That horrors in Poe’s works often occur without supernatural help makes them all the more significant, and more frightening. Most of the tales in which women are prominent revolve around this theme. The early “Berenice” and “Morella” struck some of Poe’s contemporaries as mere exercises in horror, but they overlooked artistic modifications of Gothic conventions that we see today as foreshadowing sophisticated psychological developments in literary creations throughout the world. The narrator in “Berenice,” Egaeus, has nearly the same name as the father in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—Egeus, who fails to comprehend the truly irrational nature of love. That Poe’s character was born in a library—thus he’s unreal—may carry more psychological substance than what informs many other mere thrillers. On two counts—a literary name and an inability to cope with physical realities, except in odd, even sadistic responses—Egaeus likely causes debility in Berenice. By showing her scant love he thereby manages to drive her toward an early grave; his fixation on her teeth squelches any mutuality in their relationship. The story is open-ended: Possibly Egaeus pulled the teeth of a corpse, an activity already gruesome enough, or maybe Berenice was not actually dead, but only in a cataleptic state approximating death, so his violation of her grave might involve even worse emotional warpings in his character. Inability to love makes him static, with only an occasional pendulum swing toward sadism.
The narrator-husband in “Morella” appears to be more passive than his wife (the title character), although such passivity may mask emotional savagery, which ultimately kills. Like Egaeus, this man manifests no healthy passion or love. Morella’s spirit returns, however, and takes over the body of their daughter, also named Morella, but named only at the moment when she is baptized—an event that represents irrepressibility of will. Perhaps the narrator’s refrain-like or near-rhyming repetition of “Morella” forms an incantation or spell that conjures the elder Morella’s spirit.
A variation on this theme of the will’s supremacy makes “Ligeia” one of Poe’s most compelling tales. If, as has been hypothesized, Poe originally intended to satirize German and British Romanticism—respectively symbolized in the dark, super-intellectual, German Ligeia, and the dumb blonde English maiden, Rowena (perhaps a hit at Scott’s Ivanhoe)—an equally valid seriousness informs the tale.6 The nameless narrator, like other Poe characters in intimate relationships who suffer because of an inability to love, brings about the death of his first wife, Ligeia, a symbol of colossal strength in human will. In contrast, his second wife, Rowena, symbolizes real, flesh-and-blood femininity. However, her family’s real desire is not Rowena’s happiness but the narrator’s financial generosity. Indifferent to Rowena’s future, her family does not see that life with her husband is horrifying. Their bridal chamber resembles a coffin, and his reactions to her are sadistic, possibly because they arise from repugnance toward the physical in love. In true horror-story fashion, he apparently poisons Rowena while fortifying his resolve with opium, then fantasizes that Ligeia takes over Rowena’s body. Given the hallucinatory texture of the tale, what the narrator would have us accept as truth in no way resembles factuality. As in Poe’s other fiction about dying and returning women, disaster emanates from a male whose attitudes and conduct toward females—in what is presumably the most intense human relationship, marriage—devastates all involved. If these women symbolize nurturing and intuitive elements in the human self, then the husband’s “killing” them is equivalent to psychological repression, and in Poe’s imaginative universe, nobody can repress a strong emotion without experiencing a tremendous, negative rebound.
