American Literature Lecture Four

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Edgar Allan Poe and the Gothic Tradition

1. Introduction

E. A. Poe (1809-1849) - a writer of mental adventures, with a decadent imagination and

an inborn taste for the fantastic. He wrote in all main literary genres:

* theory and criticism: The Philosophy of Composition; The Poetic Principle

* fiction: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Tales of the Grotesque and the
Arabesque- 2 volumes of short stories
* poetry: Tamerlane and Other Poems; Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems; Poems

As a prose writer: representative of the Gothic tradition; the founder of the American
mystery story
As a poet: the precursor of the French symbolists: Baudelaire saw him as an emblem of
demon- haunted romanticism.
Soon after his death, Poe was turned into a sort of Byronic hero; first got
recognition in France: Baudelaire, Mallarme, Valery labelled him as a symbolist poet and
made him an ‘honorary’ Frenchman
Born in Boston, Mass- the parents were wandering actors, i.e., members of a
disreputable profession. When he was 2, mother dies: adopted by John Allan, a tobacco
merchant from Richmond, Va.
After a year at the University of Virginia; a short period in the Army; becomes a
journalist and editor in Richmond: ‘Southern Literary Messenger’, Baltimore,
Philadelphia, New York
Despite his connections with the East Coast, he always proclaimed himself a
Southerner, opposing the Abolitionist movement and democracy (‘the rule of the mob’),
poking fun at the New England Transcendentalists: Emerson and Thoreau.
His personal life- one of disappointment, tragedy and frustration. Never quite recovered
from the early death of his young wife Virginia Clemm, until he was found unconscious
in a Baltimore street where he soon died at the age of 40. His grave was unmarked for 27
years when a tombstone was finally placed there; the only writer present was W.
Whitman.
Poe’s literary output: surprisingly unitary: he made no distinction between poetry/
fiction, literature/ other arts. What matters: the unity of tone and intention.
From a romantic perspective, he sees the American union of the aesthetic and the
moralistic as hindering the free play of imagination.

2. Poe, the Poet. The Philosophy of Composition. The Raven. Annabel Lee

Poe- wrote a new kind of poetry (only 63 pieces) that evoke mood, rather than meaning
and draw attention to their own technique. Poems like: To Helen, Ulalume, Israfel, The
Bells- evoke a surrealist landscape; the key words are music, angels, heaven, melancholy,
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while the recurrent theme is the obsessive search for a supernatural beauty that lies
beyond the phenomenal world.
In ‘The Poetic Principle’, he defines poetry as the rhythmical creation of beauty,
responding only to the dictates of Taste, having nothing to do with Duty or Truth.

Intellect- Truth
Taste- Beauty
Morality- Duty

Poe- a self-conscious theorist and analyst of the creative process. In The Philosophy of
Composition- a detailed account of the compositional process of The Raven: the poem
proceeded ‘step by step’ with ‘the precision of a mathematical problem’.

His method is inductive: begins with the effect and only after does he consider the causes
leading to it. The strongest effect a poem has on the soul- comes from the contemplation
of Beauty.
He links the effect with the length of the poem; length should be in proportion to
the intensity of effect: if the poem is too long, the effect cannot be sustained; if it is too
short, it disappears before it can be grasped. The proper length: 100 lines (actually 102)
Next concern: the tone; since Beauty is the province of poetry, Poe associates it
with sadness/ melancholy, as “Beauty…in its supreme development inevitably excites the
sensitive soul to tears”
The keynote in the construction of the poem is the refrain closing each stanza.
The choice of the one-word refrain nevermore is justified by the effect derived from the
association between the long ‘o’ as the most sonorous vowel and the voiced/ fricative
consonant ‘r’
As for the choice of topic, the most melancholic one is Death, and Death becomes
most poetical when associated with Beauty: The death, then, of a beautiful woman is,
unquestionably the most poetic topic in the world and.. the lips best suited for such a
topic are those of a bereaved lover.
So, the poem contains two ideas: a lover lamenting his deceased mistress (‘a
sainted maiden whom the angels call Lenore’); a raven- a bird of ill-omen- repeating
invariably the refrain ‘nevermore’ in answer to the question of the lover whether he will
ever see his beloved again, in Heaven.
Final consideration is given to the locale, the chamber that has the force of a
frame to a window’.
What has been noticed: the outcome of his logic of composition is only one
poem.
However, the importance of the essay lies in that:
- it contradicts the romantic view of composition as inspiration
- it reveals the conscious quest of the poet for meaning and form.

Perhaps contemporary readers are less receptive to his verse because it lacks the
psychological dimension of his tales.
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The majority of his poems- short ballads and lyrics- deeply personal and intensely
emotional love songs rendered from the perspective of a melancholic male. Many of the
shorter poems are lyrics of irrecoverable loss—loss of love, loss of youth, while longer
poems such as “Al Aaraaf ” and “The Raven” are more epic in content.

The poems reveal an idealized setting, or psychic landscape that combine elements of
beauty and horror within a dark, apocalyptic vision. If Poe’s most important tales of
horror and suspense are dramatic studies of aberrant psychology and the products of
human depravity, his poetry best reveals his taste for a fantastic literary universe, for
irrational, death-haunted, and dreamlike realms..

