CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRID:;E

A RARE AND RADIANT MAIDEN

THE PORTRAYAL OF WOMEN IN THE WOfl.KS

OF.

EIGAR ALLAN POE

a thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts with Honors in .. English

by Susan Injejikian

August, 1980 The thesis of Susan Injejikian is approved:

California State University, Northridge Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind is the most melancholy? Death -- was the obvious reply. 'And when,' I said, 'is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?' From what I have already explained at some length, the answer here, also, is obvious -- When it closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestion­ ably, the most poetical topic in the world -- and equally it is beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of the bereaved lover. Edgar Allan Poe The Philosophy of Composition Vol. 14, p. 201

iii (1)

Whether or not there lies any truth in the popular myth of Edgar

Allan Poe's life, one of obsc~re poverty, plagued by debt and tormented by dependence upon drugs and drink,1 Poe seems to have been blessed with a rare variety of soul and personality that gained him the love of many women and allowed him diverse and rewarding relations with members of that sex. However, many of the women who were dearest to him -- including his mother, his foster mother, and his young wife

-- died painful, lingering, premature deaths. Thus, among other associations, Poe came to equate the image of a beautiful, beloved female with something transient, insubstantial, and inevitably taken away too soon. This motif recurs throughout the body of Poe's works, from the simplest lyric to the most elaborate Gothic horror tale.

To what extent Poe drew upon his personal biographical experiences for his artistic visions of women can only be speculated upon. But it is plain that he shares, with male authors of every age and culture, an awareness of the eternal struggle between the archetypical images of Woman: virgin and temptress -- Aphrodite and

Mary. But more than many writers, he uses this struggle as an allegory for even greater disparities: body and soul, soul and intellect, reality and fantasy.

It is useless to attempt to gauge Poe's literary attitudes toward women in terms of Transcendentalism, or any other American literary movement. His poetry, and to a lesser extent, his fiction, are unique in that they rely very little on the attitudes of the outside world.2 Out of space and out of time, Poe's thought was more that of the Southern cavalier than the Yankee cynic. He could easily {2)

be classified as a Romantic, though his style bears more resemblance to

German Romanticism than to the English or American variety.) Never- theless, let us explore the evolution of the female image in

literature just prior to and during Poe's time.

The theme of seduction and the popular figure of the alluring

but virtuous young maid began in the Pastoral tradition of Renaissance

poetry and became most popular in the 18th century, with the novels of

Richardson and the dramas of Wycherly.4 But by the beginning of the

1800's, middle class morality had thoroughly permeated popular literature, and soon Victorianism prevailed. Bawdry went out of style,

at least in books, and the seduction theme was no longer fashionable. The solution, as Edward H. Davidson suggests, is the concept of death

as a euphemism for seduction:

••• an age which eschews one representation of Eros will find a substitute Eros. If a middle-class and commercial morality prevented the exposition of seduction in life, it found an equally titillating theme in "death as seduction." Or, to state the idea in other terms, if the woman could not be presented seductively in life, she could be displayed in erotic postures and in seductive disguises in death. Death became a means of enticement: death was the great seducer, and the "ruined" girl was laid out for burial in the landscape of ruin and decay." 5

It is easy to understand the popularity of the theme of death in

Poe's time. Americans were more complacent in the first few decades

of the 19th century than at almost any other time. The Industrial Revolution and the recent advances in medicine had freed them from the terror of death that had been omnipresent in the preceeding century.

Not until the Civil War did death once again become such a common (J)

reality to Americans. Hence the romance and dramaturgy of death -- of fictive death, at least -- was avidly consumed by the reading audience of the day.6 The concept of the unity of love and death was not entirely novel. The French, calling the orgasm "petite mort," knew of the strange, ecstatic fulfillment of dying, and conversely, that each moment of sexual climax is a kind of preview of death. The figure of the lovely, timid bride was not far removed from that of the sacri- ficial virgin. Marriage was a large part of the ultimate life fulfillment for the American girl in 18JO. But death in childbirth was a common occurrence and each bride knew, beneath her blushes, that death was part of the bargain when a young girl married.

