Crushing the Clichés: Delineation of Women in the Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Researcher Supervisor Noshaba Ejaz Sohail Ahmad Saeed (Assistant Professor)

IN THE PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Session: 2011-2013

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH The Islamia University of Bahawalpur

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Table of Contents

Chapter One Introduction ...... 1

1.1 Theoretical frame work of study: ...... 3

1.1.1 Patriarchy: ...... 6

1.1.2 Sex, Gender and Sex Roles: ...... 6

1.1.3 Sexual Objectification: ...... 9

1.1.4 French Feminism: ...... 12

1.2 Chapter Schema: ...... 16

Chapter Two Literature Review ...... 17

2.1 Introduction ...... 17

2.2 Nineteenth Century Concepts about Women: ...... 17

2.4 Women in Poe’s Work: ...... 24

Chapter Three Portrayal of Women ...... 30

3.2 Madeline Usher: ...... 37

3.3 “Ligeia”: ...... 40

3.4 “Morella”:...... 45

3.5 “The Spectacles”: ...... 49

3.6 The Detective Stories and Images of Helpless Maidens: ...... 52

3.7 “The Oval Portrait”: ...... 56

3.8 Women in Poe’s Poetry: ...... 59

3.8.1 Never Ending Mourning in Poetry: ...... 64

Chapter Four Conclusion ...... 71

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Chapter One

Introduction

Edgar Allan Poe in Nineteenth Century proposed his renowned theory that the death of beautiful women is unquestionably the most poetic topic in the world (Poe165).

Therefore, in many of his literary works, women seem to be attractive but at the same time the passive victims who are either already dead or killed off in the beginning of his tales and poems. However, the aim of this study is to argue that Poe’s compositions offer more variations in the delineation of women than “the beautiful, dead women” (Poe 165).

Unfortunately, the variations in the characters and the active roles played by the women depicted in Poe’s works mostly remain unnoticed. Therefore, it is significant to have a look at the variety of women that Poe really presents in front of his readers, especially in his prose. Moreover, it is also interesting to investigate the representation of his famous dead, beautiful women seeing that she might not be so passive and victimized as she may seem at first sight.

The women in Poe’s fiction while animate are not presented as the physical entities rather they are monolithic; beautifully carved like a perfect statue but do not have any feelings and emotions of their own, it is just the narrator who defines and describes her. It has been argued by several critics that Poe never truly wrote about the women , instead he used them just as the objects or a decoration pieces who have no other task then settling in the corner; their beauties have been praised by the narrators and are just presented as the sources of inspiration. 2

They in the first reading seem to be the stone women who merely play the role of the emotional catalyst for their partners. Though they are actually the cause of all the action in the story or poem yet they are not given voices of their own. In most of the works by Poe a ravishing woman dies in order to expatiate the experience of the narrator.

Ladies in Poe’s fiction have been continuously judged by the narrator and it is just his point of view and feelings about them. They need not to tell their own stories. The female characters are usually killed off so quickly as if they have always been fated to die quietly, taking their part of the stories as a secret buried with them in their graves.

However, these women have a quality to live beyond their graves either physically or as the ones who always hover in the narrators’ minds. They reappear after their deaths and avenge all the pain they suffered while alive. The portrayal of female in various poems and short stories by Poe shows the impact of women on his narrators’ life. It is always a woman who dies herself as well as the cause of any other character’s death. For instance:

The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia”.

There is never ending mourning present in Poe’s literary works. His narrators always mourn on the death of beautiful women in their lives. One such example is of his famous poem “The Raven” which describes the death of the beautiful woman and whose narrator drives himself insane with the torment over the loss of his lover. Poe writes in his “The Philosophy of Composition” that the experience of beauty in all its melancholy extremity is “the death… of a beautiful woman” and, appropriately, “equally it is beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of bereaved lover” (165). 3

It is always woman who dies but the account and influence of her death is the source of inspiration for the narrator to tell his story. Kenneth Silverman believes that in his tales Poe “nourishes himself on a young woman’s death, in the sense that art was for him a form of mourning, a re-visitation of his past and of what he has lost, as if trying to make them right, since nothing could, he returned to the subject of the one and the only supreme beloved again and again” (qtd. in Weeks 149).

J. Gerald Kennedy argues in his New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales that ‘condition and consequences’ of death of women in Poe’s poetry and prose reveal his own

‘conflicted response’ to the death of women (113).Kennedy locates more positive image of women in Poe’s poetry, Poe “repeatedly expresses the notion that woman’s love was for him the essential source of bliss, security, and life itself (114). Poe’s literary compositions have a series of incidents that deal with the mourning and never ending remembrance of the beautiful women lost.

