Disparate Affections: The Volatile Imbalance of Male and Female Agency in Several Short Works by

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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/625008 DISPARATE AFFECTIONS: THE VOLATILE IMBALANCE OF MALE

AND FEMALE AGENCY IN SEVERAL SHORT WORKS BY EDGAR

ALLAN POE

By

KAITLIN PAIGE HOOKER

______

A Thesis Submitted to The Honors College

In Partial Fulfillment of the Bachelors degree With Honors in

English

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

M A Y 2 0 1 7

Approved By:

______Dr. Jennifer Jenkins Department of English ABSTRACT

This essay explores a paradoxical imbalance between male and female within three of Poe’s short fiction works: Berenice, , and The Fall of the House of Usher. Specifically, it analyzes both mental and physical agency, identifying dominant and submissive moments for both male and female characters in both categories, with neither gender being healthy while the other is, and neither unhealthy while the other is. The characters that make up the female side of this paradox are all women who are buried alive and who gain postmortem agency. These resurrected female characters consistently take both mental and physical power away from their male counterparts before a culmination and climax in their power roles when they reveal their continued life after death to male narrators. At this time, a resolution in the struggle between the genders occurs with female characters ending in positions of both physical and mental power.

This tension between male and female seeks resolution while simultaneously revealing Poe’s obsession and fascination with its imbalance.

2

Within the short fiction works of Edgar Allan Poe, living women are silent and flawed, either sick with a mysterious illness or functioning simply as objects against which violence occurs. However, in death women have great agency as creatures that haunt men and ultimately lead to their downfalls, either through emotional pain and psychotic ruin, or simply through the fear and horror they elicit from male characters when they rise from the grave. These women who die and rise again are extremely significant characters in Poe’s short stories Berenice, Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher because they stand as examples of female characters who take mental and physical agency away from male characters, and who grow stronger and more powerful after death. In these stories, women gain power only after death. Therefore, their mortality complicates their agency in that they have more power after death than they do in life as sources of aggravation or objects of love, lust, and fascination to men. In order to more fully explore the way Poe treats women and awards them agency, we must examine their differing circumstances within each story, the events leading up to their deaths, and what happens after death in respect to the power and transformation of each of them as characters, as well as the effects of this newfound power upon male characters. Within these stories, we see male characters in the end as weak, sickly, and psychotic as Poe’s women were in life, while women grow stronger both physically and mentally after death. This tension seeks resolution in stories published between 1835 and 1839, revealing Poe’s obsession and fascination with the volatile imbalance between male and female agency.

Though the killing off and removing of female characters would seem to take away their agency, Poe’s women possess more power in death than they ever had in life. In death, they have the power to drive men to madness with guilt and longing and to kill them with sheer force of fear when they reveal their continued life after death. Subsequently, they are described as doing 3 so while perfectly preserved, as beautiful as they were in life, while the male narrators let their mental turmoil wear away their physical being. These male narrators sicken, both mentally and physically, as their female counterparts did in life, and assume submissive, weak roles as women take power and dominance within the push and pull dynamics between the genders. It is only after death that Poe’s women transform into beings that are powerful and central to these stories that are narrated solely by men.

Though female characters have power in life, this power in no way rivals their agency after death. In The Fall of the House of Usher Madeline Usher functions as a threat to her brother’s inheritance as well as a possible liability if the undertones of their incestuous relationship are indeed true. In Berenice, the eponymous character’s beautiful teeth remain healthy and intact as the rest of her body wears away. These teeth, a symbol of her resilience and power, push the narrator into the madness that culminates after her death. In Ligeia the love the narrator feels for his wife is a huge source of unhappiness and distress both leading up to and after her death. However, none of these examples of female power can compare to the true agency women possess in comparison to male characters in their resurrection. Madeline Usher rises from her tomb and destroys her brother and their entire estate. Berenice’s ghastly, perfect teeth cause her husband to go mad and ultimately violate the grave she lays in, still alive, and— as he is discovered by others the end- exacts punishment for his crime. Lady Ligeia ultimately rises from her own grave in the form of the narrator’s new wife, Lady Rowena, and so dominates both her physical form, as well as the narrator’s state of mental turmoil. These female characters, though seemingly frail, sickly and tortured in life, are completely transformed after death.

Women within these three short works by Poe follow a common sequence. At the beginning of each story the female character is alive, beautiful, intelligent, and loved by a male 4 protagonist. Then the woman sickens and changes. Those with adventurous, happy spirits fade and are overcome by gloom, often beginning to mirror their male counterparts. Those characterized as gloomy from the start descend further into mental darkness as their bodies wear away. In the case of Berenice and Ligeia, women sicken after the stories’ beginnings; in The Fall of the House of Usher, Madeline is sick before the narrator arrives. However, Madeline’s case is also unique in that she is not loved by the narrator but by her brother, a male character within the tale—and not the one who tells the story. After they suffer mysterious illnesses, these women die, though Poe is careful to omit the exact moment of death. Each story builds to the death of its main female character differently. In Berenice, the narrator begins to dread and fear her and her beautiful teeth before he learns of her death. In Ligeia, the narrator says he is shocked by the amount of passion and life his wife has until her last moment alive, and Madeline Usher’s eventual return from her supposed death is heavily alluded to as she wanders the house aimlessly and silently like a ghost even before her burial and resurrection.

Each story presents a subplot or backstory before the female characters reappear. These subplots are essential to the understanding of how a female character’s death affects the male protagonist. The most extreme instance of this is in Berenice, where the narrator finds a mysterious black box in his room whose purpose and content he cannot recall. After this discovery, he begins to hear a female voice and feel the presence of his late wife all around him.

