Dawn Keetley
Pregnant Women and Envious Men in
“Morella,”“Berenice,”“Ligeia,”and
“The Fall of the House of Usher”
“Morella”(1835) is the lone story of Poe’s that is
unambiguously about pregnancy. However, while
the consensus view has it that, in Gillian Brown’s
words, Morella is the “only woman in Poe’s tales
to leave biological issue,” her act of birthing
anticipates an as-yet-unrecognized possibility in
“Berenice” (1835), “Ligeia” (1838), and “The
Fall of the House of Usher” (1839).l These stories
seem preoccupied with women’s reproductivity-
fraught with images of pregnancy and childbirth
that erupt without logic or reason. Even “Morella,”
though, which is so obviously about pregnancy,has
rarely been discussed as such.2Brown, who at least
registers the role of procreation in the tale, writes
that Poe’s “necrophilic interest in women quite
distinctivelyeschews their given generative power
and their role in the perpetuation of the specie^."^
I argue instead that, far from denying women’s
“generative power,” Poe’s “necrophilicinterest in
women” is closely tied to their procreativeness:
while dead and dying women are now established
as central themes in the Poe canon, parturient
women-mothers-constitute a similarly crucial
thematic. While freighted with the imagery of
pregnancy, Poe’s fiction is, however, marked by a
deep-seated and enraged denial of precisely that
reproductivity. But why? Why are Poe’s male char-
acters seemingly so blind to women’s sexual and
procreative nature? Why does pregnancy register
only unconsciously and then as something loath-
some and temfylng?
Melanie Klein’s concept of envy helps to ex-
plain why the narrators of “Morella,”“Berenice,”
and “Ligeia,”as well as Roderick Usher, all seem to
want the “mother”to die, without ever being quite
aware of that fact. Not least, Poe’s stories dramatize
the allconsuming relationship between mother
and child upon which Kleinian envy is predicated:
in each story,the male protagonist plays out uncon-
scious moments of his birth and early experiences
with female characters persistently identified with
images of procreativeness. With equal insistence,
Morella, Berenice, Ligeia, Rowena, and Madeline
are associated with images of gothic horror. In
Klein’s view, the early motherchild bond is simi-
larly scarred with fear and hostility-even “gothic
complexity,”as Janice Doane and Devon Hodges
put it. The constitutional envy that Klein attributes
to infants is an integral part of this “gothic”bond.4
Envy, in Klein’s 1957 essay “Envyand Gratitude,”is
the deep-seated urge to spoil, devour, and destroy
the primal object, the m ~ t h e rIt. ~
is an impulse that
seems uncannily akin to the paranoia, terror, and
annihilating rage to which Poe’s male characters
succumb when confronted with intimations of
Morella’s, Berenice’s, Ligeia’s, Rowena’s, and
Madeline’s reproductivity. For Klein, no less than
for Poe, the mother-infant bond is always peril-
ously close to slipping from an evanescent ideal
to an opposite and unbearable horror. This essay
proposes, then, that Klein’s theory of envy helps to
explain how images of women’s procreativity and
men’s persecutory fear and violent aggression are
bound together in Poe’s stories.
I do not want to rest on this argument alone,
however, not least because it presumes that Klein-
ian envy is true in some transcendent and universal
way. Thus this essay arguesfurther that both Klein’s
theory of envy and its dramatic anticipation in
Poe’s short stories are predicated on specific his-
torical conditions.6Klein would mostly disagree
with the claim, insisting that envy, a manifestation
of the death drive, is innate and thus relatively resis-
2 Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism
tant to external circumstances;in his theory of the
perverse-the drive to do what one shouldn’t,what
is harmful to oneself-Poe seems to agree that
humans are compelled by a fundamentally self-
destructive force.’ But the fact that Klein viewed
envy as directed first and with an insistent inevita-
bility at the mother is to a large degree the result of
her unwavering assumption that the mother forms
an immediate and exclusive relationship with the
infant-pervaded first by anger, paranoia, and fear
and only later, with difficulty, by love. Moreover,
when describing early infantile experience, Klein
(like most object-relations psychoanalysts) gives
scant attention to the real mother, dwellingon the
mother the infant apprehends-a mother who is
almost completelyan introjected object of fantasy.
According to Doane and Hodges, “Klein’stheory
of the child so marginalized the ‘real’ mother as
the innocent stimulus of infantile processes of in-
trojection and projection that she remains a figure
almost empty of agency and subjectivity.”The real
mother in Klein vanishes, replaced by a “spectral
mother,” who is the infant’s psychic object, pro-
duced by his vacillating impulses of idealization
and destruction.8
This mother, however, is perhaps as much the
f a n t q of Kkin herself, shaped as Klein inevitablywas
both by a psychoanalytictradition and by a culture
that has been more interested in promoting an ide-
al than recognizing the reality of motherhood. In
Poe’s fiction, too, as critics have repeatedlypointed
out, the real woman tends to be subsumed by the
psychic needs of his male characters. Recognizing
in Poe’s fiction an operation similar to the one
Doane and Hodges i d e n q in Klein, Karen Weekes
asserts: “Poe’s female characters . . . become a
receptacle for their narrator’s angst and guilt, a
tabula rara on which the lover inscribes his own
needs. His fictional ‘ideal’is a woman who can be
subsumed into another’sego and who has no need
to tell her own tale.”%hile Doane and Hodges talk
about the “spectralKleinian mother,”a figure that
haunts the site of the real mother’s erasure, this
essay proposes that there is also a “spectralPoesian
mother.” This ghostlike mother is made virtually
inevitable by cultural expectations of exclusive
mothering already prevalent in Poe’s time-by
the demand that the mother be there entirely for
the child, swallowed up into its ego, the target of
its unleashed constitutional aggression and envy.
Such demands secure the real mother’s “death,”
leaving in her place only a wraith.
Klein’s theory of primary envy, though hardly
the ahistorical truth she suggested,1°nevertheless
offers an explanation of psychic processes ren-
dered entirely credible by the particular familial
arrangements,especiallymandates about exclusive
mothering, that emerged in the antebellum U.S.
According to Klein, envy seeks to “put badness,
primarily bad excrements and bad parts of the self,
into the mother, and first of all into her breast, in
order to spoil and destroy her” (“Envy,”181).In
her view, envy is particularly strong within what
she called the paranoid-schizoid position, a posi-
tion occupied most intensely in the first three
to four months of life.” It needs to be stressed,
though, that Klein typically used the word “posi-
tion” rather than “stage”because she believed that
developmental positions are never outgrown, that
even individuals who successfully negotiate the
paranoidschizoidposition,for example, are always
liable to return to its particular terrifying dynamic.
In the paranoid-schizoid position, the infant is
not yet capable of relating to a person as a whole.
Instead, he connects only to part-objects, which
he splits into “good” and “bad”: the good object
(or good breast) is that which gratifies him, gives
him sustenance, security and pleasure, while the
bad object (or bad breast) is that which frustrates,
withholds, and causes discomfortand pain.12Split-
ting, according to Klein, is a necessary part of every
infant’s development, and it functions to save the
good object (the good breast) from the infant’s
constitutional aggression and paranoia. However,
when envy is excessive,it becomes that much more
difficult to preserve the good object, to keep it
separate from the bad, and thus correspondingly
difficult to introject the good object and make
security, gratitude, and finally love possible.l3
When splittinggoes awry, good and bad objects can
become confused-that is, the infant is unable to
keep the good object apart from the bad, thus seri-
ously diminishing his ability to relate to a mother
whom he can no longer grasp as anything other
than unremittingly hostile, triggering a reactive
rage. Excessive envy can also cause splitting to be-
 Pregnant Women and Envious Men
come more desperate, and the infant idealizes ex-
cessively in an attempt to ward off spiraling hatred,
envy, and the resultingpersecutory anxiety (“Envy,”
184, 191-92). Klein stressed that idealization is a
defense against underlying hostility-the greater
the idealization,the greater the envy againstwhich
it defends: “Excessive idealization denotes that
persecution is the main driving force,” she writes,
adding that “the ideal breast is the counterpart
of the devouring breast” (“Envy,”193). While the
idealized primal object is one outcome of exces-
sive envy, so too is the punishing mother. Unable
to bear inwardly the exclusive hostility and desire
to spoil that constitutes envy, the infant projects
those impulses onto the breast/mother, turning
it into a still more threatening force. In a vicious
and escalatingcycle, then, the mother seems to be
trying to attack the infant ever more relentlessly,
precipitating still more retaliatory and defensive
attacks by the infant, thus further spoiling the
good object and heightening the threat it seems
to pose.14 Through various processes associated
with excessiveenvy, then, the narrative of Kleinian
envy instantiates a ternfylng “spectral mother”-
one who is alternately the product of excessive
idealization and projected rage.