However, the women delineated in his works are never the representatives of the weaker sex; they are intellectually and spiritually strong women as in case of the Dark

Ladies. Madame Lalande in “The spectacles” is intelligent, full of life and the one who does not die rather she overpowers the narrator while animate, unlike the Dark Ladies.

The researcher has used some key concepts of Feminist Theory in the study.

1.1 Theoretical frame work of study:

The researcher aims to devise a model for the Feminist analysis of Poe’s literary texts.

The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on the previous research work done in the 4 field of Feminism, and to determine how the present study is different in comparison. It also deals with the basic theoretical issues and their advancement through history.

Feminism is a collection of ideologies and movements which aim to establish and define the equal political, social and economic rights for women. From these Feminist movements emerged the Feminist theory that aims to understand the nature of gender inequality, by examining women’s social roles and experiences; in order to respond to the issues such as social constructions of sex and gender. Feminist theory attempts to develop a comprehensive account of the subordination of women, and is a requirement for the development of effective strategies to liberate women; as it identifies the underlying causes of women’s subordination.

Rosemarie Tong suggests that feminist theory attempts to describe women’s oppression, to explain its causes and consequences, and to prescribe strategies for women’s liberation. In Women Do Theory Jane Flax also suggests that this theory is a systematic, analytical approach to everyday experiences. Flax argues that everybody does this unconsciously, and that to theorize is to bring this unconscious process to a conscious level so that it can be developed and defined (Flax 21). The basic purpose of the feminist theory is to understand the power discrepancy between men and women, and to understand women’s oppression. It deals with the issues like how the subjugation of women actually evolved and the changes that occurred over the time; and to derive the strategies to overcome this oppression.

According to the historians of modern western feminist movements, there are three waves of this campaign; the First Wave, Second Wave and Third Waves. These 5 waves are divided on the bases of different feminist issues during different times. The

First Wave started in the 1860s and dominated through to the 1920s. It dealt with the issues of the basic rights of women’s education, suffrage, and the conditions for working women. However, during this wave, the movement of Western feminists could not reach the public institutions and universities. The Second Wave began in the late 1960s and included inequality of laws and cultural values for women. This wave also dealt with the role of women in society. The production of feminist knowledge is common to both these movements; however, the dispersion of feminist knowledge is more related to the second wave. It is clear that most of the theories of feminism arouse from the Second Wave of the movements in the west. The 1980s marked the advent of the Third Wave of feminism that lasted till the early 2000s. This wave is considered a prolongation of the Second

Wave. It is also said that the third wave is a reaction to the apparent failure of the movement.

During feminist movement both feminist fiction and non-fictions were produced and created new interest in women’s writings. Much of the early period of feminist literary movement was devoted to revive and review the texts written by women. A

Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary traditions dominated by patriarchy. 6

1.1.1 Patriarchy:

Patriarchy is a system of male authority which oppresses women through its social, political and economic institutions. In any historical form that patriarchal society takes, whether it is feudal, capitalist or socialist, a sex-gender system of economic discrimination operate simultaneously. Patriarchy has power from men’s greater access to, and intercession of the resources and rewards of authority structures inside and outside the home.

The concept of patriarchy is crucial to feminism because feminism needed a term by which the totality of oppressive and exploitative relations which affect women could be expressed over and above this particular characterization, each feminist theory finds the different features of patriarchy that define women’s subordination. The two ends of feminist field might be represented on the one hand by Gayle Rubin who argues that if one uses the term sex-gender system patriarchy would be one form, a male dominant one.

Patriarchy thus, by definition, is sexist which means it promotes the belief that women are innately inferior to men. This belief in the innate inferiority of women is a form of what is called biological essentialism because it is based on biological differences between the sexes that are considered part of our unchanging essence as men or women.

1.1.2 Sex, Gender and Sex Roles:

Gender is a culturally shaped group of attributes and behaviors given to the females or the males. Feminist theory very carefully distinguishes between the gender and the sex. 7

Sex according to the feminists is the biological factor; on the other hand, gender is a social construct. Kate Millet and Shulamith Firestone radicalized contemporary thinking about gender. Firestone argues in “The Dialectic of Sex” that gender distinction structures every aspect of lives by constituting the unquestioned framework in terms in which society views men and women. Gender difference, she claims is an elaborate system of male domination. The theoretical task of feminism is to understand the system.