Two other tales revolve around the deaths of beautiful women with more positive implications. In “The Assignation,” Poe’s first prose tale to feature the theme, the lovely Marchesa does not return to haunt her lover—who is not her husband, but instead a far younger, more virile, artistic, altogether creative man. Rather, they agree to double suicide. Although the horrifics in these deaths are undeniable, the horror is mitigated by the lovers’ hope to unite on the far side of the grave, where worldly society’s rules of conduct do not apply. Bliss after death may also signify a more spiritual love than society would tolerate. A reversal of these events occurs in Poe’s last published tale about women. “Eleonora” incorporates moments of sadness, when the narrator’s wife, the lovely, delicate Eleonora, dies. The narrator and Eleonora were blissful in the Edenic Valley of Many-Colored Grass; but paradise is temporal, and so, after their sexual experience, she dies because Edenic innocence has passed. The narrator’s memories of what followed became clouded for some time, an understandable rendering of his grief, comparable with that of the bereaved lover in “The Sleeper.” Ultimately he comes out of his dream state, which has not been wholly pleasant, finds himself (a telling phrase as regards his psychological state, and one recurrent in Poe’s fiction) in a city, a direct counter to the idyllic rural environs he had shared with Eleonora when they were youthful innocents, ignorant of many aspects of life. In his new surroundings, which suggest greater reality than the valley had offered, he is tempered by sadness. He meets Ermengarde; their marriage will be one of mutuality and more maturity than his union with Eleonora. Eleonora’s spirit blesses the new marriage and perhaps reincarnates in Ermengarde, although such revivification remains ambiguous. Eleonora’s name has the same root as “Helen” and “Lenore,” and so her effect upon the narrator is dazzling. But dazzle ment does not suffice to make an entire life, and so he progresses into greater maturity.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” commands special status among tales of a beautiful woman whose death brings woe to the survivor-male. For many readers, “Usher” epitomizes all that Poe did best in Gothic horror. The precise nature of the tale’s success, however, has been debated. While terrors in the tale derive from legitimate sources, those in the soul, the tale may in another reading stand as a fine parody of literary Gothicism. Just as in “The Assignation,” Poe goes beyond the trappings of popular horror fiction in “Usher.” As in the earlier tale, too, the narrator in this tale interprets the Usher twins’ relationship through a distorted lens, “seeing” it through imperfect vision. Consequently, discrepancies between appearance and reality abound; they enrich the psychological undercurrents of meaning that are seminal in this and other Poe tales. The “Usher” narrator’s sojourn in the “house” of Usher may symbolize a journey into depths of his own self, where he confronts psycho-sexual-artistic elements that horrify him by the far greater negative than positive possibilities they raise. As in some of the poems and in Pym, this tale notably renders a symbolic entering into the human head to find masculinity and femininity in dreadful imbalance—a Poe trademark, as we have seen, of terror “of the soul.”
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” often distinguished as a separate species of fiction from Poe’s horror tales, is often held up as the invention of the detective story. It may indeed be his invention—it is at least far more his invention than the Gothic horror story, which he merely adapted to his own purposes. “Rue Morgue,” indeed, is not swathed in the same extravagant prose as some of the earlier tales, but its expression does not disguise its Gothic heritage. Baffling, atrocious murders without a clear-cut motive, committed in a seemingly locked room; confusion over the killer’s language; signs pointing to some supernatural agency at work—all are eventually clarified by the awe-some mind of the amateur sleuth Dupin. His disdain of professional police methods, the wordplay in his name (“Dupin” sounds like “dupe-ing”) and in the name of the prime police suspect, Le Bon (“the good”), the name of the locale (no “Rue Morgue,” or “Mortuary Street,” ever existed in Paris); an ape imitating human behavior—all attest to Poe’s having his own type of joke in this tale. So does the entire “false start” method employed—leading readers to expect supernaturalism at work, but then disclosing realistic, if unusual, conditions related to the deaths.7 Just so, in “The Purloined Letter” we find that Dupin and the Minister D may be t