As even such a short survey evinces, Melanie
Klein’s account of envy is eerily replete with the
imagery that pervades Poe’s fiction: paranoia
about frighteningly powerful women; an inter-
twined and often confused love and hatred; an
almost desperate idealization; the fetishizing of
body parts; the frequently excessive splitting of
good from bad; and a hostile unconcern with the
whole, real woman.15 Significantly, given these
similarities, Poe’s stories are frequently told by a
narrator positioned as a small child in relation to
an all-powerful “mother” whom he contemplates
with increasing terror. The early story “The As-
signation” (1834) manifests this identification of
the narrator with a small child and is, like later and
better-known stories, infused with a deep sense of
a child’s absolute dependence on a mother per-
ceived to be indifferent at best and murderously
hostile at worst. The story begins with a narrator, in
Venice, hearing the beautiful MarchesaAphrodite
shriek. Her scream is explained by an ambiguously
structured sentence: “A child, slipping from the
3
arms of its own mother, had fallen from an upper
window of the lofty structure into the deep and
dim canal. The quiet waters had closed placidly
over their victim.”’6 With its imagery of an infant
slipping into the “abyss”of a “deep and dim canal,”
this story, like others of Poe’s, conflates birth (in
this case a fatal inversion of birth) and death. It
also,however, hints at a certain aggressive desire on
the part of the mother, for the story, importantly,
does not explicitly say that the child fell-or that
the fall was an accident: the child inexplicably
“slipp[ed] from the arms of its own mother.” The
quiet and placid water, moreover, reflects a mater-
nal impassivityin the face of the tragedy that is soon
confirmed by the mother’s lack of any discernible
reaction. The narrator seems strangely to adopt
the perspective of the unknown infant: the same
sentence that describes the marchesa as the “gayest
of the gay”marks his empathywith the victim, “who
now deep beneath the murky water, [is] thinking
in bitterness of heart upon her sweet caresses, and
exhausting its little life in struggles to call upon
her name” (201). The struggles and grief, even
bitterness, of the infant contrast with the marble
stillness of its mother. The narrator remarks that
she is not even looking at the water but at a build-
ing beyond: “howcould that lady,” he asks,“gazeso
fixedly upon it, when beneath her lay stifling her
only child?”(202).The marchesa’spreoccupation
with something other than the child, probably the
product of her union with an unloved older hus-
band, is confirmed when a stranger who appears to
be her lover finally rescues her baby: “‘Thou hast
conquered,”’she says as her hand meets his (203).
Later, both the marchesa and her lover apparently
kill themselves in a suicide pact. “TheAssignation,”
then, weaves together the neardeath of the infant
with the seeming infidelity of his mother. Though
the infant does not literally die, the narrator who
so clearly identifies with him likens himself to a
corpse as the child struggles under the water: ”I
must have presented to the eyes of the agitated
group a spectral and ominous appearance, as with
pale countenance and rigid limbs, I floated down
among them in that funereal gondola” (202). In
this close identification,the narrator suggeststhat
even though the infant is brought back from death
by the mysterious stranger, his mother’s betrayal,
4 Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism
and thus her failure of absolute devotion to her
child, has already struck a fatal blow.
Other of Poe’s stories depict male characters
in relationships with women that are exclusive
and yet distinctly not sexual; instead they seem to
struggle to recapitulate an intense, allconsuming
motherchild bond. Describing his relationship
with Morella, for instance, Poe’s narrator makes
clear that “the fires” are “not of Eros”: “bitter and
tormenting to my spirit was the gradual convic-
tion that I could in no manner define their un-
usual meaning, or regulate their vague intensity.”
Nonetheless, his wife at first “shunned society,”
he recalls, “and, attaching herself to me alone,
rendered me happy” (234). Their bond is exclu-
sive but not defined by romantic love, appearing
to partake instead of the infant-mother relation-
ship. In “Ligeia,” the bond is still more obviously
akin to that of a mother and child. Ligeia seems
to embody the maternal-“I have never known the
paternal name of her who was my friend and my
betrothed” (262), the narrator exclaims-and
his dependence on her is virtually absolute. Con-
templating the monumental accomplishments of
Ligeia-her “gigantic”acquisitions-the narrator
explicitly calls himself “child-like”in comparison
(266). Although the cues are much less obvious,
one can even read Roderick Usher’s strange physi-
cal appearance and supposed illness as the marks
of a childlike state. One of the characteristics the
narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher” par-
ticularly notes is his friend’s hair, which suggests
a baby’s in its “more than web-like softness and
tenuity,” its “wild gossamer texture” (321).As the
narrator recounts the symptoms of Roderick’s ill-
ness, they seem to approximate infantile sensation:
he can eat only the most “insipid f o o d ; his body
can bear only “garments of certain texture”; his
eyes are “tortured by even a faint light”; and most
sounds inspire him with horror (322).Roderick’s
illness seems decidedly regressive, and the house
he inhabits-with its sentience, its interior recesses,
and its proximity to water and moon-is the ma-
ternal body that progressively engulfs him.
In all of the stories considered here, infantile
experience is invoked in particular by male charac-
ters’ attention to parts of the woman’s body-thus
replicating the earliest of Kleinian relationships in
which the infant bonds only to parts of the mother,
unable as yet to apprehend the whole person.”
The narrator of “Morella,”for instance, focuses on
the touch of Morella’s fingers and “the lustre of
her melancholy eyes” (235). The narrator of “Be-
renice” begins with the notquite remembrance of
“spiritual and meaning eyes,” becoming obsessed
with Berenice’s eyes, lips, and, of course, teeth
(225,230-31). In “Ligeia,”the narrator positively
lingers over the various features of the title charac-
ter’s face, especiallyher eyes-and it is her hair and
eyes that rivet his attention and provoke his horror
at the end (263-65,277). Madeline, in “The Fall of
the House of Usher,” is the only female character
in this set of tales who does not draw such atten-
tion. In this case, the imagery of part objects-f
faces and eyes-is displaced onto the house itself,
which is throughout a sentient maternal symbol.
None of Poe’s male characters seems able to
perceive women as individual wholes-a develop
ment crucial to what Klein called the depressive
position, in which paranoia and envy are to some
degree overcome and the whole mother gradually
becomes loved, the good and the bad within her
integrated.ls
This implicit casting of Roderick Usher
and the narrators of “Morella,” “Berenice,” and
“Ligeia” as infants in relation to phantasmatic
mothers is further heightened by the overde-
termined imagery of reproduction surrounding
the stories’ female characters. It is repressed
knowledge of this procreative power that propels
the male characters’ aggressive, even murderous,
impulses. The disavowed “pregnancies” of Poe’s
women inflame unconscious envy to an intoler-
able degree: the urge to spoil spirals and hence
the “mother,”through projection, becomes herself
ever more threatening. Klein made it clear that it
is the mother’s procreativeness in particular that
heightens envious aggression to such proportions
that it needs to be alleviated through annihilation
of the source-the primal object, the mother:
“Excessive envy of the breast is likely to extend
to all feminine attributes, in particular to the
woman’s capacity to bear children” (“Envy,”201).