Here begins his descent into mental deterioration culminating in his eventual violation of her grave. This tale contains the shortest interval between a female character’s death and her resurrection, which is significant in that the male narrator changes drastically in this short time, experiencing both mental and physical illness in the extreme in what seems to be a period of a few days. This quick and severe deterioration in the character of Egeaus is due to Berenice’s 5 state of increased agency in her life after death. The male characters who live after Madeline dies in The Fall of the House of Usher exist without her in a subplot that includes her burial and the unnamed male narrator’s extended visit with Roderick Usher. Her reappearance occurs after a longer period of time than that of Berenice, and the male protagonist’s descent into mental and physical illness is slower as a result of this. The longest break between a lead female character’s assumed death and resurrection occurs in Ligeia; the narrator moves away and marries another woman who also dies, and whose corpse returns to life as his first wife, Lady Ligeia. The narrator in this tale is mentally and physically well enough to leave his residence, and meet and marry another before his fall into mental and physical decay begins. It is not until very near

Ligeia’s reveal that we perceive the narrator as truly unwell. All three stories, then, have smaller plots that exist independently of the women they are about, and in each tale, the time frame of a male character’s loss of mental and physical health is entirely dependent on how long female characters conceal their state of continued life. These timelines point to the linked relationship between male and female, existing even after death in a power imbalance until the resurrection and postmortem reveal of female characters.

Each tale in this set of three concludes when women resurrect and bring about the mental and physical downfall of a male character. These last two steps follow one another very closely.

The revelation of continued life or the resurrection of female characters occurs at or near the end of the story, usually leaving us to guess at the fate of the male narrator. The Fall of the House of

Usher alters this trope slightly because the male narrator is a third party viewer who conveys the news of Roderick Usher’s death and the physical ruin of his estate. In the case of Ligeia, the narrator’s realization of the presence of his dead first wife is in the last line, and in Berenice, the narrator’s notice of the nail marks on his hands that mark his wife’s struggle as he pulled out her 6 teeth comes only four sentences from the end. The final sentence contains the revelation of her physical teeth that seals the truth of Berenice’s involvement in the strange events surrounding the male narrator. It is hard then to say what becomes precisely of these characters that fascinate and engage us while reading these stories, though one thing can be certain—female characters end in positions of mental and physical dominance in all three tales.

This resolution Poe seeks comes at the moment the male protagonist becomes physically and mentally aware of the continued life of female characters formally presumed dead. In The

Fall of the House of Usher, Madeline’s physical reappearance to the narrator and Roderick performs this resolution. In Berenice, the narrator’s physical realization of the presence of

Berenice’s teeth and nail marks on his hands and his mental realization of her continued life perform this resolution. In Ligeia, the narrator’s physical sighting of Lady Ligeia coupled with his realization of her return to the living perform this resolution. However, these resolutions do anything but create equilibrium; they serve to further separate the genders from one another, awarding female characters with mental health and physical dominance while simultaneously taking away mental and physical agency from male characters. However, this is the resolution that all three stories seek, each ending with the female protagonist in a state of both physical and mental dominance over her male counterpart.

These deeply fascinating female characters make Berenice, Ligeia, and The Fall of the

House of Usher into intricately woven tales about the limits of female agency. Poe scholar

Samantha Stobert writes, “Perhaps these female characters owe their popularity to their most compelling qualities: beauty and an aura of danger… whose dusky features embody sexuality, death, and all that was considered dangerous and unconventional in women.”1 It can be said,

1 Samantha Stobert, “"Misery Is Manifold": Bereavement in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe”, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 11, no. 3 (43) (2000): 282, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43308460 7 then, that these women are so compelling because they are what women are not often depicted as being: powerful and mysterious beings with real agency. Postmortem agency shifts the power dynamic between men and women in these stories, giving women physical power and psychological agency over the men who have become as weak and mentally ill as these women appeared in life.

Berenice (March, 1835)

Berenice, a lesser-known Poe tale, contains his usual elements: a beautiful, dying woman, a male narrator who descends into madness, slowly building horror, and live burial. After their marriage, Berenice’s perfect, beautiful, but unnerving teeth set her husband Egaeus on edge. His sick fascination with the teeth begins before his wedding to Berenice and remains on his mind at her funeral and after her supposed death. He describes how the image of them in his mind haunts him, saying, “I saw them now even more unequivocally then I beheld them then. The teeth!—the teeth!—they were here and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me.”2 The male narrator admits the effect Berenice’s teeth have had on him, saying that they appear more clearly to him in his own memory and imagination than when she had been physically present.

This moment, fairly close to the death of Berenice herself, is the turning point for the narrator at which he begins his descent into madness and obsession. Berenice, on the other hand, begins to gain power in this same moment. In making her husband fear an aspect of her physical form,

Berenice seizes agency from Egaeus by taking on a role of physical dominance normally reserved for men and male characters.

2 Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn. (The Library of America: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 230. 8

This constant imbalance of male and female agency is evident not only in the physical realm, but within mental capacity as well. Feminist scholar Joan Dayan touches on this notion of duality between male and female characters, represented often in Poe stories by mental illness contrasted with mental health. She highlights this double nature, saying, “These double derangements—her descent and his ascent—intensify the reciprocal relation between twoness.”3

Here the push and pull between male and female agency applies directly to the characters’ mental capacities. Male and female are in constant opposition: one cannot be well while the other is well, neither can be deranged while the other is. In this way, the fragile balance of female agency revolves around not only gendered physical agency, but mental health. Egaeus’ discussion of Berenice when we are first introduced to her is an example of this imbalance between the genders: “Yet differently we grew—I ill of health and buried in gloom—she agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy.”4 Even before the two are united in matrimony, the imbalance between both their physical and mental health is evident, with Berenice beginning as healthy and carefree, and Egaeus introduced as already sick and unhappy. There is no point within the story at which the two characters are one in either their mental or physical state. This is because of the constant imbalance Poe fosters between male and female agency and dominance within the story. This imbalance is complementary, existing within the confines of duality—unable to resolve itself until the gendered characters in the story end at opposite ends of both physical and mental health, with female in the dominant position in both instances.