While the political task of feminism is to end it. (Firestone 5)

Polarity is essential to gender construction since each gender is constructed as an opposite of the other. Simone de Beauvoir was the first to describe ‘woman’ as ‘Other’ or

‘not man’. This concept of Otherness underlines categories the characteristics labeled feminine and masculine. Traditional sex differences studies are designed to prove that these characteristics are not socially constructed but derived from the biological differences. Feminists criticize pro-gender biological evidences as being fallacious.

Feminists do deny the biological differences between men and women; in fact many feminists celebrate those differences. But they do not agree that such differences as physical size, shape, and body chemistry make men naturally superior to women: for example, more intelligent, more logical, more courageous or better leaders. Feminism therefore, distinguishes between the word sex, which refers to our biological constitution as female or male, and the word gender which refers to our cultural programming as feminine and masculine. In other words women are not born feminine, and men are not born masculine. Rather these gender categories are constructed by society, which is why this view of gender is an example of what has come to be called social constructionism. 8

In conventional sociology ‘sex roles’ are the social roles allocated to men and women on the basis of biological sex. Feminists theory argues that gender associated behaviors are linked arbitrarily by society to each biological sex. An attack on such sex roles stereotypes was the first agenda of the feminism. Proving Simone de Beauvoir’s thought that one is not born rather becomes a woman. Feminists found sex roles to be learned quality, as assigned status and part of an ideology which attributes women’s role to nature. For example Kate Millet argues that sex roles’ stereotyping ensure the social control of women, because from childhood women are trained to accept a system which divides society in to male and female spheres and gives public power to males. Millet used the language and concept of social psychology in particular, Robert Stoller’s ideas of core gender identity, to argue that women are given expressive traits and men instrumental traits. Sex roles are form of oppression because they keep women away from social activity.

Alice Rossi, Jessie Bernard and Betty Friedan use social psychological analysis and argue that contemporary oppression of women is the result of the inclination of socially defined sex roles. Feminism thus, revolutionalized traditional sociology by showing how gender associated behavior was created by social propaganda. For example,

Elizabeth Janeway claims that women are really defined by domestic roles only in popular media. Much contemporary feminist researchers prove that observed psychological differences between the sexes are not innate but the result of sex roles conditioning, and uses many theological approaches from behaviorism to object relation theory. Phyllis Chester in “Women and Madness” argues that expectation for abnormal and non functioning human beings, and therefore, the stereotype of femininity is a 9 prescription for failure and madness. Other psychoanalysts found role theory to be in adequate because it relies on internationality whereas sex roles are part of a family creation of appropriate personality structures. Sandra Bem and others claim that sex roles stereotyping could be eliminated by the introduction of androgyny among some radical feminists a commitment to abolishing sex roles is taken to imply a commitment to androgyny. (Jacob 73)

Traditional gender roles cast men as rational, strong, protective and decisive; they cast women as emotional (irrational), weak, nurturing, and submissive. These gender roles have been used very successfully to justify the inequalities, which still occur today, such as excluding women from equal leadership and decision-making positions. The belief that men are superior to women has been used, feminist observed, to justify and maintain the male monopoly of the position of economic, political and social power. That is, the inferior long occupied by women in patriarchal society has been culturally, not biologically produced. Patriarchy treats women, whatever their role, like objects, women exist, according to patriarchy, to be used without consideration of their own perspective, feelings or opinion.

1.1.3 Sexual Objectification:

Sexual objectification is an act of treating a person merely as an instrument of sexual pleasure, making them as a “sex object”. Objectifying more broadly means treating a person as a commodity or an object, without regarding their personality or dignity.

Objectification is most commonly examined at the level of a society, but also can refer to the behavior of individuals. The concept of sexual objectification and, in particular, the 10 objectification of women, is an important idea in feminist theory and psychological theories derived from feminism. Many feminists regard sexual objectification as deplorable and as playing an important role in gender inequality. However, some social commentators argue that some modern women objectify themselves as an expression of their empowerment over men. While others argue that it increased sexual freedom for women.

Feminist scholars claim that the objectification of women involves the act of disregarding the personal and intellectual abilities and capabilities of a female; and reducing a woman’s worth or role in the society to that of an instrument for the sexual image that she can produce in the mind of another. Helen Cixous questions the identity and place of women in her essay on feminism named “Stories”, asking “Where is she?” and afterwards presents the following list:

Activity / Passivity,

Sun / Moon,

Culture / Nature,

Day / Night,

Head /Heart,

Intelligible / Sensitive,

Logos / Pathos. (2042) 11

She further continues her thoughts as:

[Sociaty] has always worked by … dual, “hierachized” opposition,

Superior / Inferior. Myths, legends, books, philosophical systems.