“Morella,” “Berenice,” “Ligeia,” and “The Fall of
the House of Usher” all dramatize a common pat-
tern: an intensifjmg imagery of procreation; the
 Pregnant Women and Envious Men
male protagonist’s denial of this procreativeness;
his mounting, often quite sudden rage against
the heroine; a sudden and escalating sense of
the threat she poses; and, finally, the “mother’s”
death-a death longed for if not actually brought
about by the protagonist.
In “Morella,”in which the reader knows the
wife to be literally pregnant, the narrator’s un-
awareness is particularly astonishing.The narrator
describes his wife’s state as unfathomable-“But,
indeed, the time had now arrived when the mys-
tery of my wife’s manner oppressed me as a spell”
(235)-but this “mystery,” as the unfolding of
the story reveals, is clearly women’s reproductive
power (the term “mystery”will recur in later s t e
ries as other male characters are similarly baffled
by signs of pregnancy). The narrator of “Morella”
can apprehend his wife’s condition only as an ill-
ness, when he can apprehend it at all. That the
narrator retains what on some level can only be
a willful blindness to his wife’s state is evident in
the fact that he sees a wartangillness in which she
“pine[s] away daily”;the perversity of apprehend-
ing the swelling belly of a pregnant woman this
way seems driven by the need to repress what must
be quite visible evidence of the truth. In the end,
Morella has to tell the narrator, on the very day
of the birth, that she is about to deliver a child,
an event he persists in being unable to foresee.
The only signal that the protagonist is conscious
at any level of his wife’s condition is his sudden
disgust for her. She becomes abhorrent to him:
he cannot bear her touch or the sight or sound
of her. Indeed, as the time for Morella to give
birth approaches,the narrator longs for his wife’s
death “with an earnest and consuming desire,”
and he grows furious as she continues to linger
(236). While he remains oblivious throughout to
the cause of his hatred, she apparently does not:
“She seemed . . . conscious,” he remarks, “of a
cause, to me unknown, for the gradual alienation
of my regard; but she gave me no hint or token of
its nature” (235). Morella sees what her husband
cannot-that her pregnancy is the source of his
otherwise inexplicable loathing.
This ignorance, marking a need to repress
the knowledge of pregnancy, is repeated in later
stories. In “Berenice,”the title character’s acces-
5
sion to sexual maturity and parturiency is rendered
much less directly-is subject, in other words, to
still more forceful repression than Morella’s ma-
ternity. As in “Morella,”the narrator of “Berenice”
codes as disease what can easily be read as his
cousin’sentry into adolescence, sexuality, and even
pregnancy. The narrator laments that the cousins’
happy “earlydays” end when Berenice is struck by
a “fatal disease”and everything becomes “mystery
and terror.” “The spirit of change swept over her,”
he recalls, “pervading her mind, her habits, and
her character, and, in a manner the most subtle
and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her
person!” The result is that he “kn[ows]her no
longer as Berenice” (226; also see 229). This utter
change in identity, which the narrator perceives
helplessly as a terrifying mystery, is identical to
the transformation in Morella when she becomes
pregnant. About midway through the story the
narrator tells us that “in an evil moment”he speaks
of marriage to Berenice, the cousin with whom he
has grown up, despite the terror she inspires. The
real mystery is why the narrator speaks of marriage
to Berenice at all, since he now ”shudder[s] in
her presence.” The marriage may be explained,
however, by Berenice’s pregnancy, for the narra-
tor only mentions it after “bitterlylamenting her
fallen and desolate condition” and after having
“called to mind that she ha[s] loved [him] long”
(229). As the wedding approaches, the possibility
of Berenice’s pregnancy seems to move closer to
the narrator’s consciousness,and his anxious loath-
ing intensifies. At one point, he sees her standing
before him and becomes gripped with an “icychill”
and an “insufferableanxiety”at her “sovacillating
and indistinct. . . outline”-caused, he thinks, by
his imagination, the twilight, or the gray draperies
falling around her figure. He then shifts from these
unusually direct comments upon her “figure”and
her “outline”to a horrified fixation on her “thin
and shrunken lips” and “the teeth of the changed
Berenice” (230; emphasis in original). “Would to
God that I had never beheld them, or that, having
done so, I had died!” he exclaims (230).Finally, in
the notoriously baf€ling conclusion of the story,we
learn that Berenice has seemingly died and been
laid out in her tomb, only to awaken the household
with her screams.
6 Poe Studies/Bark Romanticism
What happens at the end of “Berenice,” I
suggest, is less a preparation for death than a
disguised childbed scene. In a displacement of
preparations for lying-in onto death and interment
that also figures in “Ligeia”and “Fall,” a servant
maiden tells the narrator that Berenice’s “illness”
has reached its climax and all the “preparations”
for burial are c0mp1ete.l~As is, again, also the
case in “Ligeia”and “Fall,”the narrator then goes
into a dazed state of waiting, which suggests the
waiting of the expectant father outside the lying-in
chamber. Berenice’s“wild cry”disturbs the silence.
The narrator finds himself covered in blood, his
hand “indented with the impress of human nails,”
and with a shriek he dislodges from a box “some
instruments of dental surgery”and thirtytwo small,
white teeth (233). The scream, the blood, the
impress of nails on the hand, the instruments-all
are the apparatus of childbirth, albeit persistently
repressed and displaced. The very extraction of
teeth even serves to evoke childbirth, since even
in the antebellum period tooth loss was known to
plague pregnant women.20
The concern of “Morella” and “Berenice”
with identity-specifically the desire for its coher-
ence, yet the acknowledgment of its fundamental
instability-is one more mark of the stories’ being
mired in a terrifylng early stage in which polarized
good and bad objects refuse to stay separate, in
which the good object will not remain good. Klein
claims that when the infant suffers from excessive
envy, the good breast, subject to relentless, anxious
attack and “spoiling,” risks becoming merged
with the bad breast.21 In “Morella,” the beloved
daughter transforms disturbingly into the hated
mother, forcing the narrator to shudder at the
“perfect identity” of the daughter’s smile with the
mother’s (238). Berenice becomes someone else
entirely,as disease disturbs “eventhe identity of her
person” (226). In “Ligeia,” transformations-the
terrifjnng blurring of two opposed women-are
central to the plot: Rowena usurps Ligeia’s place
and, at the end, an utterly changed Ligeia appears
where Rowena should be. Identity,which should be
singular, becomes shared; identities that should be
separate become merged; what is hated becomes
what is loved, and what is loved becomes what is
hated.
In “Ligeia,”the deaths of both the title charac-
ter and Rowena are charged with repressed images
of childbirth. Like Morella and Berenice, Ligeia is
consumed with a disease that transformsand finally
kills her. Unlike those other characters, however,
Ligeia adamantly refuses to submit: she wrestles
death with a “fiercenessof resistance” that the nar-
rator finds indescribable (267).Ligeia’s determina-
tion to wrest life from the clutches of death-and
the narrator’s final hallucinatory belief that her
will is so strong she has in fact done so-resonates
with Morella’s proclamation, which is explicitly
about the fact of her giving birth: “I am dying, yet
shall 1live” (236). Central to reading the death of
Ligeia as a shrouded childbirth scene is the poem
she writes and makes the narrator read. The poem
describes a play that the penultimate line &rms as
“the tragedy, ‘Man,”’whose hero is “the Conqueror
Worm,” usually taken to mean death.22The stanza
about the “Conqueror Worm,” however, conveys
unmistakable connotations of birth:
But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!-it writhes!-with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
(268-69)
The “blood-red thing” that writhes and crawls
brings to mind a newborn baby (and also the sym-
bolically freighted bloody teeth extracted from
Berenice), and the mimes that “become its food”
suggest not only worms feeding on men’s dead
bodies but the creatures that feed on women’s live
bodies. The poem expresses Ligeia’s ambivalence
about childbirth: the “blood-red thing” intrudes
on the mimes and the theater, suggesting the
breakup of something utopian, perhaps the exclu-
sive motherchild love that Ligeia and the nuwutor
enact (267).And if the “vermin fangs / In human
gore imbued” potentially evoke breast feeding, the
image conveys distinctly ambivalent, even envious
impulses.