Although mental dominance is a large factor within this hypothesis, physical agency is a defining factor in the imbalance as well. We see shifts and struggles in Berenice’s agency in the form of her physical teeth and their eventual extraction by her widower. Again we turn to Dayan

3 Dayan, Joan, “The Identity of Berenice, Poe's Idol of the Mind”, Studies in Romanticism 23, no. 4 (1984): 499, doi: 10.2307/25600513. 4 Poe, Poetry and Tales, 226. 9 for insight on this imbalance and the role that the physical teeth play within it: “His final pulling out of her teeth—the source of his anguish and adoration—is an extraction of identity so total and so purified of separateness that the final irradiation of the teeth rattling across the floor writes out the derangement of a brain.”5 Here, the dual “anguish and adoration” the male narrator feels towards both Berenice’s teeth and her overall character, shows that the teeth—to him— represent Berenice as a whole. This gives us immense insight into the way in which the male narrator views her; he allows the metonymy that is her teeth to stand for the whole person of

Berenice, and therefore sees her as merely an object herself. He is so terrified by the power that she wields over him that he must attempt to reassert his dominance over her body by forcibly removing her teeth—the objects he comes to see as representing her as a person. In this way, the push and pull of male and female agency reaches a climax within the story, as the weak and sickly Egeaus attempts to regain physical dominance over Berenice by completing a physical act.

Evidence of the male narrator’s continuing mental deterioration becomes even more prevalent after the death of Berenice. Though her perfect teeth set him on edge in life, in death the very memory of them pushes Egaeus so deeply into psychosis that he digs up her grave and pulls them out, returning with his hands “indented with the impress of human nails,”6 indicating that Berenice was indeed buried alive. However, because Poe omits the scene in which he enters her coffin to pull her teeth, unlike in Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher, it is not possible to see the powerful creature Berenice has developed into since passing from the living. We can assume that Berenice’s continued life after interment is manifest in the agency and power that she is now able to exercise over her husband. His eventual pulling of her teeth, then, is an act of revenge against her and the power she has begun to hold over him in her state of increased

5 Dayan, “The Identity of Berenice”, 492. 6 Poe, Poetry and Tales, 233. 10 agency. By pulling her teeth from her still living body, Egaeus is symbolically taking her life by taking from her the physical objects that, to him, symbolize her as a person. These teeth also represent her agency over him that acted as catalyst for his descent into mental derangement, as he is so deep in his own psychological mire that he is not able to recall the moment he physically removed him. Here we see an intersection between the physical and mental spheres of agency that consistently overlap and that exist in a constant imbalance between the two characters.

The pulling of her teeth—an extreme push for physical dominance on the part of

Egeaus—does not occur until after Berenice’s supposed death. This is because Berenice’s agency builds slowly as the story progresses, but does not reach a critical point until after her burial. The first time Berenice is described with any physical agency is when she seems to have physically grown to stand taller than the male narrator. Within a passage set in the brief time in the story before the two marry, Egeaus encounters Berenice in a state of heightened physical dominance: “But uplifting my eyes I saw that Berenice stood before me.”7 The male narrator must look up to take in the physical figure of Berenice, indicating that her stature is superior to his and simultaneously putting her in a position of physical dominance. In this same vein, after his first horror-filled viewing of Berenice’s teeth, the narrator says, “Looking up, I found that my cousin had departed from the chamber.”8 In this case, he is also physically beneath her in that he has to look up to realize that she has left. This incidence also occurs directly after the narrator notes the bodily horror elicited by Berenice’s too-perfect teeth that seem to be too physically powerful within her sickly body. Both of these instances of description show the physical dominance Berenice gains over the male narrator in the form of height that was not mentioned in the beginning of the story—when the narrator was in a position of power—but is highlighted

7 Ibid, 230. 8 Poe, Poetry and Tales, 230. 11 towards the end when Berenice begins to assume the more powerful role. Berenice’s continued life after her burial is further evidence for her ever-increasing physical agency over Egeaus. His defiling of her grave and pulling of her teeth is then nothing more than a last, desperate attempt to regain the physical agency and power he feels she has stolen from him.

Berenice’s supposed death is the catalyst for the chain of events that ultimately lead to the downfall of the story’s male narrator. Beginning with his obsession with her and her teeth, his slip into madness and mental illness, and eventual desecration of her grave that functions as a last effort to regain physical control, Egaeus weakens physically and sickens mentally as the story progresses. Berenice’s burial drives the narrator mad, causing him to hear her voice and feel her presence in his chambers. He claims that, “the shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears.”9 The narrator’s seemingly psychotic claims here highlight his state of mental frailty and serve as evidence for his decreasing mental agency and dominance within the tale. Poe scholar Arthur Brown discusses the aftermath of Berenice’s death and the effects it has on her widower,: “She has become present to him when death is present for her, for the destruction of her being means that he can possess her.”10 Berenice becomes more relevant and more present to Egaeus after her death because of his unconscious suspicions of the newfound agency she possesses from beyond the grave. As a result of this, Egaeus seeks to possess her in this state of her heightened presence and dominance by taking away her physical agency, which exists to him in the form of her teeth. By removing these small, white bones that haunted him in both her pre and post mortem states, the male protagonist tries to regain dominance over her physical form. However, this last effort to regain power position only pushes the male narrator further into mental illness and decay, as he is not even able to recall his trip to

9 Ibid, 232. 10 Arthur A. Brown, ‘Literature and the Impossibility of Death: Poe’s ‘Berenice’”, Nineteenth-century Literature 50, no. 4 (1996): 448- 463, doi: 10.2307/2933923 12 her grave in the end. Here we see the same type of gender role reversal that happens in all three

Poe stories, with the narrator descending into mental illness and personal physical decay as the female protagonist’s postmortem agency grows and, as a result pushes him further in this direction.

