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The Volatile Imbalance of Male and Female Agency in Several Short Works by Edgar Allan Poe

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The Volatile Imbalance of Male and Female Agency in Several Short Works by Edgar Allan Poe Disparate Affections: The Volatile Imbalance of Male and Female Agency in Several Short Works by Edgar Allan Poe Item Type text; Electronic Thesis Authors Hooker, Kaitlin Paige Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 29/09/2021 16:33:32 Item License http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ 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, Ligeia, 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.
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