Much of “Ligeia” actually concerns the
 Premant Women and Envious Men
drawn-out death of the title character’s successor,
Rowena, as she lies on her death/childbed and
repeatedly dies and convulsively comes back to
life in a process that resonates with the spasms of
labor. Other key images in this part of the story
suggest a childbirth scene. The drapes, on which
the narrator focuses almost to the exclusion of any
other decor and which surround and haunt both
himself and Rowena, suggest the inevitably draped
woman at the center of childbirth in antebellum
America.In fact, the narrator displaceswhat is h a p
pening to Rowena onto the scenery as he claims,
in an “opiumengendered vision, that the drapes
are generating “varyingfigures” and the lights of
the censer are “writhing”(274). That the narrator
admits to using opium has often been taken to
explain the mysterious ’rubydrops” that fall into
Rowena’s wine and that seem to worsen her condi-
tion (273-74). It was quite usual, however, in the
early decades of the nineteenth century, before
ether and chloroform became common, to give
women in labor both alcohol and opium in order
to ease the pain of childbirth. It was also extremely
common to bleed to the point of fainting those
women who were having difficultyin labor, perhaps
another source of the blood-red drops associated
with Rowena.2g
At one point in this travail, the narrator
describes a convulsion, one of Rowena’s appar-
ent returns to life, in ways that evoke the telling
obsession with teeth that engrossesthe narrator of
“Berenice”:“I saw-distinctly saw-a tremor upon
the lips. In a minute afterward they relaxed, disclos-
ing a bright line of the pearly teeth. Amazement
now struggled in my bosom with the profound
awe which had hitherto reigned there alone”
(275). This attention to lips and teeth coalesces
the images of the child/deathbed-the drapes,
the opium, the blood, the periodic spasms-and
pushes toward the horrifying conclusion of the
story in which the narrator’s obsession with the
shrouded face, especially mouth and cheeks, of
Rowena escalates hysterically. Poe’s preoccupa-
tion with women’s faces in these stories-their
eyes, lips, and teeth, especially-is elucidated by
Freud’s contention that unconscious thinking is
frequently characterized by the transposition of
lower onto upper parts of the body-of the geni-
7
tals onto the face in particular. The fact that the
cheeks, lips, nose, and hair all have analogs in the
genitals enables this transposition. Interestingly,
Freud adds that the “one structure which atfords
no possibility of an analogy is the teeth”-and so
when repression is strongly operative, he claims,
the teeth are often prominent.24That “Berenice”
is a story almost wholly about a fixation on teeth,
and that “Ligeia” evokes the same fixation, sug-
gests both an unconscious preoccupation with
the genitals and a forceful mechanism at work
to repress that very preoccupation. To the extent
that the teeth also suggest childbirth, the sight of
Rowena’s teeth, crystallizing,as they do, projected
horror and aggression,evokes an animus directed
at promativity.
Rowena is the most hated of Poe’s women:
“I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to
demon than to man,” the narrator writes (272).
Critics have long noted that this hatred may inspire
murder, and some construe the several drops that
fall into Rowena’s wine glass as the instrument
of the narrator’s malev01ence.2~While the male
protagonistsin “Morella”and “Berenice”only long
for the deaths of the title characters, the narrator
of “Ligeia”arguably acts on his aggression toward
the mother figure. It is telling, moreover, that he
may have poisoned Rowena, for poisoning is a
particularly powerful fantasy within the Kleinian
infantile realm, one integrally bound up with envy.
Klein describes how envious aggression is often
materialized in the impulse to poison: “the young
infant’sphantasies of attacking the mother’s body
with poisonous (explosive and burning) excre-
ments are a fundamental cause of his fear of being
poisoned by her and lie at the root of paranoia.”26
The infant’s impulse to poison the mother is
characteristic of excessive envy and inevitably
gets projected onto the mother herself. Thus the
narrator’s intense hatred of Rowena can partly be
explained by the degree of his own repressed envy
and fear of her-and the poisoning wards off the
projected threat she poses in his fantasy.
The narrator’s aggression toward Rowena,
though, cannot be understood separatelyfrom his
feelings about the loved Ligeia.27Although Ligeia
seems to be the one woman who does not inspire
the narrator’s fear and aggression, the story can
8 Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism
be read as an illustration of the excessive splitting
that Klein considers central both to primary envy
and to the paranoid-schizoid position. “Idealiza-
tion,” claims Klein, “is a corollary of persecutory
anxiety-a defence against it-and the ideal breast
is the counterpart of the devouringbreast” (“Envy,”
193). It is precisely to the extent that Ligeia (the
“good mother) is idealized, then, that her oppo-
site Rowena (the “bad”mother) is hated. In fact,
the connection between the loathing of Rowena
and the idealization of Ligeia becomes clear when,
immediately after the narrator expresses his bot-
tomless hatred for the former, he goes into reveries
about the latter: “My memory flew back, (oh, with
what intensity of regret!) to Ligeia, the beloved,
the august, the beautiful, the entombed. I revelled
in recollections of her purity, of her wisdom, of
her lofty, her ethereal nature” (272).According to
Klein, individualsare driven to idealize the mother
first by the need to (re)capture something that
was never actually as present to them as they recall
(hinted at in the narrator’s persistent failure of
memory), and also by the need to defend against
strong feelings of aggression and persecution.
Idealization, in other words, is an effort to ward
off overpoweringlyhostile impulses and the return
of those impulses in dangerous and threatening
ways. The narrator’s idealization of Ligeia can be
understood, then, as a symptom of, an attempt to
defend against, an underlying rage at the primal
object-an impulse that does indeed return, first in
the hated Rowena herselfand then in what the nar-
rator believes to be the transformation of Rowena
into Ligeia. Most frighteningly, the Ligeia who
emerges at the end is not the loved and idealized
wife but a threatening figure. The final hornfymg
moment of the story is hornfylng not least because
the narrator’s frantic splitting fails, his excessive
idealization fails, and the ostensibly loved Ligeia
merges with the hated Rowena.
Like the earlier stories, Poe’s “Fall of the
House of Usher” is replete with veiled images of
pregnancy and childbirth. The story’s preoccupa-
tion with such matters is evident in its very scenery,
not least in the womblike “black and lurid tarn
that inspires the narrator with such awe and dread
and that, in the end, engulfs the house and the
Ushers (318). The black tarn is reminiscent of
the “deep and dim canal” into which the infant
slips in “The Assignation.”28Freud’s Interpretation
of h a m s discusses quite extensively how, in the
unconscious, diving into water is a representation
of birth; in Freud’s system, the event reported in
the manifest dream must be reversed to ascertain
its real meaning.29A dream of going into water, as
in “TheAssignation”and the ending of “The Fall of
the House of Usher,”thus encodes a preoccupation
with emergingfrom it-with birth. The absorption
in faces (unconsciouslytransposed genitals) con-
tinues in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” though
again projected onto the scenery-specifically the
house, which is consistently represented as a face.
As the narrator contemplates the tarn, he shud-
ders at the “inverted images of the gray sedge, and
the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like
windows.”The house is, moreover, marked by what
is at first a “barelyperceptible fissure.”By the end
of the story, this fissure widens and tears apart, as
the “mightywalls” rush “asunder” (318,320,335).