The relationship between Berenice and Egaeus is unique within this trio of Poe stories.

Though loving relationships are not always explicitly explained, as in the case of Lady Ligeia and her lovesick husband, they are often alluded to, as with Madeline and Roderick Usher. In contrast, the male narrator in Berenice admits to the reader, “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.”11

Though scholarly narrators such as Egeaus are not uncommon in works of Poe, the absence of a woman as an object of lust or love is. However, in Berenice, we see a twist on this trope in that—though the narrator claims he does not love her—he admits that he is fascinated by her and wishes to study her. This fascination is further confirmed when the male narrator goes on to say he considers Berenice, “…not as a thing to admire, but to analyze- not as an object of love, but as a theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation.”12 This confirmation of Egeaus’ thoughts on the person of Berenice as an object, though not unexpected, are startling to read in that they come before his eventual proposal to her. He himself even notes the deranged nature of this proposal: “…bitterly lamenting her fallen and desolate condition, I called to mind that she had loved me long, and, in an evil moment, I spoke to her of marriage.”13 This evil moment he speaks of refers to the notion that he, as a male, stands in a position of both physical and mental

11 Poe, Poetry and Tales, 229. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 13 power and knows that Berenice is loathe to decline his proposal. Within this fraudulent proposal that highlights the way in which Egeaus views Berenice as an object to be studied, we see again the motif of power balancing between male and female characters. Egeaus notes here that, although he is now horrified by her, he proposed to her when he knew he was in a position of power over her in which she would be inclined to accept him as a spouse. He even notes that—at this time—she was experiencing a “desolate condition,” putting him on the powerful, mentally healthy high end of the ever-tipping scale, opposite her, for this moment of proposal.

Berenice and her male counterpart remain in opposite states of mental and physical health throughout the tale. Joan Dayan writes about these differences in gender power roles: “In these tales, possession, multiple hauntings, and identity dissolutions suspend gender difference as a component of identity.”14 The verb “suspend” here refers not to deferring or postponing, but instead to holding or keeping undetermined, and to refraining from forming or concluding definitely. In this way, the other elements of these three Poe stories, including—as Dayan mentions—gothic themes like hauntings and possessions, take a background role to the constant and volatile shifting between the genders as a form of human identity. The struggle between male and female is so great that it seeps into every crevice of Poe’s short stories regarding women who are buried alive, making this conflict between the two sexes the forefront of each tale. Poe uses gender identity as the ultimate and underlying conflict propelling his tales forward, and allowing the concluding shift between the genders’ agency to reach culmination within female resurrection and assumption of power and dominance over male.

14 Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves”, American Literature 66, no. 2 (1994):244, doi: 10.2307/2927980. 14

Ligeia (September, 1838)

Similar to Berenice, Ligeia is another lesser-known Poe story that fits into the theme of contrasting male and female agency in conjunction with a female character who gains postmortem agency. This tale is unique in that it is the only one in this set of three where we see a traditional love story occur between the male narrator and female protagonist. The narrator spends well over half of the story describing Ligeia, both her physical beauty and her personality and intelligence. When she begins to die, gripped by the mysterious debilitating illness that seems to have affected Berenice and Madeline Usher as well, he speaks about her vivaciousness, her love of life: “I at length recognized the principle of her longing with so wildly earnest a desire for the life which was now fleeing so rapidly away. It is this wild longing—it is this eager vehemence of desire for life—but for life—that I have no power to portray—no utterance capable of expressing.”15 As Ligeia dies, her mental capacity stays mostly intact. She longs for life and the joys of living, and even has the psychological strength to write a poem for her husband to recite to her at the moment of her death. In contrast, the male narrator is mentally unwell and, as a result, is unable to understand this passion for life his wife has, even going so far as to admit he has “no power” compared to her in this vein. The balance between male and female mental health at this moment shifts to Ligeia in the dominant position, though her unnamed husband remains in a position of physical agency and dominance as she dies.

The unnamed male narrator touches on Ligeia’s power after death near the beginning of the tale saying, “That she loved me I should not have doubted; and I might have been easily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love would have reigned no ordinary passion. But in death

15 Poe, Poetry and Tales, 267-8. 15 only, was I fully impressed with the strength of her affection.” 16 We see here Ligeia’s powerful capacity for love, as well as the uniquely passionate heart she possesses. However, this mention of her power after death speaks to her state of increased postmortem agency. After she dies, her state of increased mental health and dominance forces the unnamed male narrator into a state of decreased agency. He sees visions of his late wife and experiences vivid trances that deeply affect and damage his mental health. As these visions, trances, and mental confusion begin for the narrator only after Lady Ligeia’s death, we can conclude that it is her state of increased post mortem psychological agency that affects the balance of power between the two genders and elevates her into a position of power.

In Ligeia, as well as Berenice, the physical form of the female character is altered as the tale progresses and as she herself progresses into a greater state of agency over the male narrator.