Poe understood this parallel of marriage and death, and the similar appeal of the bride and corpse. Its influence shows up in his prose: a~ obviously as in such details as the "pall-like canopy" over the marriage bed in "Ligeia" and as evasively as in this passage from "Morella":

And in the contour of the high forehead, and in the ringlets of the silken hair, and in the wan fingers which buried themselves therein, and in the sad, musical tones of her speech, and above all -- ohl above all -- in the phrases and expressions of the dead on the lips of the loved and the living, I found food for consuming thought and horror -- for a worm that would not die.

* * * * * (4)

Elizabeth Arnold Poe was an actress. Frail, intense, with a slight figure and large, wide-set eyes, she proved consumptive and died in December, 1811, at the age of twenty-four. Her second son Edgar was not yet three years old. David Poe, also an actor, had disappeared the year before. One child, William Henry, had been left with his grandparents because of his parents' destitute circumstances, and a daughter, Rosalie, was born in 1810.7 Though it would seem that she was the center of his universe, it is difficult to estimate the extent of Edgar's memory of his mother, conscious or unconscious. We only know that she spent her last months in cheap lodgings in Richmond, Virginia, growing thinner and racked with a tubercular cough, though no doubt still beautiful and clad in theatrical finery. In The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Marie Bonaparte introduces a tidy; psychoanalytical interpretation of Poe's treatment of women. This theory revolves around the image of the dying Mrs. Poe and its indelible picture in the mind of her younger son. The sub­ conscious effect of this tableau, Bonaparte explains, operating with a strong mother-fixation and a lifelong desire to remain faithful to this ultimate first love, cemented the concepts of love and death in Poe's mind. Henceforth, his ultimate, indeed, his only vision of beauty would be coupled with illness and death. This not only explains the morbid flavor of his writing, but also his peculiar attraction to Wirginia Clemm, who seemed marked for death at an early age. Thus, Elizabeth Arnold Poe is the culprit. One of the local women who aided Mrs. Poe in her last days was (5)

Frances Keeling Allan, the childless wife of John Allan, a Richmond tobacco merchant. She returned, with the orphaned Edgar, to her husband's mansion. Edgar appears to have had an excellent relationship with Mrs. Allan, who in conspiracy with her cousin, Edgar's beloved Aunt Nancy, protected the boy from his stepfather's wrath. Throughout his youth, Poe was faced with repeated threats of disownment by John Allan, and only his foster mother's petitions persuaded Allan to relent and finance another educational or military project for his ward. She died, however, in 1829, when Poe was twenty. Allan refused to eummon Poe from his post as sergeant-major at Fort Monroe, Virginia to his "mother's" deathbed until it was too late. It was during his teens, while studying at the English and Classical School in Richmond, that the young Poe began to dabble in verse. One of his first subjects was the mother of one of his school- fellows: Mrs. Jane Stanard, who at twenty-eight, was twice Edgar's age. She is said to have encouraged the boy's poetic pursuits, and came to be his inspiration for the celebrated "To Helen," that reverent and ecstatic celebration of ideal, classical womanhood. Soon after they met, however, Mrs. Stanard lost her reason and died. Another woman who was to figure very prominently in Poe's life in terms of a mother-son relationship was Maria Clemm, Edgar's paternal

I aunt, and the mother of his cousin-wife Virginia. Poe first came to live with Mrs. Clemm 1n:lBa9, after breaking with John Allan for the last time. Virginia was seven; Edgar was twenty. Poe lived with the Clemms on and off for the rest of his life.

When his health and fortunes were at their lowest ebbs, "Muddle," as he (6)

called her, repeatedly came to her nephew's aid, though her slim allowance as a seamstress was hardly sufficient for herself. Poe recognized her devotion and penned two short poems, "Hymn" and "To My Mother" in Mrs. Clemm's honor.