In the closing of the story, unlike at the beginning,
when all was dreariness and darkness, a “blood-red
moon” shines through the fissure-an image that
anticipates Freud’s comment that dreams about
water (and thus about birth) often also include
a moon-“the white bottom which children are
quick to guess that they came out of.” In this case
the moon is not pale but “blood-red,”rendering it
still more evocative of childbirth (335) .30
All these displaced images of childbirth-the
rushing waters of the tarn, the blood-red moon,
the tearing fissure-surround the central mystery
of this story, Madeline Usher. She inspires the
same dread in the narrator as does the scenery
that encompasses her. This dread arises at least
in part because Madeline is overdetermined, I
argue, as pregnant. She suffers from the same
attenuating illness as Morella, Berenice, Ligeia,
and Rowena-an illness that marks, in its inverted
emphasis on diminished bodies, the effect of the
male protagonists’ repression. Madeline’s situa-
tion inspires “perplexity”in her physician, which
may suggest that while he at least grasps the fact of
her pregnancy, he is puzzled by the identity of the
father. Intimating a heightened awareness of the
possibility of an incestuous relationship between
Roderick and Madeline, the narrator evinces “an
 Premant Women and Envious Men
utter astonishment not unmingled with dread"
(320, 323) .31 The final events of the story, which
render the childbed as deathbed, can be read as a
"confinement,"in which the fear-stricken Roderick
(like the narrator in "Berenice") waits outside the
lying-in/interment room, listening for screams,
anticipating the birth/death of his line. When
Madeline finally appears, there is "blood upon
her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter
struggle upon every portion of her emaciated
frame." Then, in her final birth/death agonies,
she falls upon her brother and "b[ears] him to
the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he
had anticipated."This strange syntactical construc-
tion is typically understood to mean that Madeline
bears R o M c k to the floor a corpse, but the corpse
she bears need not necessarily be (only) Roderick.
She could be bearing him a stillborn child-the
victim of what Roderick fears in that it leaves him
alone to carry on the Usher name (335).
More than Poe's other stories, "The Fall of the
House of Usher" troubles the woman's existence
as a fully separate character, suggesting that she
may be one with her brother.32To put it in psy-
choanalytic terms, Madeline is potentially one of
Roderick Usher's introjected objects.At the end of
the story her actions seem magical, as she manages
to break out of both a coffin with the lid screwed
down and the "massive iron" door to the vault-all
exactly synchronized with the story the narrator is
reading to his friend (329,332-34). Finally, Mad-
eline inhabits a house that seems in many ways to
be alive itself, perhaps a figure of her brother's
psyche as well as the maternal body. To the extent
that Madeline is not completely "real," she plays
a part in Roderick's fantasy life, representing in
particular the way in which the Kleinian mother
herself, in the paranoid-schizoid position, is not
a discrete individual but an introjected object,
created by the infant's own impulses of envious
fear and aggression.While the culpabilityof Poe's
other male characters-for the deaths of Morella,
Berenice, and Rowena, in particular-remains un-
clear, Roderick Usher's responsibilityfor Madeline
Usher's live burial is unambigu~us.~~ But this story
also illuminates the inevitable seljkiestructiveness
of envious aggression. For what it discloses is not
only Roderick's longing for Madeline's death but
9
also the ways in which the loss of the mother, of
the introjected object, inevitably escalates, often
unbearably, fears of the infant's own death, for
Roderick's murderous assault on Madeline only
ushers in that event."
While these tales of Poe are fraught with the
imagery of childbirth, caught up in a web of pri-
mal envy, to read them as fundamentally shaped
by envy raises pressing questions: To what extent
do Poe's stories reflect preoccupations that are
uniquely his own, indicative only of his individual
biography? How is one to distinguish personal
(often unconscious) preoccupations from cultural
ones-especially when a writer's culture is bound
to influence the form or shape in which even the
most private of psychic complexes is manifest?To
believe that, because intimations of Kleinian envy
pervade his fiction, Poe himself necessarilysuffered
from excessive, recurring, and unresolved envy is to
make two problematic assumptions-first, that the
content of Poe's fiction reflects in some unmedi-
ated way the content of his psyche;35and, second,
that Klein's theory of envy is true in some universal
sense, describing the infantile state crossculturally
and transhistorically. While I read Poe's stories as
dramatizations of pregnancy,of the mother-infant
bond, and of the murderous envy that women's
procreativeness incites, I suggest neither that this
is a unique complex of Poe's nor that the envious
assault on the mother is a permanent fact of hu-
man experience, as Klein's theory would have it.
Poe's and Klein's enthrallment with the exclusive
mother-infant bond and its inherent violence re-
flects more structural mandates. Finally, a reading
of Poe's and Klein's spectral mothers suggests that
envious aggression is directed most relentlessly at
the mother in cultures that presume the mother
is all, that idealize her as all, thus provoking ha-
tred when she inevitablyfails to fulfill that elusive
promise.
What draws Poe and Klein together across
more than a century is this cult of exclusive
mothering. At the end of the eighteenth century
and throughout the early antebellum years in the
US., there occurred what is widely considered a
transformation in motherhood-as expectations
emerged that influence motherchild relationships
even today. This critical change involved the vir-
10 Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism
tual creation of the intense emotional attachment
between mother and child, fostered by the notion
that mothers should nurture their children’s
emotional, religious, intellectual, and psycho-
logical well-being in addition to their physical well-
being (the primary responsibility of the colonial
mother) .36 There were numerous reasons for this
shift-primarily the increasing isolation of the
family and of the mother within it. As work moved
from the home to commercial centers, so too did
men, and thus middleclass women “cared for their
children in relative isolation, compared with the
large sociable households of early Ameri~a.”~’Jan
Lewis has identified a veritable civic religion of
motherhood-ne permeated with ideals of love,
selflessness,and s a c r i f i ~ eWith
. ~ ~ this increasing fo-
cus on the intense attachment of mother and child,
the early nineteenth century laid the groundwork
for the twentiethcentury explanations of psycho-
analysis-created the family structure, in other
words, that shaped the psychoanalytic subject.
But beyond what is by now the familiar narrative
of late eighteenthcentury changes in the family,
in particular the emergent emotional centrality of
the mother, there is a more specific way in which
antebellum constructions of childrearing began
to shape those understandings of the infant’s psy-
chic life that Melanie Klein would later describe.
Antebellum child-rearing literature emphasized
the enormous influence the mother wielded over
the infant’s character-an influence beginning in
infancy, even in utero. The mother’s influence was
perceived to be so strong that writers often talked
about her as an indwelling presence: the mother
“implanted in and “impressedupon” her child her
own qualitiesher own moral nature.3gMary Ryan
describes this process as the lodging of a “portable
parent deep within a child’s personality,” while
Lewis terms it a “moral and emotional replication”:
because the “impress” of the mother on her child
was thought to be so profound, it seemed that “the
child was the mother reborn”-their identities
merged. Richard Brodhead has even used psycho-
analytic language in characterizing antebellum
conceptions of the motherchild bond. He claims
that advice literature of the time articulated the
inevitable “introjection” of the mother.40To the
extent, then, that the early nineteenthcentury
mother was virtuous, kind, and patient-or angry,
impatient, and viciou-her child internalized her
as such, and this internalized mother formed the
substance of that child’s interior life.
The intense attachment between mother
and child also became predominant in discourses
of brea~t-feeding.~~ Prior to the mid-eighteenth
century, breastfeeding was urged primarily for
the physical health of the infant, but by the late
eighteenth century, arguments in favor of the
practice altered in important ways, including a
shift in focus toward pleasure for both mother
and infant.42 By the early nineteenth century,
Marylynn Salmon suggests, it had become an
overwhelmingly emotional e ~ p e r i e n c eLouisa
.~~
Barwell’s influential antebellum treatise on infant
management confirms this shift: while feeding is
typically a pleasure, she claims, arousing “delight-
ful feelings” in mother and infant, if the infant is
in pain (often due to bad feeding practices), it will
come to associate the mother with “pain as much
as with pleasure, and the affections are imperfectly
and tardily aroused.”44As the motherchild bond
became an increasingly emotional one, it also
seemed to take on the characteristicsof “phantasy”:
the mother expressly became one of the child’s
inner objects, an imaginary presence shaped by
the infant’s own satisfaction and frustration-a
presence that approximated, but was never en-
tirely synonymous with, the real person.45 Such a
wholesale transformation in the motherchild bond
during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century explains in large part why Klein’s theory
of envy, which itself presumes an essential and
exclusive motherchild bond, seems so powerfully
relevant to the preoccupation with motherhood
in Poe’s fiction-seems, indeed, to be presciently
anticipated in it.