“—but had she then grown taller since her malady? What inexpressible madness seized me with that thought? One bound, and I had reached her feet!”17 The narrator is gripped with fear when he realizes the change in the physical form of his beloved, and comments that when he goes to her, he reaches only her feet, meaning that she has grown taller and more physically dominant since her interment. He is now physically less than and below her in this reversal of gender power. The male narrator is also mentally sickened by this realization, as he states that the thought of her physical growth seized him with madness. In this way, Ligeia attains more agency in both the physical and the mental arena in her postmortem state.

Similar to the narrator’s thoughts toward the female protagonist in Berenice, we see the unnamed husband come to view his wife as an object. Poe scholar Elisabete Lopes says, “When

Ligeia takes over the body of the bedridden Rowena, her identity is also veiled, since she is

16 Ibid. 17 Ibid, 277. 16 envisioned by the narrator as a thing, something he cannot define.”18 The male narrator is so frightened of his state of unknowing and lack of agency in relation to the female character of

Rowena/ Ligeia that he is incapable of viewing his once beloved wife as a female being with power, and so instead views her as an unintelligible object to be feared and misunderstood. This objectification of the female protagonist is the unnamed narrator’s way of trying to regain his mental agency over her, by making her less than human, and therefore less than him. Speaking to the link between the mental and physical spheres of agency and non-agency that affects both male and female in the tale, Lopes goes on to say, “In the end… Ligeia flees the claustrophobic mental/physical space where she had previously been imprisoned by the narrator.”19 Lopes describes the character of Ligeia here as exiting from this constant battle of shifting male and female agency, in which one or the other is always either healthy or unhealthy and neither can be well while other is. In this “fleeing” Ligeia assumes the dominant position in this battle of power by gaining the prevailing position in both physical and mental health, and “fleeing” the never- ending push and pull battle of agency.

Ligeia’s mental state throughout the tale is the defining factor in the presence of either mental health or mental illness for the unnamed male narrator. Near the beginning, when she longs for physical health and writes long intellectual poetry, the narrator is incapable of understanding her, and cannot overcome his mental unrest enough to be fully mentally present for her last moments. After her death, the narrator begins to descend deeper and deeper into mental deterioration and confusion while Ligeia’s spirit and mental agency blossoms. Poe scholar Paul Lewis discusses the strange mental connection the two characters share within the story: “The narrator’s state of mind in the last pages corresponds to and even seems to stimulate

18 Elisbete Lopes, “Unburying the Wife: A Reflection Upon the Female Uncanny in Poe’s ‘Ligeia’”, The Edgar Allan Poe Review 11, no. 1 (2010): 46, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41506388. 19 Lopes, “Unburying the Wife”, 47. 17 the return and departure of Ligeia’s “spirit”.”20 This mental correspondence and stimulation alludes to the connection between the two characters’ states of mental health and unhealth, the narrator’s descent into a position of non-agency giving more power to the supposedly dead

Ligeia, whose mental agency increases with each passing moment.

The mental union between the genders in Ligeia is one that is explicitly linked and that exists in a constant imbalance. In respect to the ways in which the male narrator and Lady Ligeia are psychologically linked, Jack L. and June H. Davis conclude,

It is through the narrator’s projection of his own psychological state upon Ligeia that his psychosis is fully revealed. For example, the narrator reports he is subject to alternating moods of great optimism and deep despair. The times he feels most optimistic appear to be when Ligeia is closest to him and he seems nearly able to grasp the wisdom he imagines she possesses. Conversely, his utmost despair come when he finally perceives that she is dying.21

Only when we compare the psychology of the narrator to that of Ligeia do we clearly see his state of mental deterioration. These “moods” refer to the alternating states of mental health and illness that the male narrator experiences as a result of his linked gender-agency relationship to

Ligeia. Stated here, the narrator is more optimistic, existing in a state of mental health while

Ligeia is alive, but begins to descend into despair when she starts to die, and, consequently, when her mental agency experiences an upward trend. As she dies, Ligiea’s mind remains intact, as she pens poems and attempts to cling to life, while in the same moment the narrator enters a state of crisis, mentally unwell compared to his dying wife. Thus, we see here the consistent timeline of female agency that increases steadily as female characters approach death and culminates in their resurrection.

20 Paul Lewis, “The Intellectual Functions of : Poe's ‘Ligeia’ and Tieck's ‘Wake Not the Dead’”, Comparative Literature Studies 16, no. 3 (1979): 213, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40245759. 21 Jack L. Davis and June H. Davis, “Poe's Ethereal Ligeia”, The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 24, no. 4 (1970): 170–76, doi:10.2307/1346725. 18

The narrator’s fate is unclear after Ligeia’s return to possess his current wife, Lady

Rowena. Gargano here references a pathological climax that the narrator experiences with the ultimate return of his dead wife: “The end of the story presents the absorbing psychological spectacle of the narrator’s complete withdrawal into an all-absorbing private fantasy. This withdrawal… reaches a pathological climax in the resurrection of Ligeia.”22 The word pathological here refers to an illness of mind and body both. That this climax occurs at the moment of Ligeia’s reveal is significant: this culmination of Ligeia’s agency over her unnamed husband causes this “climax” to occur, pushing her into the final dominant position of power within the story.

In contrast to Lady Ligeia herself, the unnamed narrator’s fate is left open-ended.