wins, a relationship that makes it possible for Dupin to outwit the criminal and surpass the police. Furthermore, and perhaps humorously, Dupin comments on the value of balancing within the self mathematical and poetical elements—that is, reason and imagination. Because D considers his own, strictly mathematical, mind to be far more astute than that of a poet, and because Dupin is a poet (as is Poe), the poet (or intuitive part of the self, perhaps) is accorded superiority. Poe seemingly could not resist parodying what he himself did well, and so in “ ‘Thou Art the Man”’ he spoofs the tale of detection, again using as part of the plot what is seen by some as supernaturalism at work, although clearer wits disbelieve (using ballistics to identify a criminal is a first of its kind in a detective story). Similar confusion of supernaturalism and madness informs “The Gold-Bug.” And Poe’s subtle balancing of natural and supernatural—chiefly by use of demon tropes in “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—may plausibly, as in many of his other tales, allow shallower readers to be fooled into reading these as simple stories of the otherworldly. 8
IV
Much in the foregoing pages also applies with equal validity to Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which continues to defy readers’ efforts at interpretation. When Poe enlisted acclaimed American author James Kirke Paulding in a failed effort to get “Tales of the Folio Club” published by the prominent firm of Harpers’, Paulding praised the project but noted that it was too rarified for average readers. He counseled Poe instead to use his talents for a novel featuring realistic, if intermittently comic, treatment of aspects of American life that might benefit from humorous lights being thrown upon them. Although Poe heeded Paulding’s advice by using the timely theme of polar exploration (here to the Antarctic) in Pym and by using comedy, the subtleties and coded nature of that comedy have confounded many readers. The extended title of the book and its preface alert us that truth-versus-fiction or appearance-versus-reality themes are significant. The vessels in which Pym sails, many characters’ names, including Pym’s own (which may be an anagram for “imp”), the disquisition on penguins, plus many inconsistencies, betray comic underpinnings. Far more easily apprehended, though, are the horrifics: Details of revolting illness, the physical consequences of mutiny aboard ship, shipwrecks, savage barbarism, and live burial course through the novel. Indeed, if “horror” is distinguished from “terror” because the former involves sensory experience (contact with repulsive smells or loathsome tangible objects, bodily pain) and the latter defines anguish, fear, hysteria, attraction-repulsion (emotional upheavals only), then Pym is replete with both. Perhaps Poe’s ironic tendency underlies many passages of disgusting details as deliberate bait that would separate careful from superficial readers. Not long before, writing as a critic, he had censured what he termed the “mere physique of the horrible” in William Gilmore Simms’s novel The Partisan: A Tale of the Revolution (1835), which, however, contains far less physical discomfort, excruciating pain, torture, and death than we find in Pym.
If Poe shifted his imaginative direction during the composition of Pym, it’s no wonder that its heterogeneous features confuse but entice readers. To some extent Poe builds on the mode of the boy’s adventure story enjoyed by many nineteenth-century readers. The adventures of young Pym and his great friend, Augustus Barnard, anticipate those of Tom and Huck in Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. The adventures of Poe’s youths fall very much into the category of the naughty but not malicious or destructive boy in such fiction. Intoxication, the boys’ frolicking in a boat, the Ariel (perhaps an allusion to the boat that upset and caused the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s early death), the preposterousness in Pym’s first accident and his rapid recovery may reasonably suggest that Pym shares affinities with the Folio Club tales, as do the motifs of food and drink, along with incredible plunderings from and mimickings of travel books and repeated situational and stylistic extravagances that characterize this novel. One might surmise that much in Pym came out of a bottle from the same shelf as “MS. Found in a Bottle.”
Regarding another topic, should we, for instance, impute racism to the seemingly evident imputations of a widening divergence between North and South in the 1830s? Does the Tsalal natives’ conduct represent fears of African-American slave uprisings against white oppressors in the South? Since more than enough evidence has been marshaled to indicate that Poe was not the paranoid racist some critics have discerned—many who call him racist use as sure “proof” material not written by or unshakably endorsed by him—we cannot brand him with that label.9 Moreover, is the racism of the story Poe’s own, or is he playing upon widespread attitudes of others, to produce a book that would sell? He certainly kept his finger on the pulse of popular attitudes.