Writing in the 1950s, Melanie Klein was
inevitably influenced by the reigning presump
tion of the exclusive and emotionally freighted
bond between mother and child. Indeed, her
work depends on and continues the naturaliza-
tion of this dyad-although to the extent that
this is a blind spot of Klein’s, it is one shared by
psychoanalysis in general. As Doane and Hodges
point out, “all object-relations theorists preserve
the idea of the mother as origin.”46Klein writes,
 Premant Women and Envious Men
“While [this] exclusive relation [between mother
and infant]. ..varies individually in duration and
intensity, I believe that, up to a point, it exists in
most people” (“Envy,”188).Although Klein was
unusual in allowing that the motherchild rela-
tionship is far from wholly nurturing (and that,
in fact, it often involves extreme hostility), she
nevertheless subscribed to the persistent idea of a
mother exclusively devoted to her child-not only
always and only there, but also, in the child’seyes,
“omnipotent” (“Envy,”185). This presupposition
typically comes hand-in-hand with the corollary
presumption that envy will thus be directed at the
mother-and is, indeed, an impulse seemingly
unthinkable outside that particular relationship:
“envy is a most potent factor in undermining feel-
ings of love and gratitude at their root, since it af-
fects the earliest relation of all, that to the mother”
(“Envy,”176;seealso 181).Thisfoundingprinciple
ensures that the infant’s mother, within Kleinian
theory, will always bear the brunt of his anger-f
his redirected death instincts,his aggression, guilt,
and envy. So much of Klein’s understanding of
the mother-infant bond and her theory of envy,
however, is predicated upon what she openly
admits is the phantasy of the infant, rather than
anything objectivelyreal, that one starts to wonder,
particularly because of the obvious difficulties of
knowing exactly what an infant feels or knows,
exactly whose fantasy it is.
That both Poe and Klein are participating
in a particular fantasy of the motherchild bond
is underscored by their self-consciousadmissions
that the bond and the envy that pervades it are the
work of a constant effort and failure of memory.
Klein sometimesacknowledgesthat much of what
she calls infantile experience is actually after-the-
fact reconstruction of early events. In other words,
a person’s unconscious is structured not only by
actual early environment and relationshipsbut also
(and arguably to a greater degree) by subsequent
reconstructions of the same, which inevitably pro-
ceed through layers not only of cultural meanings,
values, and expectationsbut also of individualand
family remembering and forgetting.Separatingthe
actual experience from the reconstruction seems
an impossible task, and Klein openly talks about
patient recollections that are obviouslymediated.
11
She mentions at one point patients’ memories of
their earliest experiences of feeding, of whether
they were satisfactoryor not, but she qualifies her
(and their) claims to remember those experiences
accurately by adding “accordingto what they have
been told” (“Envy,”185). In light of her own un-
derstandingof the dfficulty of accessing the reality
of infancy, a claim she makes later can, in turn,
be regarded with some skepticism. Writing about
envy and its fostering of idealization, she suggests
that it is those who did not experience “sufficient
happiness” in the baby-mother relationship who
“idealize it in retrospect” (“Envy,”193)-an as-
sertion that begs the question of what “sufficient
happiness” in early life is and who can claim, and
on what grounds, that they ever actually knew
it. I would argue that whether or not adults feel
they have experienced “sufficienthappiness”with
their mothers in infancy is based not only on the
inevitably flawed recollections of those involved
but also on cultural beliefs about the degree and
nature of the “happiness”that should inhere in the
motherchild bond.
Poe’s characters, like Klein’s patients, have
trouble consciously bringing to memory the
relationship with the mother that is nonetheless
supposed to be so foundational. Indeed, they
seem to be trying to think back to a time before
consciousness, before memory-to the realm, in
other words, of infantile experience. In “Berenice,”
the narrator writes of the death of his mother at
his own birth, but then insists that he had lived be-
fore, claiming “a remembrance of aerial forms-of
spiritualand meaning eyes-of sounds, musical yet
sad-a remembrance which will not be excluded;a
memory like a shadow,vague, variable, indefinite,
unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the impossibil-
ity of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my
reason shall exist” (225). This shadow of memory,
which is not explicitly connected to his mother’s
death but neverthelessevokes memories of her-f
eyes, of voice-onstructs these very early experi-
ences expressly as that shadowy domain of the
unconscious that can never quite be accessed but
always and inexorably haunts the sunlit world of
reason. In “Ligeia,” too, the narrator begins by
trying to remember something he cannot-Ligeia
herself, who is consistently figured as a mother: “I
12 Poe StudiedDark Romanticism
cannot, for my soul,” begins the first line of the
story, “remember how, when, or even precisely
where, I first became acquainted with the lady
Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my
memory is feeble” (262). The narrator writes later
about how, “in our endeavors to recall to memory
something long forgotten, we often find ourselves
upon the very verge of remembrance, without be-
ing able, in the end, to remember” (264-65).As
in “Berenice”-where the moment when memory
fails is connected to the mother, to her eyes and
her voice-so too, in “Ligeia,”that which is always
present but never fully available to memory is in-
carnate in the eyes of the mother.
In the end, the reason Kleinian envy can use-
fully illuminate the fictional protagonists of Poe
is that his fiction emerged at an unprecedented
high point in the growing cultural tendency to
give the motherchild dyad primacy-a process in
which Klein also participated. As both Poe’s and
Klein’s writings evince, the effects of this famil-
ial arrangement on the infant are by no means
always benign. Poe shares with Klein a belief in
innate hostility, compensatory idealization, and
an entrenched drive toward destruction. Both
of them then bind these impulses within the
motherchild relationship, a binding that, as their
writings repeatedly demonstrate, often damages
both child and mother. Finally, however, Poe’s
fiction goes further than Klein’s work in mapping
the implications of this phantasmatic dynamic. If
the idealized mother-infant relationship integral
to envy is a fantasy, then the mother it calls up is
a ghost. And this ghost is raised at the cost of the
real mother; it erases the possibility of knowing
who she might really be. Klein’s theory is built on
a certain fantasy of the mother and the mother-
infant bond. Poe’s fiction of more than a century
before, with its consistent rendering of the mother
as shadow-as dead, as spectral mother-suggests
the deadly costs of that fantasy.
Lehagh University
Notes
Gillian Brown, “The Poetics of Extinction,“in The
American Face $Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Shawn Rosenheim
and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1995), 341.
Typically, critics have seen Morella as the
incarnation of a spiritual or intellectual principle, a
character who anticipates Ligeia’s striving to supersede
the limitations of human knowledge and mortality; see
James Gargano, “Poe’s‘Morella’:A Note on Her Name,”
AmericunLiterature47 (1975):261. Asecond major strand
of thought interprets Morella as a supernatural figure-a
vampire or succubus;see, for example, Lee Richmond,
“Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Morella’: Vampire of Volition,”
Studies in Short Fiction 9 (1972):93-94. Third, and most
persuasively, Morella is understood as the incarnation
of Poe’s own obsession with death. Leslie Fiedler, for
one, sees “Morella,”along with “Berenice,”“Ligeia,”and
“The Fall of the House of Usher,”as representing Poe’s
perverse and necrophilic urge to embrace his own self-
destruction (Love and Death in the A m ’ c a n Novel [New
York Stein and Day, 19661,415-16).