“THE RAVEN” (1845)

The poem is essentially a nocturnal dialogue between a mourning lover and an intrusive
raven who visits him, apparently to intensify the misery of the narrator at the death of his
beloved. The poet first questions the raven about Lenore, then wonders if he will
reencounter her in the afterlife, and finally if he himself will ever find peace in her
absence. To each of these questions the bird’s consistent reply- nevermore- infuriates
him, but also deepens his sense of loss.

Whether the raven is real, or a hallucination, good or evil, bird or demon—it is never
clear; what is clear is that the bird helps to reveal a human mind that is unraveling, and
descending completely into the madness of despair. At the end of the poem, the reader is
informed that the raven is still present in the chamber of the narrator and that the poet’s
soul will never escape the shadow of the bird. .: “And my soul from out that shadow that
lies floating on the floor/ Shall be lifted—nevermore!”.

“ANNABEL LEE” (1849)

This famous piece is Poe’s final finished poem, published posthumously.. Various
women in the poet’s life saw themselves in the poem’s child heroine, but the poem is
clearly written in memory of Virginia Clemm Poe, who died two years before its
creation.

Set in the past, in a kingdom by the sea, the narrator-poet tells of his love with a woman
named Annabel Lee who: “... lived with no other thought/ Than to love and be loved by
me” (102). Their love was so pure and virtuous that even the Gods and the angels envied
them. When Annabel Lee dies suddenly, her kinsmen take her body away from the poet
and bury her in a place near the sea, leaving the narrator alone in his grief. The narrator
concludes that their love continues to endure, and that the soul of the poet and his
Annabel Lee remain joined, defying death.

Annabel Lee is one of the great symbols of romantic love. The woman in this poem is
both the poet’s wife who died from tuberculosis in Poe’s presence, and a symbol of
idealized love
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In tune with the concept of beauty in Poe’s poetic universe, the poem celebrates the love
shared between youth who may not possess the wisdom of experience, but make up for
this in the passion of their feelings. The poem praises the superiority of the child-lover
over the rational adult.

“Annabel Lee” illustrates thematic issues common to many of Poe’s works: the death of a
beautiful woman, her burial, and the poet’s undying love and deification of her memory.

“Annabel Lee” most resembles “The Raven” insofar as both poems are told from the
point of view of a narrator who has recently lost an important woman in his life, both
poems exist not so much as narrative actions but as evocations of feelings, and both
lament the gap between romantic love and reality. As in “The Raven,” the poet clings
stubbornly to the memory of his idealized lost love in spite of the fact that this love is
doomed.

The issue of separation is, however, treated differently in the two poems: in ’Annabel
Lee’, the poetic soul remains willingly connected to his lost love in spite of her physical
absence. In “The Raven,” on the other hand, the bird is there as an ever present reminder
of the barriers currently separating the poet from the lost Lenore; Lenore’s memory
eventually becomes less a permanent symbol of idealized beauty and love than a constant
source of pain and personal negation.

3. Poe, the Prose Writer. The Short Fiction. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

Poe, the fictionalist- an artist of displacement; reality is displaced by a mentally-

constructed landscape underpinned by a dream-like imagery and an inclination to the
grotesque and the macabre, peopled by anguished egos and psychotic, divided selves.
cf. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym:
‘For the bright side of the painting I had very little sympathy. My vision were of
shipwreck and famine, of death and captivity among barbarian hordes.. in an ocean
unapproachable and unknown’.
Like his poetry, his short stories record adventures of the mind and imagination.
His characters repeatedly try to reach beyond the world of reason, to a dark, melancholic
beauty close to death. (cf. ‘Ligeia’, ‘Berenice’); sometimes, an apparently rational
character comes in touch with the frightening world across the grave (‘The Fall of the
House of Usher’).
In his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, Poe presents the idea of a short
story in very precise terms: his idea is inductive again: a story does not start from
incidents, but by conceiving a certain, unique effect; the writer invents the incidents that
‘may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect’. The best illustration of Poe’s
method is

The Fall of the House of Usher

The opening is typical for a Gothic horror story: a ruined house, sinister landscape and
the black waters of the lake reflecting the image of the house.
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The main concern of the narrator: his own feelings as objectified in this landscape
of decay and dream. The terror is psychological: the water that reflects and distorts reality
is, actually, an image of the mind with its anguished processes- a metaphoric projection
of Roderick’s disordered and decaying intellect.
Roderick’s artistic creations: themselves dramatizations of his terror:
-his painting of the catacombs of the house links his terror to his buried sister,
Madeleine
- his poem, ‘The Haunted Palace’ can be seen as a self-conscious allegory describing his
own disintegration
His terror, which he projects unto his dying sister, also fascinates him. Like Poe’s other
frenzied protagonists, Roderick is torn between fear and desire, perversely seeking the
experience of absolute terror that leads to self-destruction.
Roderick dies, claimed by the ghost of his resurrected sister but, he is, equally, a
victim of the terror he has created and anticipated and which gad been suggested, in the
first paragraph, by the reversed image of the house in the black waters of the lake.
Roderick Usher is a typical Poe hero: an obsessive, isolated and melancholic
individual who adopts a deceptive rational mask to explore his irrational cravings for
self-destruction. Such heroes live in a world that abolishes the cause-effect relationship, a
universe governed by ‘perverseness’.

