Author and Reader As Uncanny Doubles in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe

The Poetics of Haunting and the Haunting of Poetics: Author and Reader as Uncanny Doubles in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe John Charles Caruso A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2014 Reading Committee: Mark Patterson, Chair Robert Abrams John Griffith Raimonda Modiano Program(s) authorized to offer degree: Dept. of English ©Copyright 2014 John Charles Caruso University of Washington Abstract The Poetics of Haunting and the Haunting of Poetics: Author and Reader as Uncanny Doubles in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe John Charles Caruso Chair of Supervisory Committee: Mark R. Patterson, Ph.D. Entitled The Poetics of Haunting and the Haunting of Poetics: Author and Reader as Uncanny Doubles in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe, this project examines the crucial tension between author and reader that animates Poe’s poetic theories and gives rise to the doppelganger as the central figure in all of his work. This study begins by exploring how Poe has emerged in recent years as one of the most original and enduring of antebellum American authors despite his long dismissal by literary scholars as juvenile, vulgar, and merely popular. As the young nation’s foremost critic and (along with his contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne) its primary innovator in the modern short story form, Poe insists that by combining a focus on compositional "unity of effect" with skillful and meticulous literary craftsmanship, a text can be made to embody authorial intention so fully that it completely determines the reader's experience and thus enforces authorial control over the work's meaning. Yet, as his many uncanny tales and morbid explorations of liminal states serve to attest, Poe recognized the vexed nature of textual ontology. Poe's poetic theory breaks down by what modern theorists would call "the death of the author." That is, while wanting to control the reader's experience, Poe comes to fear the reader's ultimate freedom and thus the failure of his own theory. The reader becomes his uncanny double. Performing a thorough analysis of the poetic theories Poe develops in his reviews and essays not only illuminates Poe’s choice of haunting psychological themes but also opens up new ways of reading his tales and poems while beginning to explain why his work so profoundly continues to haunt us. Table of Contents Introduction: Poe’s “Haunting” of American Literature ....................................... Page 6 Chapter 1: Poe’s Critical Reception .................................................................... Page 16 Chapter 2: Haunted by Poe: the Editor, the Author & the Critic – Case Studies of Rufus Griswold, Henry James, F.O. Matthiessen & Harold Bloom ..................................................... Page 51 Chapter 3: Poe’s Poetics .................................................................................... Page 102 Chapter 4: Applied Poetics: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Poe’s “The Raven” ........................................................ Page 140 Chapter 5: The Figure of the Double in Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” ........................................................... Page 182 Chapter 6: A Reading of “Ligeia” and Concluding Remarks ........................... Page 213 Works Cited ........................................................................................................ Page 236 Acknowledgments .............................................................................................. Page 246 Caruso, Haunting of Poetics, 6 Introduction: Poe’s “Haunting” of American Literature Entitled The Poetics of Haunting and the Haunting of Poetics: Author and Reader as Uncanny Doubles in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe, this project examines the crucial tension between author and reader that informs Poe’s poetic theories and gives rise to the doppelgänger as the central figure in all of his work. The chiasmus of the title captures the reversing and doubling that remains constantly at play in Poe’s tales and poems, but it also suggests that Poe’s deep obsession with struggles for contested authority and control over the meaning of texts informs not only his own creative work but drives the reader’s experience of Poe’s work. This psychologically disturbing and often deeply felt personal reaction to Poe’s writing has engendered a violent critical response to him and his work so that he has long remained a strangely polarizing and polarized figure in American literature. The strange disparity between Edgar Allan Poe’s incredible popularity and the lingering effects of his banishment from the American literary canon presents a strange conundrum, one this project explores in depth because, even at a first glance, there seem to be two Poes, as if he had already become his own uncanny double. The first is Poe as the most beloved of classic American authors, the sad-eyed figure in that famous daguerreotype, instantly identifiable through his creepy, grotesque prose and in his