Brown, “Poeticsof Extinction,” 341. A few crit-
ics have treated Poe’s stories as reflections on mothers,
though none to my knowledge has suggested that the
female characters in “Berenice,” “Ligeia,” and “The
Fall of the House of Usher” are pregnant. See Mane
Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A
P ~ c h 5 A n u ~ t i c Z ~(London:
~ e t u ~ Imago,
~ ~ 1949);Eva
Cherniavsky, That Pub Mother Rising:Sentimentalficounes
and the Imitation of Motherhood in 19th-Centu7y America
(Bloomington:Indiana Univ. Press, 1995),48-55; Diane
Long Hoeveler, “The Hidden God and the Abjected
Woman in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,”’ Studies in
Short Fiction 29 (1992):385-95; Leland Person, “Poeand
NineteenthCentury Gender Constructions,”in A Histuri-
cal Guide to Edgar Alhn Poe, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy (New
York Oxford Univ. Press, 2001 ) ,135;J. Gerald Kennedy,
“Poe, ‘Ligeia,’ and the Problem of Dying Women,” in
New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales, ed. Kenneth Silverman
(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 122; and
Cynthia Jordan, Second Stories: The Politics of Languagz,
F m , and Gender in Early A m ’ c a n Fictions (Chapel Hill:
Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989),137. Monika Elbert
has done the most extensive analysis of motherhood in
Poe’s stories (“Poe’sGothic Mother and the Incubation
of Language,” Poe Studies/Dank Romanticism 26 [1993]:
22-33), but where she finds in the stones a manifest
 Pregnant Women and Envious Men
longing for an absent mother, I see instead the terrors
of an all-toepresent mother.
Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, From Klein
to Kristeua: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the
"Good Enough" Mother (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan
Press, 1992), 13.
Melanie Klein, "Envy and Gratitude," in E n y
and G r a t i t d , and Other W h , 19461963,vol. 3 of The
Writings of Melanie Klein, ed. Roger Money-Kyrle (New
York Free Press, 1975). All other references to Klein's
essay are to this edition and are cited parenthetically
in the text.
6 In their critique of mein for constrainingwomen
to motherhood and for defining mothers as "the ideal-
ized and blamed origin of the child, the family, and
the state," Doane and Hodges offer nuanced readings
of Klein and other object-relations theorists while rec-
ognizing, at the same time, that they dispense not the
"truth" but aversion of truth entrenched within history:
"All object-relations theorists preserve the idea of the
mother as origin; we hope to show how this 'origin' and
'cause' is, in fact, the effect of a discursive practice that
itself has multiple origins" ( f i n to KristGva, 6 , 3 ) . As I
argue, the cult of motherhood that emerged in the early
decades of the nineteenth century was one of the first
and foremost of these discursive practices that installed
the mother as origin in mid-twentieth century object-
relations theory.
'I Ian Craib defines the death instinct as "de-
structive, turned against either the self or projected
outwards against others"; see Psychoanalysis and Social
Theory (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1990),
141. This definition resonates with Poe's descriptions
of the perverse, elaborated particularly in "The Imp of
the Perverse" and "The Black Cat."
Doane and Hodges, Klein to KtistGva., 29. Juliet
Mitchell has also described the way the infant's psyche is
shaped mostly internally in Klein's work. Klein's notion
of phantasy, she writes, expresses how "the baby relates
to the conjunction of its inner and outer worlds psychi-
cally"; the infant's phantasy "emanates from within and
imagines what is without" (introduction to The Selected
MelunieKlein,ed. Mitchell [NewYork Free Press, 19861,
22,23; emphasis added). Klein herself wrote: "I would
not assume that the breast is to [the infant] merely a
physical object. The whole of his instinctual desires and
his unconscious phantasies imbue the breast with quali-
ties going far beyond the actual nourishment it affords"
(YEnvyand Gratitude," 180). Madelon Sprengnether has
13
also written of the "spectral mother" of psychoanalytic
theory. Although she discusses Freud rather than Klein,
her argument about the ways in which Freud's theory
erased the mother, and then consequently ushered her
back in as "a ghost, a phantom, any object of fear or
dread," has been helpful to my project; see The Spctral
Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cor-
nell Univ. Press, 1990), 5.
Karen Weekes, "Poe's Feminine Ideal," in The
Ca&& Companion toEdgmAUanPoe, ed. Kevin J. Hayes
(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 150.
lo I share Dorothy Dinnerstein's sense that one
should not take literally all the complicated mental pro-
cesses Klein attributes to young infants, especiallyin her
'poetically vivid" essay "Envy and Gratitude" (see Dinner-
stein, The M m i d and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements
and Human Mnlaise [NewYork Harper Colophon, 19763,
95-96). Dinnerstein goes on to write that " [Klein's]
formulationsare based on the play, dreams, and transfer-
ence behaviors of older children and adults, who have
recast memories of very early feelings into words and
images that the infant did not possess" (96).
l 1 For a full elaboration of her theory of the
pamnoid-schizoid position, see Klein, "Some Theoretical
Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the In-
fant," in E n y and Gratitude, 61-71.
l2 While Klein does write about both sexes, she
herself uses the universal "he." Moreover, in this essay
I am writing about the envious impulses of only male
characters. Thus I will use the pronoun "he" when gen-
eralizing about early infantile experience.
l3 Klein, "Theoretical Conclusions," 70.
l4 For a clear articulation of the vicious cycle in
which envy can involve the infant and, later, the adult,
see Deborah Willis, M&ht Nurture: WikbHuntingand
Maternal Power in Early Modon England (Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1995), 47.
l5 In this essay I do not argue that Poe's fictional
characters are driven by envy simply because he himself
was. Recognizingthe problems involved in psychoanalyz-
ing a man long dead, I argue instead, later in the essay,
that Poe inhabited a time and place in which conditions
rendered it unsurprising that what Klein describes as
the envious urge to destroy the mother became an in-
creasingly manifest urge. That said, the fact that Edgar's
mother died when he was only three is generally accepted
as central to the preoccupationsof his art; see Bonaparte,
L@ and Work, 59, 77,83-84, and Kenneth Silverman,
14 Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism
Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance
(New York: Harperperennial, 1991), 26, 7 6 7 7 . What
Bonaparte’s and Silverman’s astute biographical criti-
cisms share is a recognition that Poe was consumed by
an ideal that failed to substitute for the real mother he
lost at a tragically young age. What neither mention,
though, is that this process of idealization was also
potentially symptomatic of an underlying aggression-
anger at Eliza for dying, but also, perhaps, the anger of
an excessive envy that could have been exacerbated by
loss. Klein argues that “deprivation increases greed and
persecutory anxiety,”for “there is in the infant’smind a
phantasy of an inexhaustible breast which is his greatest
desire.”When the “breast deprives him,” Klein writes, “it
becomes bad” (“Envyand Gratitude,” 183).
Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry, Tales, and SelectedEssays,
ed. PatrickF. Quinn and G. R. Thompson, 2nd ed. (New
York: Library of America, 1996), 201. All further refer-
ences to Poe’s stories are to this edition and are cited
parenthetically in the text.
17 Klein writes that the “infant’srelation to parts
of his mother’s body, focusing on her breast,” which
characterizes the early paranoid-schizoid position,
“gradually changes into a relation to her as a person”
(“Some Theoretical Conclusions,”71).
l8 For a discussion of the depressive position, see
Klein, “Theoretical Conclusions,”69-80.
l9 Antebellum physician Edward Dixon devotes an
entire chapter to “hysteria”as one of the sicknesses at-
tendant upon women once they reach their reproductive
years (Womanand HerDiseases,fiom the Cradle to the Crave,
8‘hed. [1841; New York: Adriance, Sherman, 18511,
131-45). This condition includes the kind of catalepsy
from which Poe’s women suffer. Dixon even talks of the
dangers of mistakenly burying women alive (141).
2o For a nineteenthxentury discussion of the con-
nection between pregnancy and tooth loss, see Dixon,
Woman and Her Diseases, 299-301.
21 See Klein, “Envy and Gratitude,” 184, 186,
192.
22Joel Porte has read Ligeia’s poem as describing
the “tragedy ‘Woman’”rather than the tragedy of man,
and he sees the hero as “the conquering male organ”
( The Romance in America: Studies in CoOpo; Poe, Hawthorne,
Melville, and James [Middletown, CT Wesleyan Univ.
Press, 1969],73). Chemiavsky also interprets the worm
as a phallus (in Pale Mother Rising, 54).