Pym is a novel about a protagonist’s spiritual-sexual growth; not only is the chief theme in Pym not racist, but Poe may have been actually ahead of his time, in positing that Pym had developed into a post-adolescent stage in which he was prepared, if warily, to merge with the female presence represented by the giant, white-shrouded human figure.10 Pym draws the other voyagers with him, although moving in this way toward an inescapable unknown may have troubled him and his Tsalalian hostage, if not Dirk Peters (whose names merge sexuality and spirituality). Poe may indeed have had racial fantasies, but in Pym such fantasies seem to exist in the context of melding rather than in separation. Within this scheme, Nu-Nu, a member of a decidedly anti-feminine culture—emphasized in the destruction of the Jane Guy, a ship contextualized with notable femininity—is not equal to a merger with the feminine toward which Pym and Peters are drawn; Nu-Nu’s death may symbolize his position. If Pym is a work in which we see probings of irrationality in the human self (and “self,” singly or in compound words, resonates throughout the novel much like a refrain in a poem or piece of music), then the final scene, where masculine and feminine are inevitably going to merge, may symbolize an awe-inspiring plunge into depths hitherto only glimpsed. If Pym is continuing to mature, then that continuation plausibly incorporates mystery as a concomitant to true identity.
Such a reading, of course, offers but one approach to Poe’s novel. Others suggest that Pym may be incomplete because Poe had no idea where to go with his creation, or that incompletion may signal his consciously essaying the Romantic fragment that became a respectable form in the early nineteenth century, as exemplified in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” several Wordsworth poems, Keats’s “Hyperion,” Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life,” and Byron’s Don Juan. This structure of incompletion or tentativeness paves the way for what has subsequently become known as Modernism in literature. Not too long after it was published and reviewers remarked its heterogeneity, Poe called Pym a “silly book,” but when he sought to plume himself as an author, he always cited it as one of his accomplishments. If, according to Webster‘s, “silly” may mean “contrary to reason,” Poe, being Poe, may have knowingly chosen this designation to confute his detractors.
V
What can one say in conclusion regarding Poe’s ongoing appeal? First, his creative works have survived considerable deprecation to emerge as deservedly ranking with those of other authors whose achievements are often considered far more artistic than his own. Part of the low esteem for Poe’s poems and fiction has come about because readers today are often unwilling to approach literature with their ears as well as their eyes. Thus Poe’s intent to enlist hearing as well as seeing from his audiences may have been blunted by shifts in readers’ responses. Second, since connections of his creative work with literary Gothicism have been apparent since he began to publish, and since Gothic tradition overall had to wait until the later twentieth century before it gained recognition, Poe’s work was likewise bypassed by many until comparatively recently.
A consensus has emerged, however, that Poe’s horror writings merit considered attention. Poe realized that stock character types and t
heir worlds, long familiar in antecedent Gothicism, could be manipulated into representations of the human mind (symbolized in weird castles, mansions, dark pits, or cellars) under stress (represented by the overwrought characters themselves, who repeatedly seem to be living creatures moving with and through dizzying experiences inside and “haunting” those minds just described). He discerned that he could create a sustained “effect” or impression of such upheavals in short poems and, for the most part, in brief fictions, Pym being a notable exception. Poe’s horrors thus continue to fascinate readers because they indeed touch on timeless, existential anxieties common to people everywhere. His works therefore are seldom set in a specific historical time. Poe’s renown for literary succinctness of course validates his intent; he wrote best with brevity. That “best” emanated, however, from his awareness that intensity cannot be long sustained in much related to human nature, and that human emotions are kaleidoscopic. Therefore he repeatedly used lyric poetry and short stories as his most comfortable media for unfolding the interior of the human mind, whether employing weird landscapes (“Ulalume”) or drawing on the haunted-castle theme from earlier Gothics to enhance the emotional turmoil in his characters. To press this point home, Poe often shaped his material to suggest the reader’s entry into the human head, which frames the mind. Thus the dark windings of interiors, with movements spiraling up or down, create rich textures and dizzying effects, encompassing issues of gender, sexuality, marriage—all of which concern human identity. Whatever form he uses, Poe aims for a vivid, intense impression, and such intensity cannot be lengthened into extended form without diminishing the effect. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is also a short novel, for its time, albeit the prose expression within that book displays an unmistakable repetitiveness, perhaps to reinforce the pervasive aura of a hypnotic dream-world into which Pym journeys.
Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 5