Whatever an ordering intervenes, a law organizes the thinkable by (dual,

irreconcilable, or mitigable, dialectial) opposition. And all the couples of

oppositions are “couples”. Does this mean something? Is the fact that

logocentism suggests thought - of all concepts, the codes, the values, - to a

two term system, related to ‘the’ couple man / woman?

Nature / History,

Nature / Art,

Nature / Mind,

Passion / Action. (2043)

For Cixous the answer is that everything is related to the Man / Woman opposition:

In philosophy woman is always on the side of passivity. Every time the

question comes up; when we examine kinship structures; whenever a

family model is brought in to play; in fact as soon … as you ask yourself

that what is meant by the question ‘what is it’ as soon as there is a will to

say something. A will: desire, authority, you examine that you are lead

right back – to the father. … And if you examine literary history, it’s the

same story. It all refers back to a man, his torment, his desire to be (at) the 12

origin. Back to the father. There is an intrinsic bond between the

philosophical and the literary … and phallocentrism. (2043)

Cixous argues that in all the binary oppositions mentioned above the inferior terms are always associated with the feminine, while the terms that occupy the privileged positions are always associated with masculinity.For her this never ending privileging of the masculine, which results from what she calls ‘the soliditary of logocetrism and phallocentrism, damages us all, females and the males alike, because it curbs the imagination and is therefore oppressive in general.In her 1974 essay “The Laughter the

Medusa”, Cixous suggests that laughter, sex (if not policed by patriarchal heterosexuality), and writing that may have liberating effects. Aware that writing usually serves the consolidation of patriarchal power.

However, repression is gender blind and represses male as much as it does females. Males, too can escape ‘philosophical theoretical domination’. Cixous chooses to call the subversive writing that she has in mind feminine and female because the force of repression are so clearly male.

1.1.4 French Feminism:

French materialist feminism examines that patriarchal traditions and institutions that control the material (physical) and economic by which society oppresses women, for example, patriarchal beliefs about the differences between men and women and the laws and customs that govern marriage and motherhood. Although Simone de Beauvoir didn’t refer to herself as materialistic feminist, her groundbreaking The Second Sex created a 13 theoretical basis for materialist feminists for decades to come. In patriarchal society,

Beauvoir observes, men are considered essential subject (independent selves with free will) while women are considered as contingent beings (dependent beings controlled by circumstances). Man can act upon the world, change it, give it meaning, while women have meaning only in relation to the men. Thus, women are defined just in terms of their difference from men, but in terms of their inadequacy in comparison to men. The world

Women therefore, has the same implication as the word “Other”. A woman is not a person in her own right. She is man’s other: she is less than man, she is a kind of alien in man’s world; she is not fully developed human being the way man is.

The first to argue that woman are not born feminine but rather are conditioned to be feminine by patriarchy, Beauvoir articulated an idea that is now called, as mentioned earlier in the chapter, social constructionism in her now famous words, “One is not born woman, one rather becomes one”. Beauvoir maintains that women should not be contented by investing the meanings of their lives in their husbands and sons, as patriarchy encourages them to do so. As Jenifer Hansen observes, “Beauvoir strongly believed that marriage … trapped and stunted women’s intellectual growth and freedom”

(2). In investigating themselves so thoroughly in the accomplishment of their husbands and sons, Beauvoir claims, women are trying to escape their own freedom to fulfill their potential in the world, a freedom that they often try to avoid because it is frightening: it demands personal responsibility while offering no guarantee of success or even of well being. “If woman seems to be inessential [being] which never becomes the essential”,

Beauvoir suggests, “it is because she herself fails to bring the change” (10). 14

One of many thinkers influenced by Beauvoir, Christine Delphy offers a feminist critique on patriarchy based on Marxist principals. Delphy who coined the phrase materialistic feminism in early 1970s, focuses her analysis on the family as economic unit. Just as the lower classes are oppressed by upper classes in the society as a whole, she explains, women are the subordinates within the families. Delphy argues that all the relationships between man and women are based on power: patriarchal men want to keep all of it, while non patriarchal women want power to be equally distributed. (260)

French feminist’s psychoanalytical theory is interested in patriarchy’s influence on women’s mind and behavior. For the oppression of women is not only limited to economic, political and social domains, it includes women’s psychological repression at the level of unconscious as well. Helene Cixous argues that language reveals what she calls “patriarchal binary thought”, which might be defined as seeing the words in terms of polar opposites, one of which is considered superior to the other. “Traditionally”, Cixous notes, “the question of sexual difference is treated by coupling it with opposition activity

/ passivity” (2042). In other words patriarchal thinking believes that women are born to be passive while men are born to be active because it is natural for the sexes to be different in this way. Thus, if a woman is not passive, she is not really a woman. Of course it follows that women are naturally submissive to men, that men are naturally leaders, and so forth.