The last lines of the tale are a quote spoken by the narrator: “Here then, at least,” I shrieked aloud, “can I never—can I never be mistaken—these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes—of my lost love—of the lady—of the LADY LIGEIA!”23 The narrator here shrieks and repeats himself, his words disconnected and nearly insensible, pointing to his extremely deteriorated mental state. When we examine previous lines, we see how not only the mental, but the physical presences of the narrator and Ligeia interact and compare to one another. The scene preceding Ligeia’s reveal gives us insight into the male narrator’s last, weak moments before complete mental and physical collapse: “Arising from the bed, tottering, with feeble steps, with closed eyes, and with the manner of one bewildered in a dream, the thing that was enshrouded advanced bodily and palpably into the room.”24 The narrator is physically weak, barely able to draw himself from bed, while the resurrected form of Ligeia moves “bodily and palpably” with

22 James W. Gargano, “Poe's ‘Ligeia’: Dream and Destruction”. College English 23, no. 5 (1962): 341, doi:10.2307/373801. 23 Poe, Poetry and Tales, 277. 24 Ibid, 276. 19 rough strength and purpose, pointing to her state of increased physical dominance. The narrator also comments that he acts “bewildered” as if he were “in a dream”, evidencing his state of mental confusion and deterioration. This line, coupled with the following scene that depicts the narrator on his knees screaming unintelligibly conjures the ultimate image of one who has lost all physical and mental capacity, and is simultaneously on the verge of physical and mental collapse. In this way, the resurrection of Ligeia and the increased states of agency she displays bring about the ultimate demise of her unnamed widower. It is also interesting to note the way in which Lady Ligeia is first referred to in this line as “the thing.” Although he does not yet know the female form before him is Lady Liegeia, his only other natural assumption is that this being is his late wife, Lady Rowena—who lies within the chamber with him—and not an entirely separate “thing.” Here we see again the male narrator viewing and describing a female character as an object, just as Egeaus does in Berenice. This physical comparison to a non-sentient entity in the end is this male narrator’s last unconscious effort to regain dominance over the wife he thought to be dead, but whom has gained both physical and mental agency over him in her post mortem state.

The Fall of the House of Usher (September, 1839)

The Fall of the House of Usher is another Poe tale about a beautiful woman who is buried alive, the man who loves her, and their entangled fates. This particular tale is unique in this set of three in that the parallel relationship we see between our ill-fated female character and the man she entrances does not exist between her and the narrator, but, in this case, between her and her brother—an additional male character within the tale. The story is told by an unnamed friend of 20

Roderick Usher who observes Usher’s relationship with his sister, describing it in such a way that we as readers cannot help but pick up on incestuous undertones and therefore link the two in a gender imbalance. The Ushers’ bond is also unique in that they are twins, and seem to share some mental or psychological connection beyond that of the lovers we see in other Poe stories.

However, the parallels we draw from the constant imbalance of male and female agency remain the same.

Discussing this intricate push and pull of male versus female agency, Poe scholars

Claudine Herrmann and Nicholas Kostis establish the baseline differences in Roderick Usher that his sister’s death incurs: “Immediately after his sister’s burial, Roderick will become another: he will neglect his usual occupations, his voice will change, and, what is more significant, ‘the luminousness of his eye’ will disappear completely as the obscurity in which his sister is plunged rebounds on him.”25 Here we are able to note actual physical changes Roderick Usher undergoes after the death of his sister, and at the beginning of his gender role reversal as a weak, sickly, and psychotic character, as Madeline was in life. There is also an identifiable parallel drawn between

Madeline’s “obscurity” and how it “rebounds” on Roderick. Obscurity here refers to the physical darkness and closeness that Madeline is experiencing as yet another Poe character who is interred alive. The obscurity of Roderick, however, refers to his mental decay and descent into psychosis that stems from the supposed death of his sister and the power she has since gained.

There is a duality here of physical and mental decay that crops up continually throughout the story, evidencing Poe’s obsession and fascination with the imbalance he sees between male and female agency.

25 Claudine Herrmann and Nicholas Kostis, “‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ or the Art of Duplication.” Substance 9, no.1 (1980): 39, doi: 10.2307/3683927. 21

Though similar to the other tales discussed in the volatile imbalance of male and female agency between Madeline Usher and her brother, The Fall of the House of Usher is unique in that this imbalance between Madeline and Roderick seems to be trying to balance itself out. Poe scholars Claudine Hermann and Nicholas Kostis discuss this dynamic and how it relates to a resolution:

If his conscience is understandably disturbed at this moment, the manifestation of this disarray the parallel between his behavior and that of his sister- is governed by the function of the metaphor which, like love, is an internal bond and causeless. The result is that the literal and figurative meanings begin to stir and seek each other out, until they finally fuse, thus bringing to an end this linguistic adventure as well as that of its participants.26

The notion here is that the push and pull we see occurring between male and female dominance and agency throughout all three Poe stories is ultimately seeking relief in the form of equilibrium. The literal and figurative meanings mentioned in this excerpt refer to the constant struggle between both physical (literal) and mental (figurative) dominance between the genders.

Therefore, this imbalance that exists consistently between male characters and female characters who resurrect exists to do more than put the genders at odds with one another, and seeks an ultimate resolution to this imbalance with female characters attaining positions of physical and mental dominance.

Unlike Berenice, we are privy to Madeline Usher’s dramatic moment of post-burial reveal. Roderick Usher’s power and agency, though clearly faltering as he grows sicker and weaker after the supposed death of his sister, is extremely weak in this passage from the tale where he anticipates his sister’s return: “There came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering

26 Hermann, “The Fall”, 39. 22 murmur, as if unconscious of my presence.”27 Though the male Usher’s mental unravelling is alluded to before this moment by the narrator, this is the moment, just before Madeline’s reappearance, when the scale is tipped, leaving him in a weak, psychotic position of low power and agency, while the soon-to-be-revealed Madeline’s power grows, even before her physical form is presented in the narration. We see the power she now wields over him in her state of postmortem female agency before our assumptions about her continued life after death are confirmed by Poe.