Virginia worshipped her big cousin Eddie, ~ho came to call her "Sis" or "Sissy." The reasons for their eventual marriage, as well as the nature of their connubial life are vague. But she fit, more or less, the ideal feminine image of his heroiness large, dark eyes, lily-white skin enhanced by jet-black hair, and a frail, unwholesome plumpness that marked her as consumptive. Until her death at twenty­ six, she appears to have served more in the capacity of a sister or cousin, than of a wife. But one thing is certain: in her lingering illness and painful death, she realized her husband's fearful fantasies and caused him to experience, once again, the all too familiar sense of the losa of a loved one. A similar type of sister-brother devotion existed between Poe and Sarah Elmira Royster, a Richmond neighbor. The two, first meeting in their mid-teens, immediately became inseparable, and by 1826, when Edgar left to study at the University of Virginia, had become unofficially engaged. Elmira's father, however, disapproved of their relationship and, conspiring with John Allan, intercepted and destroyed Edgar's letters to her. Not long afterwards, convinced that Edgar Poe no longer loved her, Elmira married the wealthy Mr. Shelton. Twenty­ three years later, when both of them had been widowed, the two met in Richmond and again became engaged. Whether or not this marriage would have actually come to pass is doubtful, considering Poe's deep (?)

involvement with Annie Richmond at that time. Whatever the case, Poe died ten days before the marriage was to have taken place.

Two poems written in Poe's youth, "Bridal Ballad" and "Song: I

Saw 'rhee on Thy Bridal Day," echo the theme of an otherwise happy bride tortured by the memory of a lover whom, by this marriage, she forsakes.

A story, "The Pirate," which Poe published at eighteen, is based directly on the events in the relationship of Edgar and Elmira. That

Poe regarded Elmira Royster as a sort of sisterly love, he uncon­ sciously admits here by calling the heroine Rosalie, after his own sister.8 (Rosalie herself, being retarded, did very little to fashion her brother's vision of the ideal woman.) In the three years following Virginia's death, and even before,

Poe carried on a number of passionate acquaintances within a set of mawkish Eastern poetesses, with whom he exchanged sensational letters, but little else. Two of these ladies, Frances Sargent Osgood (already ill with consumption and soon to die) and Annie Richmond (to whom Poe composed "For Annie") were married, and hence, could not have posed a great romantic threat to Poe. He made offers of marriage to Sarah

Helen Whitman and Elmira Royster Shelton both within a year. That Mrs•

Whitman cooly turned him down was, no doubt, to the poet's unconscious relief. For while outwardly anxious to fill the void first left by Elizabeth Poe, then by Frances Allan and finally by Virginia, Poe also showed a reluctance to realize his romances in any substantial way, by marriage or a similar commitment. When the wealthy Elmira agreed to marry him, Poe reacted by embarking on a self-destructive course of alcohol and laudanum which ended only in his death. In an early poem, (8)

"Introduction," he admits an inability to allow himself to love, except under the most ill-fated conditions:

I could not love except where death Was mingling his with Beauty's breath Or Hymen, Time, and Destiny Were stalking between her and me,"

It is worth noting that, growing up, Edgar Allan Poe very likely had no male figure to emulate, David Poe and John Allan both having fallen somewhat short in their roles as father and model of masculine adulthood. The elder Poe was an actor of dubious talent who had taken to the stage on a whim after giving up his law study. Erratic and alcoholic, he was also tubercular and probably died soon after deserting his family. Conversely, John Allan was a conscientious man of business, though a reluctant foster father. He raised Edgar under rigid discipline and expected him to pursue a career in business or the -· military, though he never allowed the boy any hope of becoming hms heir (Allan had four illegitimate children in Richmond). Throughout Poe's youth, he and Allan had frequent and violent conflicts which, finally after Frances Allan's death, resulted in Edgar's being disowned. Even then, the strong Oedipal conflict between the two did not cease; Allan immediately made plans to marry Aunt Nancy, who, to her nephew's great relief, refused the offer. While the women in Poe's tales are largely variations on each other, the male narrators are diverse and dimensional. The horror of these stories is invariably seen through the man's eyes, though the victim is usually the woman. And in at least one story, "The Mystery of Marie Roget," the crime is of a sexual nature. The recurring theme (9) in nightmares like "Berenice" and "The Black Cat" is that of the males' worst instincts (embodied by the orangutan in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue") avenging themselves upon the unsuspecting and innocent female.

Some, like the narrator of "Ligeia," (if we can assume that he is responsible for the poisoning of Rowena) have an unconscious motive. But more often, the man acts at the prompting of what Poe calls "The

Imp of the Perverse," as this passage from "The Black Cat" divulges:

And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS ••• Who has not a hundred times, found himself commiting a vile or stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself -- to offer violence to its own nature -- to do wrong for wrong's sake only -- that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; -- hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; -- hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; -- hung it because I knew that in doing so., I was commiting a sin -- a deadly sin that would so jeapordize my immortal soul as to place it -- if such a thing were possible -­ even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.