Cf. The Imp of the Perverse: The assurance of the wrong or error in any action is often
the one unconquerable force which impels us. This overwhelming tendency to do wrong
for the wrong’s sake... is a radical, primitive impulse.

To increase the effect of his fantastic tales, Poe often uses a realistic background and a
rational tone of the narrator. This is only meant to highlight the perverse, irrational nature
of his unconscious mind as revealed by the narrative.

The Pit and the Pendulum

One of the greatest horror stories ever written

The story begins with the fainting of the anonymous narrator on hearing he’s been
condemned to death, for an unknown crime by a tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition in
Toledo. What follows is a series of inhuman, sadistic tortures that he has to undergo, as
he struggles to set himself free.
The setting of the tale is typical for Poe: a one-room cell, apparently with iron
walls, that are capable of changing shape and close in on the prisoner. In the center of the
cell there is a deep, circular pit that descends into water. The narrator discovers the
dimensions of this torture chamber by degrees, for at first he awakens into total
blackness.
Thirsty, hungry, exhausted, and highly agitated, the narrator has a drink of water,
falls asleep and awakens to find himself strapped to a wooden platform in the center of
the cell. The room is no longer in darkness, so the narrator notices a painted figure of
Father Time on the ceiling above him. The figure is holding a huge pendulum with a
razor-sharp edge which descends ever so slowly towards his body.
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Taking up a piece of meat still within his reach, the prisoner rubs it across the
bandages that tie him down to the platform. Hundreds of rats that share the cell with him
swarm forward and begin gnawing at the bonds. In the last moment, as the descending
blade begins to cut into his flesh, the straps snap and he breaks free.
As soon as he escapes, the pendulum is withdrawn into the ceiling. The walls of
the prison grow suddenly hot and begin to change shape, squeezing the narrator ever
closer toward the pit as the faces of the painted figures take on a terrifying form. Just as
he is about to fall, the walls pull back, and the narrator is miraculously saved by the
invading French army, led by General Lasalle.
The explicit terror constructed in the story is paralleled by the protagonist’s
psychological torment. His isolation is as deep and as terrifying as the blackness of the pit
itself. Such a horrific environment forces the narrator into a battle that is as much
centered inside his own head as in the devilish tortures designed by his jailers. From this
perspective, the theme of the story could be stated as the ability of the rational mind to
triumph over irrational circumstances. The critic David Hirsch sees it as the ultimate
existential allegory of an anguished soul confronted by the blackness of existence in an
absurd universe whose shape and meaning can never be ascertained.
The theme of “The Pit and the Pendulum” also centers upon the virtues of self-
discipline and self-control. The narrator’s consciousness and imagination are constantly
challenged by his nightmarish situation. But his intellect remains intact all along, and he
ultimately survives because his rational faculties buy him time to be saved: in the end, he
neither gives in to the traps of the Inquisition nor to the horrors of his own imagination.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket, 1838

At a first glance, Poe’s only novel reads as a sea/story of adventures. It follows the
voyage of the Grampus and the incredible misfortunes that AGP, the narrator, ecounters
together with the other members of the crew. It is equally a horror story and a macabre
thriller recounting incredible incidents in a nightmarish atmosphere: claustrophobia,
mutiny, famine and thirst, cannibalism and death, or strange natural phenomena: the more
the ship advances to the South Pole, the warmer it gets, while the colour of the water
changes intto a milkish white. When AGP, together with two remainng companions,
finally reach the Pole, their boat is sucked in by a strong current into what appears to be
an opening into an immense rock The last thing he sees in front of hism is an immense,
frightening white human figure.

Pym’s narrative ends here. An Appendix, supposedly by the publisher, explains that the
author died before completing his story. His companion, Peters survived but now lives in
Illinois, but efforts to contact him have failed.

Poe’s short novel is constructed on the idea of the journey and carries on the long-
established tradition of the picaresque novel. But Pym’s travel is not enriching; it does
not explore new territories and manners. The hereo is at the mercy of forces and events
beyond his control and he travels through a succession of graveyard horrors, from rotten
corpses, to inhuman savages, or the iminent danger of being buried alive. However, Poe’s
concern is not with actual facts, but with psychological terror.
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Pym’s voyage to the South Pole becomes a metaphor for the plunge into human
mind and the exploration of the limits of human consciousness.The stages of his voyage
are the stages of his own psychic destruction, until he is confronted with the last
impenetrable white figure whose meaning cannot be deciphered by human language and
thought.
Poe’s writings and their nightmarish world touch upon our innermost desires,
secrets and fears: the fear of destruction, of the irrational, of revenge, cannibalism, incest
or death.
His conclusion seems to be that we want, yet avoid self-examination for fear of
what we might find in our own souls.