23 For opium use and bloodletting in early to mid-
nineteenthxentury labor, seeJudith Walzer Leavitt, “‘Sci-
ence’ Enters the Birthing Room: Obstetrics in America
since the Eighteenth Centuly,”JoumalofAmericanHistq
70 (1983): 286.
24 Sigmund Freud, The Znterpetation of Dreams
(1953; repr., New York Avon, 1965), 422.
25 In an influential 1948 reading of the story, Roy
Basler suggests that the narrator of “Ligeia”poisons R e
wena (“TheInterpretation of ‘Ligeia,’”in Poe: A Collection
ofCriticalEssays,ed. Robert Regan [EnglewoodCliffs,NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 19671, 58-60). More recently, J. Gerald
Kennedy offers a compelling reading of the narrator’s
“deadly plot” to frighten Rowena to death, describing
her bed chamber as a “torture chamber” (“Poe,‘Ligeia,’
and the Problem of Dying Women,” 122-23).
26 Melanie Klein, “On Observing the Behaviour of
Young Infants,” in Envy and Gratitude, 108n.
27 In his discussion of Rowena’s death as part of
a murderous plot, Kennedy makes clear that the narra-
tor’s aggression is directed first and foremost at Ligeia:
in poisoning Rowena, the narrator is trying “to kill two
women at once: the perfidious Ligeia and her unworthy
successor” (”Poe ‘Ligeia,’ and the Problem of Dying
Women,” 124).
28 Elbert has noticed the likeness between the
tam in “Fall”and the canal in “The Assignation” (“Poe’s
Gothic Mother,” 24).
29 Freud, Interpetation OfDreams, 436.
Further, one of Roderick’s paintings quite evi-
dently evokes both womb and birth canal: it shows “the
interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or
tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without inter-
ruption or device” (325).
31 In Love and Death, for instance, Fiedler finds in
much of Poe’s fiction, including “The Fall of the House
of Usher,” an exploration of the incest theme (415-16).
See also James Twitchell, F d i d d a Partners: The Incest
Taboo in Modern Culture (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1987), 205-7; and Leila May, “‘Sympathies of a
Scarcely Intelligible Nature’: The Brother-Sister Bond
in Poe’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher,’” Studies in Short
Fiction 30 (1993): 387-96. No one, to my knowledge, has
suggested that the Ushers’ incestuous desire may have
resulted in pregnancy.
32 See, for instance, Porte, Romance in Amoica,
67-68.
33 Numerous commentators have pointed out
 Pregnant Women and Envious Men
that, despite the love Roderick declares for his sister,the
story does disclose an unconscious aggression provoked
by Madeline’s sexuality and gender. See in particular
Hoeveler,who in “The Hidden God” discusses the story
in terms of the fear of the “archaic mother” and her
generative power (393). See also LouiseJ. Kaplan, “The
Perverse Strategy in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’”
in New Essays on Poe5 Major Tales, ed. Silverman, 60.
54 Melanie Klein, “On the Sense of Loneliness,”
in E n y and Gratitude, 304.
35 Scott Peeples eloquently articulates the problem
with reading Poe’s stories as unambiguouswindows onto
his psyche. I agree with his conclusion, though, that crit-
ics can use psychoanalysis to discover “profound insights
into human experience without focusing narrowly on
Poe, his characters, or ‘the reader”’ ( TheAwiJe o f w r
AlhnPoe [NewYork Camden House, 2003],51).
36 Marylynn Salmon concisely articulates this his-
torical generalization:the bond between colonialmother
and child, she writes, was typically demonstrated ”bygiv-
ing. . .good physical care” (“TheCultural Significance of
Breastfeeding and Infant Care in Early Modem England
and America,”Journal of Social Histmy 28 [1994]: 263).
Also see Catherine M. Scholten, “Mothersand Children
in the ColonialYears,”chap. 3 in Childbem’nginAmerican
Society: 165&1850 (New York New York Univ. Press,
1985), 50-66; and Nancy Schrom Dye and Daniel Blake
Smith, ”Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750-1920,”
Journal of American Histmy 73 (1986): 333-34. Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich has famously described early American
mothering as “extensive”in contrast to later “intensive”
prescriptions-involving “generalizedresponsibilityfor
an assembly of youngsters rather than concentrated
devotion to a few” (Good Wives: Image and Realiiy in the
Lives of Womm in Northem New England, 1 6 5 750 ~ [New
York Vintage, 19911,153-57).
37 Dye and Smith, “Mother Love,” 338. Scholten
describes how, by the early nineteenth century, child-
rearing had become the most time-consuming of a
mother’s domestic responsibilities, even a recognized
“occupation” (Childbearingin American S~nely,89). Two
particularly valuable essays on the transformation of
motherhood at the end of the eighteenth and beginning
of the nineteenth century are Ruth Bloch, “American
Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral
Mother, 1785-1815,” Feminist Studies 14 (1978): 101-26;
and Jan Lewis, “Mother’s Love: The Construction of
an Emotion in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Social
History and Issues in Human Conscimms: Svme Interdk-
ciplinary Connections, ed. Andrew E. Barnes and Peter
15
N. Steams (New York New York Univ. Press, 1989),
209-29. See also Nancy Cott, The Bonh of Womanhood:
W m n5 Sphere’inNew England, 1 7 8 M835 (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1977), 85-100; Cott, “Notes toward an
Interpretation of Antebellum Childrearing,”Psychohistmy
Review 6 (1978): 5; and Carl Degler, At Odds: Womm and
theFamily in America@ theReuolutMn to t h e h s e n t (New
York Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), 66-85.
ss Lewis, “Mother’sLove,” 217,221,223-25.
39 See Bloch, “American Feminine Ideals,” 110;
Cott, “Notes toward an Interpretation,” 14-15; Mary P.
Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: Amen‘can Writing about
Domesticity, 183&1860 (NewYork Haworth Press, 1982),
51; and Louisa Mary Banvell, Infant Treatment: With Di-
nctions to Mothers for SelfManagement b$m, during and
ajkPregnancy, 3* American ed. (NewYork William and
Taylor, 1846).
Ryan, Empireofthe M o t h , 51; Lewis, “Mother’s
Love,” 216; Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters:
Scenes of Reading and Writingin Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 21.
41 Most histories of infant feeding in England
locate a sharp change in the mid-eighteenth century
when middle-class and aristocraticwomen began increas-
ingly to breastfeed, giving up the long-standingpractice
of wet nursing (Valerie Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies:
A Histmy of Infant Feeding [Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ.
Press, 1986],98-100,121). The extent to which such a
dramatic change occurred in colonial America is not
clear, however, since, as commentators consistently
remark, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic strongly
endorsed breastfeeding as a mother’s duty to God,
at the same time severely castigating those who used
wet nurses. See Paula A. Treckel, “Breastfeeding and
Maternal Sexuality in Colonial America,“Journalof Inter-
disciplinary Histmy 20 (1989): 31-32. In short, American
feeding practices may not have changed very much, if at
all, from the colonial to the early national period. What
did change, though, was the meaning attached to the
act of a mother’s breastfeeding.
42 See Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, 11617.
43 Salmon, “CulturalSignificance of Breastfeed-
ing,” 259. Ryan, in particular, describes the relatively
unchecked celebration of breastfeedingin the 18% and
1840s, remarking that domestic advice literature of this
time was “largely oblivious to the dangers of excessive
attachments.” She goes on to argue that the closeness
of mother and child reached its height in the 1830s
16 Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism

and 1840s-for by the 1850s, doctors were interposing

themselves between mother and child, and scientific
principles began to regulate and constrain the mother’s
influence (Empireofthe Mother, 57,99-100).
44 Barwell, Infant Treatment, 29, 85.

45 In That Pale Mother Rising, Cherniavsky also

addresses “introjection” of the antebellum mother in
her discussion of the mother’s influence after her death:
“the Good Christian Mother [is] one whose moral influ-
ence extends beyond the grave, affecting her children’s
actions long after she herself is dead” (42).
46 Doane and Hodges, Klein to Krkkwa, 3.