* * * * *

The typical Poe heroine is characterized by a kind of indistinct, eclipsed beauty which lies more in imperfection than perfection. The figure in "The Sleeper" is, above all, "strange," and Ligeia's attraction is in the strangeness and irregularity of her proportions, (10) which the narrator finds it impossible to trace. Eleanora, like the ephemeron, is made in perfect lovliness, but only to die. A prominent exception to this rule is "To Helen," a poem written when Poe was only fourteen9 and still able to worship the image of a classically perfect stone statue from afar. Poe's women are almost invariably tall, emaciated (this, as in the cases of Ligeia and Madeline Usher, is usually the result of illness) and clad in white, filmy shrouds. Their most familiar features are the high, pale forehead of Berenice, Ligeia and Morella; the ivory skin of Ligeia and the Marchesa Aphrodite; and the ebony hair and white, gleaming teeth of Ligeia and Berenice. Bonaparte10 cites the occasional image of yellow hair as characteristic of the life in death motif, alluding directly to the yellow-haired figure of Life-in-Death in lines 190-194 of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which Poe had read in his youth:

Her lips were red, her looks were free Her locks were yellow-as gold: Her skin was white as leprosy, The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she Who thicks man's blood with cold."

This description is consistent with "Berenice," in which the heroine's tresses turn from black to yellow with illness. The heroine of "Lenore" (and its earlier version, "A Paean"), though dead, still betrays "life upon her yellow hair." Black-haired Ligeia returns posthumously in the body of the fair-haired Rowena. But by far the most prominent and telling feature of any Poe heroine is her eyes. In the poetic tradition, a person's eyes are (11)

windows to their soul, and Poe also regards them as a sort of gauge of the interior of the woman's heart. In "Annabel Lee" and "For Annie," two poems which indulge implicitly in necrophilia, the dead lady's eyes remain as the phantoms that halunt and comfort the bereaved lover. Eyes also seem to be the least earthly characteristic of otherwise mortal women. Tamerlane sees heaven only in his lady's eyes. Helen (in the later poem of that title) possesses a "divine light" and a hint of her soul in her uplifted eyes. In the three tales of dead lovers manifes- ting their souls into the bodies of young ingenues, the physical reincarnation centers itself in the eyes. The narrator remembers Eleanora as he gazes into the "memorial eyes" of Ermengarde. The wisdom of her mother gleams in the "speculative" eye of the young Morella. The husband of Rowena doubts the possession of his wife's body by Ligeia's soul, until the spectral figure opens her black eyes.

Only Ber~nice, whose attraction finally identifies itself as fixated in her teeth, of all places, has neutral eyes:

The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and seemingly pupilless, and I shrank from their glassy stare to the contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips.

The appeal of these arabesque creatures for their obsessed narrators seems to depend largely on an imperceptible, ill-defined quality that they radiate. Like the subject of "The Oval Portrait," the beauty of these women is of a fluid, formless variety, Many, like the Marchesa in "The Assignation," are seen only at night. Ligeia, the most ideally perfect heroine, "came and departed as a shadow." She is recalled out of the past, vaguely and impalpably. Her husband cannot (12)

remember where he first became acquainted with her, or even her family name. The name of the earthly Rowena, in contrast, is given -- first and last -- as welL as the region of her birth. It is as though women, like all elusive delights, seem to lose their magic when defined too clearly. The younger Morella is ten years old before her father finally gives her a name -- whereupon she promptly dies. Tamerlane recognizes this quality in his lady, and respects it:

I have no words - alas - to tell The lovliness of loving well! Nor would I now attempt to trace The more than beauty of a face Whose lineaments, upon my mind Are- shadows on th' unstable wind •••

·rhe most recurrent conflict in Poe's writing -- the struggle between what Freud called the Pleasure Principle and the Reality