For Cixous, women will not learn to resist patriarchal thinking by becoming the part of patriarchal power structure that is by obtaining equal status and equal opportunity in current patriarchal society. For women’s acquisition of power within existing socio- 15 political system would not adequately change the system. Indeed, the result would be that women would become more like patriarchal men because they would learn to think as patriarchal men have been trained to think. Instead, she argues that as a source of power, of energy. So therefore, a new feminine language is needed that undermines and eliminates the patriarchal binary thinking that oppresses and silences women.

Similarly, Luce Iragary suggests that, in patriarchal culture, much of women subjugation occurs in the form of psychological repression enacted through the medium of language. In other words, women live in the world in which virtually all meanings have been defined by patriarchal language. Therefore, they may not realize it; women don’t speak as active originators of their own thoughts. Rather they passively imitate previously spoken ideas. Irigaray puts forward that women only have two choices either to keep quiet (for anything a woman says does not fit within the logic of patriarchy will be seen as incomprehensible, meaningless) or to imitate patriarchy’s representation of herself as it wants to see her (that is to play inferior role given by patriarchy’s definition of sexual difference, which foregrounds men’s superiority).

The gender plays a key role in forming an individual’s identity, both one’s self- perception and the way one relates to others, is strongly influenced by gender. How a person is treated by others and by society as a whole is determined and influenced by the gender.

The study will focus on the identity crisis, subjugation and sexual objectification of the women in Poe’s fiction and poetry. The ideas propagated by Helene Cixous’s idea that women should resist the male dominating society by obtaining equal status and 16 opportunities in the Patriarchal setup, and Simone de Beauvoir concept of Women as the

“Other “would be focused by the researcher in this study.

1.2 Chapter Schema:

The first chapter of this study will provide the introduction of the areas that have been focused and the theoretical framework of the study i.e. the key concepts of the Feminist theory. In the chapter two “Literature Review” an account of previously published a works on the topics by different scholars and researchers have been discussed. In chapter three “The Portrayal of Women” the researcher will discuss how the women have been portrayed in the works of Poe, and different aspects of their characters are being focused upon. Chapter four “Conclusion” focuses on the final outcome and the findings of the study.

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Chapter Four

Conclusion

“But what we to do with Poe’s bleeding, raped, decapitated, dead, and resurrected women, brutalized, buried, cemented in cellars, and stuffed up [in] chimneys ?” (Dayan

10). Having this question in mind, it becomes rather difficult to form a positive image of

Poe’s women – especially when the image of rather monotonous and stereotype of woman’s image that is offered throughout his poetry comes to the mind. On the other hand there are the famous Dark Ladies, who appear as terrifying creatures who return from dead to haunt the past lovers or to suppress the female rivals. However, throughout this study, the researcher has attempted to argue that there is no such thing as typical

Poe’s women. In fact, Poe offers a variety of female characters throughout his stories. As

Paula Kot argues, “Poe’s preoccupation with the death of beautiful women actually reflects his interest in recovering women stories” (400). The male characters might seem to be the protagonists of these tales, as they are the narrators and the female characters are introspected through their views. Apparently they might seem the most powerful ones, for they mostly survive while the women die. Yet it is in fact the women who occupy the superior position in Poe’s tales. They deserve their title roles, even though

Madeline has to share it with her brother. Ligeia is not only superior to the narrator in that the narrator places himself in inferior position by referring to himself as a child, thereby placing Ligeia in superior position of mother. She is also superior to the other women in the tale, Lady Rowena Trevanion. Thereby, Ligeia is placed in the most powerful position among all Dark Ladies. Morella than again is the narrator’s superior in the tale as he appears to be her pupil. Morella is more successful in her studies than the narrator. 72

Moreover, the narrator even surrenders in front of the child by at length naming her after her mother, thus admitting the strong bond between both and the fact that he can never reach the higher position than both of them. Berenice and Madeline might seem the weaker women of the Dark Ladies, but they too must be acknowledged as powerful women. Madeline is important because even though we hardly see her in the story, she in the end falls upon her brother and thereby murders him. She therefore, literary occupies the superior position. Berenice on her part shows mark of struggle by leaving the marks on his body, when the narrator first buries her alive and violates her still living body In other words, in Dark Ladies tales, the majority of the narrators try to objectify these women, and represent them in fragmented terms to emphasize this objectification even more, each Dark Lady illustrates her strength and superiority in her own way.