haunting poetry with its reverberating lyricism. This Poe appears in countless collections of his work, published in illustrated volumes for children, broadcast to the world in endless electronic editions. This Poe is an inevitable American icon and a cosmopolitan author whose legacy lives on around the world. This Poe inspires boundless adoration. Caruso, Haunting of Poetics, 7 The other Poe, however, has long been banished from the American canon of “high literature.” He wrote horror and detective stories and puerile poetry. The mere popularity of this Poe marks him as beneath critical notice. His work is considered vulgar, juvenile, amoral and in bad taste. He was an alcoholic and a drug addict, who married his thirteen-year-old cousin, and who died drunk, penniless, and friendless in a Baltimore gutter at the age of 40. He was anti- democratic, as provincial as he was pretentious, a misogynistic and racist antebellum Southerner. This is the Poe that his contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson calls “the jingle man,” the Poe reviled by his own literary executor, Rufus Griswold, who edited the first three-volume collection of his works, the Poe whom Henry James dismisses as lacking seriousness, the one whom F.O. Matthiessen pointedly excludes from his American Renaissance and Harold Bloom still rails against in The Western Canon. This Poe provokes endless anxiety and hostility. Yet, even as one notes this strangely double image of Poe, one cannot help but recall how often doubles appear in his tales and poems, not only in the form of actual doppelgangers as in “William Wilson” but also in the form of compulsive repetitions and returns from the dead, things that are lost but never go away, things that cry out even though they are walled in. Can this be merely a coincidence that we have cultural double vision when it comes to Poe and that there are so many doubles in his tales and poems? If this is not a coincidence, and the present project argues that it is not, then the question becomes instead why Poe’s writing proliferates doublings. The first chapter of this dissertation undertakes a literary history of Poe’s critical reception, with particular attention to his long exclusion from the literary canon. Because Poe’s reception is essentially the story of the return of the uncanny repressed, the second chapter shifts to a psychoanalytic approach in order to examine how Poe’s effect of doubling causes him to Caruso, Haunting of Poetics, 8 emerge as a haunting figure to Griswold as his editor, to Henry James as a fellow author, and to the critics Matthiessen and Bloom as guardians of “high literature.” To understand the doppelgänger as the central figure for Poe – not just thematically and diegetically, and not even merely in terms of how Poe has tended to be culturally perceived, but also in terms of how readers personally experience his work – one must first examine Poe’s own poetics because the double nature of texts themselves lies at the heart of his theories. For Poe, the well-crafted text can perfectly embody authorial intention so that a reader’s interpretation exactly mirrors the author’s intended meaning. As Poe explains in his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, “In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control” (572). Indeed, this short but densely packed quotation gestures toward most of the main principles of Poe’s poetic theories. Poe continually stresses the primacy of a work’s “unity of effect,” an authorially intended singleness of focus that should not be constrained by didactic ideals or moralism, and which he believes is best achieved in shorter works because the reader’s attention can remain perfectly fixed on the text for the duration of only one sitting. The forcefulness of the final phrase, “the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control,” suggests the severity of Poe’s convictions regarding authorial control. The third chapter of this dissertation undertakes a thorough articulation of the poetic theories Poe develops in several key essays, including his “Letter to B –,“ his “Exordium to Critics,” and his review of Twice-Told Tales. After an extensive psychoanalytic interpretation of “The Raven” in the fourth chapter, the fifth chapter returns to an even closer scrutiny of “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe’s fullest elaboration of his poetics and the essay in which he perversely attempts to reclaim authorial control over his wildly popular poem. Caruso, Haunting of Poetics, 9 Of course Poe realizes full well that texts appear to readers in a variety of uncontrollable contexts, and that even under perfect conditions all readers tend to experience texts in vastly different ways and discover widely divergent meanings. Indeed, making his living as a “magazinist” – an editor, a reviewer (who not incidentally functions as a professional reader and writes about what he reads), and a writer (of essays, tales and other miscellaneous pieces) – Poe recognizes that, via texts, the author and the reader are constantly seeing reflections of themselves in the other and endlessly changing places.

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