Principle11 -- is fought out over and over again by marginal male P4rrators,in their encounters with women. These women, known almost invariably by a single, exotic sobriquet -- Eulalie, N.orella, Ulalume -- are characters of a place and time entirely removed from Poe's world, that is, 19th century America. Some, like Ermengarde in "Eleanora" and ·rripetta in "Hop Frog, " hail from distant, unknown regions. Others, like Ligeia herself, come from nowhere, into the narrator's life. All are idealizations, symbols of a better place and time, or state of mind: ideals that the author doggedly struggles to reconcile with his own mundane reality. When an actual murder occuring in New York in 1841 provided the plot for one 0f his detective stories, Poe reset the tale in Paris and changed the name of the victim from Mary Rogers to Marie Roget.12 (lJ)

Helen {in the earlier poem entitled "To Helen") embodies "The glory that was Greece I And the grandeur that was Rome" in her classic face and statuesque proportions• The dichotomy of "Psyche from the regions which I Are Holy Land" is typical of Poe's struggle to harmonize the Classical and Christian ideals. Helen is both the acme of pagan perfection, and a radiant saint in a window niche. Helen, Isadore, Nesace in "Al Aaraaf" and the Marchesa Aphrodite in "The Assignation" all link the celestial with the earthly. The narrator of "Eleanora" vows never to bind himself to any "daughter of the earth." One such less than divine maiden appears in the form of Rowena in ''Ligeia. " Though beautiful, she lacks the erudition of the aesthetic Ligeia, and she and her husband quickly come to fear and detest eachother. 'rhe conflict of imagination and reality is often defined as a simple disparity between the dream world and the real world -- fancy and reason. Two mythical figures that Poe repeatedly pays homage to are Psyche and Astarte, who are associated with the soul and the carnal passions, respectively.1J The narrators of ~Mor.ella" and "The Raven" unsuccessfully try to hide from their sorrow behind a wall of rationality and intellect. In an early sonnet, "To Science," the young Poe, apostrophising the exact "daughter of Old Time," bemoans the tyranny of dull reality over youthful dreams:

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree? (14)

The Raven, perched on a bust of Pallas, goddess of science and reason, informs the brooding lover that he shall nevermore be united with Lenore. Like the "highborn kinsmen" in "Annabel Lee, .. reality and undeniable fact appear to be the forces that keep the narrator apart from his lover. One thinks immediately of John Allan, the cold businessman, as he attempted to stifle the creative impulses in his step son and as he came between Edgar and his loving stepmother. A very common motif in Poe is the ultimate triumph of the spirit over death and other base phenomena. Often this occurs in the form of the child rebelling against the parent. Dupin, the amateur detective, repeatedly solves the crimes that leave the prefect of police baffled. The cousin-lovers of "Three Sundays in a Week" outwit their guardian uncle who intends to keep them apart (as, no doubt, the young Poe vainly wished to outsmart the parents of Elmira Royster). Hop-Frog and Tripetta, fellow sufferers in exile, triumph over their oppressors and escape back to their mythical homeland. Or, less typical, the bereaved lover of "Annabel Lee," "Lenore," and "A Faean" rises above the petty, sordid circumstances of the lady's death and emerges sublime. At first glance, there appears to be very little struggle between erotic and platonic love in the hearts and minds of Poe's protagonists. In most cases, they manage to achieve the best of both, by maintaining lucid relationships with brilliant women who resemble sisters more than lovers. With the exception of the artless, childlike Eleanora, they are women of profound learning. Morella, Ligeia and Berenice are each the mistress of immense knowledge, whether or not they choose to share it with their husband. But each of these relationships is fated to (15) evolve into something different and stronger within the course of the story. Egaeus betrays a tone of frantic doubt as he denies any carnal passion for Berenice:

During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.

These same perfunctory protestations are echoed by the narrator in "Morella":

With a feeling of deep, yet most singular affection I regarded my friend t-1orella. Thrown by accident into her society many years ago, my soul, from our first meeting, burned with fires it had never known before; but the fires were not of Eros, and bitter and tormenting to my spirit was the gradual conviction that I could in no manner define their unusual meaning, or regulate their vague intensity. Yet we met; and fate bound us together at the altar; and I never spoke of passion, nor thought of love.