In the last moment before Madeline’s physical reveal, Roderick, “shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—‘Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!’”28 Here we see the final draining of his mental power and his descent into a parallel state of helplessness, when he gives up his very “soul” to warn of Madeline’s return.

When he cries, “Madman!” he can only be referring to himself or the narrator, as Madeline is identified as “she” later in the line. We can assume it is himself at whom he screams, as these are the last words spoken in the tale, and therefore his last verbal surrendering of power and agency to his sister. This self-identification of madness is the last spoken verse within the story, snapping Roderick’s mental constitution completely before taking away his last shred of physical agency: his life.

Like the other tales discussed, The Fall of the House of Usher is ambiguous when it comes to the fate of its female character. At the end of Berenice, we see only the male narrator and his realization of his late wife’s continued life, and much of the same in Ligeia. But in this tale, we are able to see the physical form of Madeline return. Here, Poe describes the Ushers’ final moments: “For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold-

27 Poe, Poetry and Tales, 334. 28 Ibid. 23 then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.”29 The fate of Roderick is decided: he is a “corpse.” Poe also alludes here to

Roderick’s expectations of Madeline’s return to the realm of the living and the “terrors” of

Madeline’s new role that lead to his deteriorating mental condition. However, the only clues we have to the interpretation of Madeline’s future are her “now final death-agonies.” This “now- final” seems to allude to the fact that she has actually died this time, unlike the supposed death that occurred before she was buried alive. However, these words are ambiguous and do nothing to diminish her state of newly gained physical and mental agency over her brother in her resurrection.

Though physical sex and intimacy are never more than alluded to in the works of Poe, there is a strong correlation between his female characters and the notion of the succubus. In mythology, the succubus is an enchanting seductress that lures men into sexual activity that results in the deteriorating health and mental capacity of the male figure involved.30 In his exploration of the vampire motif in The Fall of the House of Usher, scholar Lyle Kendall discusses this notion of Madeline’s possible vampire nature: “Madeline is a vampire—a succubus—as her physical appearance and effect on the narrator sufficiently demonstrate.”31

Kendall suggests that the female Usher is indeed a succubus, feeding off her brother both physically and mentally, while she herself takes in strength and power. Although a theory often tied more closely with sex, it is possible that a succubus-style relationship was occurring between the twin siblings. In support of a relationship of this nature, the narrator describes

29 Poe, Poetry and Tales, 335. 30 Lyle H. Kendall, “The Vampire Motif in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’”, College English 24, no. 6 (1963): 450-453, doi: 10.2307/373885. 31 Ibid. 24

Roderick as growing paler, sicker, and weaker as the story progresses, while, in contrast, when the pair go to see the entombed Madeline she has, “the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip.”32 In death, Madeline is more physically appealing and healthy than her brother, who seems to waste away as she grows stronger. A suspicious smile also refers to Madeline’s continued life and mental power, as she is able to trick her brother into thinking she is dead when he visits her, and before her eventual reappearance in his chambers. Both the physical and mental agency Madeline has attained since her supposed death prove further that the ever-changing balance between male and female power shifts toward the female after her false burial.

The link between mental and physical health and the ways in which male and female characters never exists as both healthy or non, is evident in the way Roderick Usher describes and is aware of his own state of illness. In his article regarding the concept of “unhealthy” within

The Fall of House of Usher, scholar David Roche expands upon the sickness that the male Usher is experiencing even before the narrator’s arrival: “Recalling Roderick Usher’s letter, the narrator notes that ‘[t]he writer spoke of acute bodily illness—of a mental order which oppressed him,’ the dash functioning simultaneously as a Cartesian break and a link between the physical and the mental.”33 Here we see a quotation from the unnamed narrator from a letter, in which

Roderick Usher describes his own ailment. He calls the illness one of the body and the mind within the same sentence, linking the two very closely. The notion of a disease that affects both the physical body and one’s mental capacity is a horrific rarity in the realm of modern medicine, but to Roderick Usher and his unnamed friend, it is nothing special to note. This is because the

“illness” that Roderick experiences is not an ailment in the way we would consider it today, but a

32 Poe, Poetry and Tales, 329. 33 David Roche, “The ‘Unhealthy’ in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: Poe's Aesthetics of Contamination,” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 10, no. 1 (2009): 23, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41507856. 25 condition caused by the imbalance of male and female power and agency within the story. The only explanation for a sickness that causes such effect both physically and mentally is this volatile imbalance between male and female dominance in the story.

The ailment Usher describes to his friend is one that others spoke of and believed to be curable by two distinct methods in the time in which Poe wrote. A common cure considered for these male ailments was the presence of men and male conversation, which shows just how extreme the influence placed on male dominance and power was at the time.34 Poe researcher

Brett Zimmerman argues that the illness Roderick Usher experiences, both mentally and physically, is not one that can be cured by male- centered conversation: “Poe is aware of two

‘cures’ for the illness—one from the eighteenth century, which prescribes manly discourse for the suffering dandy, the other from contemporary phrenology, which involves the extrication of the dandy from his over stimulating environment. Poe deviates from the eighteenth- century cure by demonstrating that masculine company is insufficient.”35 The key term here is “dandy”, referring to a man of extreme style and neatness, and, often, an effeminate man. It is key to note this word that Zimmerman brings into play, as it more closely allies Roderick Usher with the feminine and with feminine qualities, which is especially relevant in the face of his state of decreased physical and mental agency. This non-dominance is linked with the female, not the male, so it would make sense then that Usher is described in a feminine way. Masculine company is insufficient because the female character within this story has taken agency and power away from the male characters so that not even their combined and double manliness can cure Roderick, as he descends further into a state of feminine non-agency. Zimmerman also touches on the link between the physical and mental condition that Madeline’s postmortem

34 Brett Zimmerman, “Sensibility, Phrenology, and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’”, The Edgar Allan Poe Review 8, no. 1 (2007): 47 http://www.jstor.org/stable/41506021. 35 Ibid. 26 increase of agency has over her brother, saying, “Eventually, the brother becomes convinced that

Madeline still lives, and his paralyzed volition arises out of his loss of reason and judgment.”36

This paralyzed volition, coupled with Roderick’s loss of reason and judgment, begins to take hold at the time of the burial of his sister. It is also at this time that we see Madeline change as a character, throwing the accepted male-female power dynamic off balance within the House of

Usher and assuming dominant physical roles herself.

