’s Classics Magazine
Articles by editors
Extracts from Introductions
A forum for discussion and feedback on the series
Special information for teachers and lecturers
www.worldsclassics.co.uk
American Literature
British and Irish Literature
Children’s Literature
Classics and Ancient Literature
Colonial Literature
Eastern Literature
European Literature
History
Medieval Literature
Oxford English Drama
Poetry
Philosophy
Politics
Religion
The Oxford Shakespeare