Like Egaeus and Berenice, and Eleanora and her lover, Edgar Poe and Virginia-"Sissy" Poe were first cousins. The question of incest is delicate, but inevitable. Daniel Hoffman suggests that Ligeia's husband never asks his wife her surname, for fear of it turning out to' be his own.14 Bonaparte explains the incest motif, both in the life ., and works of Poe (and most conspicuously in ''The Fall of the House of Usher") as another form of fidelity to the mother, by means of marriage to a sister/cousin. But this is the least of the complexities of love in Poe's and his characters' psychology. (16)

Love and sexuality, as Poe deals with them, are not earthly phenomena. His view of love, from ''To Helen" ( 1823) right up until ''For Annie" (1849), is lofty and idealisticz it is mankind's only glimpse into divinity. This idealized view of love is reflected in his verse, as Haldeen Braddy explainsz

But Poe's references to love can hardly be interpreted as generally echoing traditional masculine affection. Often the earthy quality linked with strong masculinity is absent, as is also the expression of the forthright and gutsy passion of man. The more dominant image in Poe's emotional reaction associates itself with the moon and stars, with gardens and flowers, with rare perfumes and impossible heavens. The emotionalism is authentic, but it is femininely so. Even when his description includes anatom­ ical details of the physical body, he is not masculinely contented with the flesh and the world, but must reach for the spiritual and hold converse with Heaven. At its best, love transports men and women alike, but few men have dealt so repeatedly with the spiritual effects of human passion as Poe.16

But this attitude goes so far as to even include an aversion to sex, and a reluctance to consummate relationships, and this seems to be more than simply the influence of the morality of Poe's time. The poet might simply be unwilling to bring sex down to earth -- to make it a realistic thing, or as we have suggested, to betray the first mother-love. Bonaparte interprets several stories,, most particularly "Loss of Breath" as confessions of 1mpotence.17 This impotence could be the result of unconscious fidelity to the mother, or in the case of Poe and a few of his protagonists, too much alcohol. Two stories, "Berenice" and "The Black Cat," provide possible evidence of this characteristic fear of sex. In "Berenice," the lover, (17) both obsessed with and fearful of his lady's teeth, violates her grave and removes all thirty-two of them. Bonaparte links this bizarre exploit with the concept of vagina dentata and hence, the common male fear of castration. The Black Cat (whom, as we shall see, acts on behalf of the narrator's wife) inflicts a bite upon its master, who responds by carving out its eye. What occurs here, couched in common anatomical sexual euphemisms, is a half fearful gesture of affection on the eat's part, followed by an unconscious sex crime. Later, when the cat is discovered, walled up with the corpse of the wife, its "red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire" glow incriminatingly at the murderer. A deep sense of unity-duality in characters can be found in stories where the heroine acts as a kind of alter-ego to the main character. ·rhis device can be used as simply as in ''The Assignation," where the metaphysical tie between a man and a woman is so strong that the two become one and die at an instant. The device can take the form of simple self-glorification, as with Tamerlane, who loves his lady only insofar as she mirrors his own joy and sorrow. In "The Black Cat" the cat comes to act as a kind of familiar to the wife, hence the growth and change of the narrator's feelings toward his cat, mirror his feelings toward his wife. Or, taking this a step further, the narrator manifests his own self-hatred at=Fhatred of the wife and cat. The concept of psychic unity reaches the extreme in "Ligeia" and "Morella," two tales of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. The latter story's epigraph is from Plato's Symposium: "Itself, by itself solely, One everlastingly and single." Apparently the mind of Morella (18) is so formidable that it dies not with her body, but is reborn into that of her only daughter. Ligeia, of the same unconquerable intellect, takes possession of the body of Rowena, who up until that point is a creature almost entirely of the flesh, however beautiful. On another level, the female figure acts as the narrator's gentler, more vulnerable half, or as its conscience, like Psyche, the poet's soul in "Ulalume." The poem concerns a struggle between physical and spiritual love -- the volcanic passion in the poet's heart vs. his faithful memory of the lost Ulalume. He observes the crescent moon of Astarte (venus) -- that she is warmer than Dian, the virgin goddess. Psyche (whom the poet addresses as "sweet sister"), senses his distraction, and hurries him on to the tomb of Ulalume. A similar bond exists between the ailing Madeline Usher and her twin brother. As William Bysshe Stein explains it, "She stands for the emotional, instinctive side of her brother's personality, which has stagnated under the domination of intellect."18 It is easy to believe Madeline a figment of Roderick's imagination until she makes her initial appearance. But in essence, Roderick and Madeline are one: he the intellectual and she the physical, sensual aspect of the total being. He attempts to stifle her influence by burying her alive -- she returns and destroys him. And Roderick realizes this only too well as he reads Poe's poem "The Haunted Palace," which describes the seige of the monarch Thought's dominion by "Vast forms that move fantastical­ ly/ to a discordant melody." In Archetypal Patterns in Poet£!19 Maud Bodkin traces this idea back to Paradise Lost: the woman representing desire and passion while (19)