Similar assumptions of male gender roles inflict similar damages upon the characters within this tale. In his article on male representation within The Fall of the House of Usher,

Jochen Achilles touches on these gendered assumptions and their consequences: “These economic and social definitions of masculinity engender and reinforce fears of humiliation which are in constant conflict with the desire for self-esteem and self-reliance, and thus produce psychological ambivalence.”37 Roderick Usher’s trust in his male acquaintance to be able to heal his disease of the body and mind with his manly presence and conversation alone most definitely contributes to his ultimate downfall as a character. These definitions of what it is to be “male”, and, inversely, what it is to be “female” ultimately damage Roderick Usher beyond repair, as he is not able to deal with the state of increased agency that his female counterpart wields over him in her post mortem state. As women of Poe’s time were never supposed to be strong or dominant, the very suggestion of Madeline’s continued life after her interment—indicating her dominant physical and mental agency—is enough to send the male character within the tale into a spiral of physical and mental illness.

36 Ibid. 37 Jochen Achilles, “Purgers and Montaged Men: Masculinity in Hawthorne’s and Poe’s Short Stories”, Amerikastudien/ American Studies 43, no. 4 (1998): 579, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41157418. 27

Conclusion

Within all three tales there is an ever-changing imbalance between male and female and their trading of dominant roles in both mental and physical health. A paradox exists in which only one gender can hold power over the other, and no time in which the two can exist as mental and physical equals. This shifting imbalance between healthy and unhealthy states does however seek resolution in the eventual dominance of female over male. Though some of the tales’ endings are more explained or final than others, it is only male characters whom we see in an uncertain state of agency at the end, and the female characters who we see in an extremely powerful mental and physical stance, having mastered both the physical grave and the mental capacity of a male character.

The female over male dominance in the end of these three tales hints at a larger idea about gender roles and assumptions. The thought of women as dominant characters is nearly blasphemous to the gender thinking patterns of Poe’s time, and it seems as though a more logical solution to this imbalance of the sexes would be to end the story with men in positions of power—assuming Poe were to stick to norms of the time in which he was writing. However, in

Berenice, Ligeia, and The Fall of the House of Usher, we see this is not the case. Joan Dayan presents an interesting theory on this treatment of women and their conclusions in positions of power: “Why does Poe so often present himself … as a “slave” to the images he has created?

What does he mean by this posture of enfeeblement, his claim of impotence? What I will suggest is that Poe articulates a specific relation of domination, where the speaker who has defined himself as possessor is in turn defined by his possession.”38 For our purposes, these images Poe has created refer to the female characters within his tales that die and rise again. Dayan herself

38 Dayan, “Amorous Bondage.” 246-7. 28 points out the relationship between male and female dominance, and the power play between the two, by suggesting that as soon as the male narrators within these tales assume positions of dominance by coercing women into matrimony, they become defined by their “possessions.” In this case, these possessions are the women they marry and it is these possessions that weaken and take agency from male characters. Marriage, then, becomes the ultimate act of enslavement and that, by marrying, these male characters begin their descent down the slippery slope of male non- agency. By trying to possess and objectify these women that they do not always love, male characters bring about their own declines in both mental and physical agency. In this way, the eventual dominance of female over male in the end is a way of rectifying this situation of injustice, and allowing women to take on a role of power, though they must first endure the trope of live burial.

This ever-changing and never-ending dynamic within Poe’s short stories exists because of the female-dominant resolution it ultimately seeks. Jochen Achilles says it best when he discusses the common fate of men within these three tales: “Once the power over women is lost, total decomposition of manhood seems to be imminent.”39 Men in these stories can simply not perceive, cannot understand, the notion of a woman with power, and not power that stems from her relationship to or with a male character, but independently and coming from within herself.

This failure and—frankly—denial, to comprehend on the part of these male characters is what incites the often volatile shifts in agency and power between the sexes, with women ending in a position of mental and physical power over men.

39 Achilles, “Purgers and Montaged Men”, 587. 29

As readers, the main feeling we get from these Poe tales about death and resurrection is often fear and unease. Is it because it is so rare to see women in these powerful conclusions? Or is it something a bit deeper? Poe scholar Arthur Brown suggests the reason for our unrest is simple: “But what this terror in turn allows us to feel is the sense of our own mortality, our ability to die, our humanness.”40 This mortality, this eventual end we see awaiting us in the distance, is a fear never far from our collective human conscious. The male characters within these stories then represent who we are as readers- ignorant, often submissive to greater physical and mental powers, and, ultimately, mortal. On the other end of the spectrum, the female characters within these stories represent Poe’s literary works themselves: powerful, intriguing, and undying.

40 Arthur A. Brown, “Literature and the Impossibility of Death: Poe’s ‘Berenice’, Nineteenth-century Literature 50, no. 4 (1996): 451, doi: 10.2307/2933923. 30

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31

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