Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (6 page)

Poe eventually tended to remove, or certainly to diminish the effects of, these and other specifics, the better to locate disturbing and frightening circumstances nearer their real source, the human mind. In tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” particularities of place or intoxication are not as central as irregularities or irrationalities in the characters’ emotional makeup. Similar psychological focus informs “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold-Bug,” “The Purloined Letter,” “‘Thou Art the Man’,” “The Sphinx,” and “Hop-Frog.” In all, geography of the imagination—internal geography—rather than physical, external geography is emphasized. Several Poe narrators also tend to liken their bewilderment to that of opium users instead of claiming opium use as the cause of their own unsettled mind-set-for example, the protagonists in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia.”

Poe realized, first, that he could bend Gothic conventions toward a greater psychological plausibility; and, second, that the erratic perspectives of drunkards could be used in the pursuit of what we might deem more “sober,” subtle ends. He stated in the preface to
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
(see “For Further Reading”), written not long after he had abandoned the Folio Club venture, that the basis for his tales was psychological realism and not the “Germanism” with which critics had charged him: If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul,—that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, and urged it only to its legitimate results (vol. 1, p. 5). Those “legitimate sources” were, of course, for the most part located in disturbed human minds, with allowances made for physical torments that intensified emotional tortures in tales like “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Causes for the turmoil in the minds of Poe’s characters are easy to fathom. Poe’s cultural world was coming to grips with the human mind and the hidden self—it was an exciting topic for both clinical and lay observers, especially in the context of the developing cultural nationalism of a self-consciously American civilization.

To another American writer in Poe’s era, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose ideas won widespread acceptance, the human mind harbored much good. Emerson expounded on a notion of self-reliance that teamed the individuality suggested by “self” with ways to excite and to connect (the root meanings of “reliance”). This outlook was optimistic about the possibilities of exploring the human mind, an optimism that seemed to mirror advancing pioneering and settlement in the nation.

In Poe’s writings, conversely, the human mind was fascinating, but a source of more danger than pleasure. Poe’s self was certainly not a metaphor for pleasing light and flowing waters, symbolizing ongoing life, as in Emerson’s imaginative vision. Poe’s waters were usually troubled and dangerous (witness those in “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “Silence—A Fable,” “A Descent into the Maelström,” and
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym);
and his lighting typically creates obscuring or frightening effects. Poe’s lighting inverts the pleasing effects of lighting that may be found in other authors’ writings and is instead glaring or obscuring, even blinding—as, for example, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Hop-Frog,” and
Pym,
or in “The Lake—To—,”“The Raven,” “Ulalume,” “Dream-Land,” and “The City in the Sea.” Even in a more cheerful poem like “To Helen,” dazzling light obscures the onlooker’s visual abilities. Such tropes in Poe’s works form perfect metaphors for rapidly shifting sensations in unstable minds, or strange actions and speeches that often represent those emotional traumas. The convoluted prose that typifies Poe’s tales, and that some readers have found objectionable, may be a subtly realized expression of mental distortions and the attempts of Poe’s characters to express such feelings. Often Poe’s writings unfold intricate issues in gender, of masculinity and femininity, and the reiterated interiority in his creative works fittingly symbolizes the human mind and self.

“William Wilson” exemplifies such psychological foregrounding. The tale at first seems to be just one among many similar nineteenth-century literary works in which twins struggle to the death, whether that be actual organic death or emotional death-in-life. Poe manages to have both types of death come into play. Narrator William Wilson stabs the “other” William Wilson (his twin, double, conscience), only to learn that he has “murdered” the good part of what should be his integrated self, thereby furthering the triumph of the evil within. The repetition of the word “will,” the resemblances between the two Wilsons, the claustrophobic settings of the main episodes—all are foundations for successful psychological fiction. The other William Wilson’s voice is symbolically husky and muted because the narrator William Wilson doesn’t want to hear its actual sounds or its counsel.

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.
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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.
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Just so, in “The Purloined Letter” we find that Dupin and the Minister D may be twins, 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.
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