the man embodies reason. But Poe, unlike many male authors, is able to reconcile the disparate stereotypes of virgin and temptress. His women are the epitome of pre-lapsarian perfection, with no fear of a fall. Ligeia comes closest to the anima ("soul") described by Jung.20 Able to cope with her own libido, her passion for life as well as her instinct to propagate become more intense as her life slips away.

Hence, she is the most balanced of the heroines. We also see in her the authority and wisdom of Jung's mother archetype.21 The hero is faced with a destiny resembling Adam's: know the woman and have knowledge. Poe-l;i.•ke, he declines, and Ligeia carries her secrets to the grave. Two familiar archetypes of mythology are recognizable in Poe's woman characters. The first is that of Proserpina, the beautiful daughter spirited away by Hades (death) even in the blossom of her youth. Like Eleanora, her absence causes a change in the vegetation.

The second is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: the poet is allowed to reclaim his love from the underworld, but turning too soon to look at her, finds her gone. Poe's heroes, who are not unlike Orpheus, seem to possess an instinctive knowledge that nothingbeautiful can last if it

is pinned down or too clearly defined. As Bodkin suggests, this destructive wish for tangibility is often defined as physical desire:

I find that just such a fading into empty darkness of a loved presence through a turning to look upon it is known when an imaginative vision is scattered through the sudden transition to personal desire. When the poet's vision of an ideal not yet brought into life arouses suddenly the desire to see and hold it as actual, it is swept away, and he is left aware only of hands ~~retched out and the helpless words upon his lips. (20)

In The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Marie Bonaparte introduces the concept of ''The Mother as Landscape": the idea that the mother is the first embodiment of nature and the outside world, and that an individual's relationship to the landscape reflects his or her own mother-complex.23 Biographically, Bonaparte makes much of the fact that immediately following the death of Frances Allan, Poe returned to Boston, the city of his birth24 (as though, at losing one mother, he sought the memory of an earlier one); of the women in his life with names like Virginia Clemm and Annie Richmond 25 (Richmond, Virginia being 'the Allans' home); and of the idea that Poe's constant displace­ ment from city to city throughout his life mirrored his spontaneous transference of love from woman to woman. It is certainly true that many of the women in Poe's fiction are inseparable from their environs, and that the forlorn, outcast lover is often geographically displaced as well. Consider the narrator of ''Eleanora," who lives alone with his female cousin and maternal aunt in a secluded paradise known as "the Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses." As the love between the two cousins evolves, it is reflected in the landscape (What can it mean, when one day the white daisies shrink away and the ruby-red asphodels spring up lushly in their place?). Eleanora dies; the Valley is laid waste and the lover goes into voluntary exile. In "Tamerlane" and "Al Aaraaf," the female figure is explicitly identified as the personification of nature. 'rhe climate and vegeta­ tion of "The Island of the Fay" are symbolic of the dying Fay who inhabits it.

Probably the most obvious parallel of woman and landscape is in (21)

"The Fall of the House of Usher." "House," in this instance, stands for the family as well as the edifice, and Madeline and her brother are the last of the line. But Madeline is Roderick, and the House is both of them. Its unwholesome growth and crumbling masonry, ready to crack at-any moment, are simply the outward manifestations of the siblings' disease. In the end, the entire house, Ushers and all, is swallowed up by the tarn surrounding it. This reclamation by water is another, more traditional facet of the mother as landscape. Archetypically, the sea, and the element of water in general, is the source of all life, to which most of its issue returns. The sea claims the husband and wife of "The Oblong Box" and by the drowning of the husband, reunites the couple in death, as it does with the lovers of "Annabel Lee." And then there is the Marchesa Aphrodite (named for the water-born goddess) in "1'he Assignation" who manages to drop her baby into the Grand Canal, only to have her lover (and there is no evidence that he is not the baby's father) fish it out and revive it.