Even the two ladies who do not seem superior are in fact a lot more powerful and important than they might appear to be. Whereas, the Dark Ladies are here represented in a different light that undermines their superiority, Madam Lalande represents the intelligent and bright women category of Poe’s women. She is the one who manipulates the man and does not die in the tale she rather lives and dominates him.

Both the Dark Ladies and intelligent women offer a positive alternative to the image of helpless maiden that is typical for the genre of gothic fiction and for Poe’s detective stories. Whereas, the Dark Ladies may seem to belong to the Gothic genre, they do not correspond to the figure of the helpless maiden. In this respect, Poe offers variation, in depiction of women in his tales and poems. Poe’s women can no longer be reduced to the one stereotype of the beautiful, dead maiden. Instead, there is a whole 73 variety of women and each of them deserves to be acknowledged – especially since this brings up more positive image of Poe’s women.

Death is viewed as the most passive state occurring which affects how women are viewed. Women, as dead objects are passive and lifeless for the gaze to contemplate and mind to idealize. It is easy to fetishize something that is no longer there; therefore the heightened ideal for woman to achieve is to die and become an object.

In “Berenice” and “The Oval Portrait”, there is a reinvention of self as an object, and in “Ligeia” and “Morella” there is not only present the gaze destructing feminism of women who refuse objecthood, but single handedly uncovers man’s “great secret”. While

“Ligeia” could be read as the final draft of Poe’s Women tales, “Morella” initiate the metaphysical question of personal identity, body and soul and that are better expressed in

“Ligeia”. Almost all the women in many of Poe’s tales suffer tragic fates. What separate them from each other is their reactions, whether it to be passive or thwarting.

While faint echoes of the so called stereotypical Poe’s women reappear in his poems like “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee”, those women never live to die like Ligeia,

Morella and Berenice. The poems’ shadow exist a state akin to memorial statuary: static, melancholy, and eternally beautiful. Poe’s women however, are sometimes more terrible.

The woman in Poe’s tales lives breathes and occupies her husband’s life, be it as an object or superior in arcane knowledge and passionate love. She is flawed, powerful and intimidating, while she will meet the same fate as Ulalume and Lenore, she does not die quietly. Whether to forgive a lover or avenge him, she returns, making her death not a sad 74 instance, but a philosophical positioning of what love, the afterlife, identity and soul could mean.

To assemble the theme of melancholy, Poe uses the idea of art and gender, in which the male speakers express the pain of losing a loved one. The absence of women makes the men feel powerless because their desires are no longer procurable. Masculinity does not seem as strong without women, who build the depth and height of authority for men. The return of the Dark Ladies from dead signifies the voice of women against male chauvinism – the idealized dead women created by the male writers in their works of fiction; females are deprived of autonomy of independent speech. In his tales, Poe possibly condemns misogyny and gives women a chance of being stronger than men.

Although the women have been killed in many of the literary texts by Poe, it is common in his tales to come across the tool of frightening reappearance of a person believed to be dead, especially the women returning after their deaths. However, the idea of reincarnation may lead to a point of view, according to which Poe was supposedly giving women a chance to speak. Nineteenth Century women were presented as imprisoned, silenced, and dying, that is how patriarchal society and authors generated their female fictive creatures, as well as, silenced them by depriving them of self- governing speech.

Poe’s “returning dead” motif may bring out issues other than repressed memory, the theme of women returning from dead can be taken as both horrible and empowering experiences which allow these women to receive some degree of justice, the otherwise would have been not possible. The Nineteenth Century women longed freedom – she 75 wished to complain against male domination; she desired to be free of plight in which she hovered; she wanted at least to demand respect, attention, and well deserved place in society. So in Poe’s tales the author seems to give women power of domination and not to be dominated; thus crushing the clichés and providing them a chance to have their own wills, their own voices, and their own place. Therefore, Poe probably found to give women the intellectual; and metaphysical power to break the patriarchal rules and to indict misogyny. In the creation of a powerful feminine character, one who carries out the promise of being unforgotten or perhaps immortal, Poe yet grants women the chance of being stronger than men.