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Department of English and American Studies English Language And Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Monika Zelinková Emancipating Poe’s Women: Female Agency in Three Poe Stories Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Jeffrey Alan Smith, M.A., Ph.D. 2016 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature Acknowledgment: I would especially like to thank my supervisor, Jeffrey Alan Smith, M.A., Ph.D., for helping me with the thesis and giving me valuable advice. I appreciate everything you did to help me. I would also like to thank the staff of the library for helping me with searching for uneasily accessible secondary sources. Table of Contents 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 6 2 Perception of Women in the Nineteenth-century America: The Birth of the Woman Movement ..................................................................................................................... 9 2.1 The Cult of True Womanhood ......................................................................... 10 2.2 The Cult of Real Womanhood ......................................................................... 11 2.3 The Cult of Public Womanhood ...................................................................... 11 2.4 The Cult of New Womanhood ......................................................................... 12 2.5 Poe and the Cults of True Womanhood and Real Womanhood ...................... 13 3 Poe’s Women .............................................................................................................. 17 3.1 Personal Life .................................................................................................... 17 3.1.1 Elizabeth “Eliza” Arnold Hopkins Poe ..................................................... 17 3.1.2 Frances Valentine Allan ............................................................................ 17 3.1.3 Virginia Clemm ........................................................................................ 17 3.2 Female Writers in Poe’s Circle ........................................................................ 18 3.2.1 Frances S. Osgood .................................................................................... 18 3.2.2 Elizabeth Oakes Smith .............................................................................. 19 3.2.3 Sarah Helen Whitman ............................................................................... 20 3.2.4 Margaret Fuller ......................................................................................... 20 3.3 Poe’s Relationship with Women ...................................................................... 21 3.3.1 Influence of Women from Poe’s Personal Life ........................................ 21 3.3.2 Poe and Women Writers ........................................................................... 22 4 Poe’s Body of Work .................................................................................................... 24 4.1 Overview .......................................................................................................... 24 4.2 The Three Stories ............................................................................................. 24 4.2.1 “Berenice” (March 1835) .......................................................................... 24 4.2.2 “Morella” (April 1835) ............................................................................. 25 4.2.3 “Ligeia” (September 1838) ....................................................................... 26 4.3 Analyses and Comparisons of the Stories ........................................................ 26 4.3.1 Amount of Time Dedicated to the Female Characters’ Appearance ........ 26 4.3.2 Description of the Female Characters’ Intellect and Their Relationships with the Narrators ..................................................................................... 29 4.3.3 Sense of Mysticism ................................................................................... 34 5 Conclusion................................................................................................................... 40 6 Works Cited ................................................................................................................ 43 7 Resumé (English) ........................................................................................................ 46 8 Resumé (Czech) .......................................................................................................... 47 1 Introduction This bachelor’s thesis will be dealing with women in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. There are a lot of essays and articles concerning Edgar Allan Poe’s work, focusing mainly on the topic of horror and crime. This thesis will, however, focus on something that is relevant to the present days – women’s place in the stories. The fact that makes the topic relevant is that the question of gender equality has nowadays been one of the most discussed topics. As Edgar Allan Poe himself said, “[t]he death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (Macek 2). As the quote may imply, many of Poe’s stories and poems deal with the unfortunate fate of their female characters, for example “The Black Cat,” a tale in which the wife is of no importance, and her purpose is only to be murdered by her husband (Tales and Poems 437). My goal is then to draw the attention to those women in his works that go mostly unnoticed, women that are smart and play an active role. The thesis will focus on the characters of three tales, “Berenice,” “Morella” and “Ligeia,” where “Berenice” stands as the foundation for the following development of the other tales’ characters, ending with “Ligeia” being the most complex one. By considering the influence of the historical background and real women from Poe’s circle, this thesis will re-evaluate the “popular” perception of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales and demonstrate that not all of the female characters in Poe’s tales are vulnerable and helpless wives, but also elaborate characters. In the beginning, the thesis will focus on the background of the topic, from the historical point of view. The second chapter concentrates on the nineteenth-century society and its perception of women and their roles. Susan M. Cruea’s “Changing Ideals of Womanhood during the Nineteenth-Century Woman Movement” provides the 6 appropriate information for the chapter. It describes the development of the “Woman Movement” in the nineteenth-century America, providing the type classification and its further definitions. The phases of the movement are “True Womanhood,” “Real Womanhood,” “Public Womanhood” and “New Womanhood”. The chapter concludes with the explanation of how the movement influenced Poe and where those types of womanhood may be found in his tales. Moving on, the third chapter explores the real women from Edgar Allan Poe’s circle. While the first part of the chapter focuses on women from Poe’s personal life – his mother Eliza Poe, stepmother Frances Allan and his wife Virginia Clemm Poe – the second part deals with the women writers Poe knew, reviewed and who influenced Poe in his writings and vice-versa. The sources mainly used for this chapter are Arthur Hobson Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, Paul J. Macek’s Illustrated History of Edgar Allan Poe, Leland S. Person’s “Poe and Nineteenth-Century Gender Constructions” and “Women’s Place in Poe Studies” by Eliza Richards. Regarding the women of Poe’s personal and professional life, the reason for including them in the thesis is the influence these women had on Poe and his writing, which the concluding subchapter provides. For as Professor Floyd Stovall says, “for Poe [women] were a continual inspiration, and they always reflect in varying degrees his own personality” (Stovall 199). The fourth chapter provides the readers of the thesis with a general overview of Poe’s body of work, drawing information mainly from Macek’s biography. Before introducing the stories themselves with short summaries, the chapter presents the context of Poe’s career at a time of publishing the three main stories of this thesis, “Berenice,” “Morella” and “Ligeia”. The chapter focuses on the main subject of the thesis, that is on the analyses of the three chosen tales. It is divided into particular topics 7 of the analyses; the amount of time that each story contributes to the woman character, considering their physical appearance and the intellect, the relationship with the male characters and a sense of mysticism in each of the stories. With the support of such pieces of work as Leland Person’s book Aesthetic Headaches, the chapter continues to focus on the development of the characters. “Berenice,” being written as the first of the three tales, proves to be the least elaborate, considering the power of the woman character, developing into more elaborate “Morella,” all the way to “Ligeia”. It is “Ligeia,” to which the thesis pays most attention. The reason is that in the tale, the male narrator is not only astonished by Ligeia’s appearance, as the narrators in the previous tales also are, but he also admires Ligeia’s intelligence, which fascinates him (Complete Tales 226). With all the analysed facts, the chapter proves the thesis’ statement, that as the Woman Movement
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