* * * * *

Nore than once in his essays, Edgar Allan Poe expressed his belief that poetry is "not a purpose, but a passion"26 and that the primary object of poetry is pleasure, not truth. Thus he allows himself to worship ethereal goddesses of the night over sensual, earthly women. But in another sense, Poe's favorite theme of the death of a beautiful woman united beauty and truth (witness Guy de

Vere at the grave of Lenore), illusion and reality, the ideal of Poe's

I)··~-::\ -..~ (22)

own vision and the shattering oppression of the world he could not deny. As we have seen, the poet and his beloved are pictured as being apart from the rest of humanity, with God and Nature alternating as the antagonist that separates the lovers, and the benevolent force that helps them rise above the pain of mortal life. The lovers either emerge sublime ("Annabel Lee") or are overcome and crushed by fate ("Lenore") or sometimes even left hanging in limbo ("The Raven"). But they are always persecuted, and never understood. Women, to Poe, were beautiful, transient things. Beauty was to be enjoyed briefly and then lost (or lost before it was enjoyed) and commitment to something beautiful inevitably brought on suffering. The pleasure he took in beauty was morbid, but not sensual. And his deific idealization of women is proof of the essential innocence of his nature. (2J)

NOTES

1. Haldeen Braddy. Three Dimensional Poe (El Paso, Texas:

Texas Western Press, 197J), p. JJ

2. Ibid. P• J6

J. Vincent Buranelli. Edgar Allan Poe (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977), p. 25

4. Edward H. Davidson. Poe, A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), P• 109

5. Ibid. p.111

6. Ibid. p. 106

7. Biographical facts in the life of Edgar Allan Poe are taken from Marie Bonaparte. 'rhe Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Imago Publishing Co., 1949), and Hervey Allen. Israfel. The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Rinehart & Co. Inc., 1926).

8. Bonaparte, p. 26n.

9. David Ketterer. The Rationale of Deception in Poe (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), p. 72

10. Bonaparte, p. 216 (24)

11. Sigmund Freud. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Liverwright Publishing Corp., 1961), p. 4

12. Daniel Hoffman. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1972), p. 118.

13. Ibid. P• 74

14. Ibid. P• 250

15. Bonaparte, p. 82

16. Braddy, P• 23

17. Bonaparte, p. 373

18. William Bysshe Stein. "The Twin Motif in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'", Modern Language Notes, Vol. 75 (196o), pp.

109-111. ~

19. Maud Bodkin. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 169

20. Carl Jung. The Archetypes and the Collective Uncon­ scious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 25

21. Ibid. p. 82

22. Bodkin, p. 202

23. Bonaparte, p. 286

24. Ibid. P• 36 ------·__,- ...... ---k'"-8.

(25)

25. Bonaparte, p. 86

26. Edgar Allan Poe. Preface to the 1845 poems; Works,

VII, xlvii. (26)

SELECTED BIBLIOORAPHY

Allen, Hervey, Israfel. The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Rinehart & Co. Inc., 1926)

Bodkin, Maud. Archetypal P.atterns in Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1934)

Bonaparte, Marie, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Imago Publishimng Co., 1949)

Braddy, Haldeen. Three Dimensional Poe (El P.aso, ·rexas: ·rexas Western Press, 1973)

Buranelli, Vincent. Edgar Allan Poe (Boston: ·rwayne Publishers, 1977)

Davidson, Edward H. PQe.. A Critical Stuqy (Cambridge, Mass. i Harvard University Press, 1976)

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Liverwright Publishing Corp., 1961)

Freud, Sigmund. The Origins of Psycho-Analysis (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1954)

Raining, Peter. The Edgar Allan Poe Scrapbook (New York: Schocken Books, 1978) (27)

Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1972)

Howarth, William, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe's Tales (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1971)

Jung, Carl. The Archetypes_and the Collective Unconscious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959)

Ketterer, David. The Rationale of Deception in Poe (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1979)

Moody, William Vaughn. A First View of English and American Literature (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905)

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edtsar Allan Poe (New York: The Modern Library, 1938) t

Regan, Robert, ed. Poe. A Collection of Critical Essays I (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1967)

If,