This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 67-16,736 SALZBERG, Joel, 1934- THE GROTESQUE AS MORAL AESTHETIC: A STUDY OF THE TALES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE. The University of Oklahoma, Ph.D., 1967 Language and Literature, modem University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE THE GROTESQUE AS MORAL AESTHETIC; A STUDY OP THE TALES OP EDGAR ALLAN POE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OP PHILOSOPHY BY JOEL SALZBERG Norman, Oklahoma 1967 THE GROTESQUE AS MORAL AESTHETIC : A STUDY OF THE TALES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE APPI BY T DISSERTATION COMM ACKNOWLEDGEMENT My debts of gratitude are many, and it would be impossible for me to say where they begin and end, I want especially to thank Dr. Roy Male for the time and energy he spent in directing this dissertation. Whatever its virtues, they are only the result of my exposure to his challenging and imaginative ideas. I alone am responsible for its limitations. I also have a deep sense of obligation to my teachers and friends in the Department of English at Oklahoma who, directly and indirectly, enriched my years spent in Norman. TABLE OP CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION.................................. 1 II. THE MARRIAGE OP HELEN AND PAUSTUS.............. l6 III. PREMATURE BURIALS............................. 52 IV. THE ANIMAL REALM.............................. 88 V. MAN AS MECHANISM.............................. 121 VI. THE ALCHEMISTS................................ l48 VII. THE SELP AND THE OTHER........................ 1?6 VIII. CONCLUSION.................................... 211 BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................... 213 APPENDICES........................................... 216 THE GROTESQUE AS MORAL AESTHETIC; A STUDY OP THE TALES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE CHAPTER I Introduction Poe so thoroughly emancipated himself from the cur­ rent American vogue of evaluating literature according to didactic or moral qualities that his aestheticism went to the other extreme of "art for art sake" which made pure subjectivism acceptable as art.l Poe does not touch morality. Although his aesthetic theory admits that goodness may be a by-product of art, he himself does not look for it. Sin and crime are absent from this part of his universe; and the terrible deeds that abound there are matters of psychology, abnormal psychology, not of ethics. Natural laws apply, working through human nature; the moral law does not apply.2 The above excerpts crystallize attitudes on Edgar Allan Poe which have not as yet vanished from the general critical consensus. The first excerpt supports a view, not as commonly held as it once was, that Poe's art was meant to please rather than instruct. The second excerpt insists on the idea, still current, that Poe, because he is so obviously concerned with abnormal men and their psychologi­ cal states, shows virtually no interest in ethical and moral questions. This study is concerned with both matters, which 1 2 are. In essence, really one: Poe’s art and its essentially ethical character. More specifically, this dissertation will discuss one major component of his aesthetics, the grotesque, the basic source of horror and humor in the fiction, and its moral and ethical function. Eventually, I hope to demon­ strate that Poe, in his evocation of the grotesque, creates what might be called a moral aesthetic: that is, the use of horror and humor for the purpose of evaluating man and society. Critics have generally departed from the view pre­ sented by Yvor Winters that Poe’s fiction is characterized by an absence of theme. Winters writes that ". .w e see the story-teller, like the poet, interested primarily in the creation of emotion for its oivn sake, not in the understand­ ing of experience.Poe himself is responsible for foster­ ing this view because of his pronouncements in "The Philosophy of Composition," as well as in other essays, which emphasize the importance of effect, e.g., the elevation of the soul and the contemplation of the beautiful. In the "Poetic Principle," for instance, Poe repudiates the heresy of The Didactic and takes issue with the notion that every poem should have a moral. Doubtless, the most damaging remarks that Poe makes regarding a specific form of didacticism, allegory, occur in his essay on Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales : The deepest emotion aroused within us by the happiest allegory, as allegory, is a very, very imper­ fectly satisfied sense of the writer’s ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should preferred his not having attempted to overcome. The fallacy of the idea that allegory, in any of its moods, can he made to enforce a truth— that metaphor, for example, may illus­ trate as well as embellish an argument— could be promptly demonstrated; the converse of the supposed fact might be shown, indeed, with very little trouble. (Works, XIII, l48) Poe goes on in the same essay to call Pilgrim's Progress "a ludicrously over-rated book," but in his praise of De La Motte Fouque, he indicates that he is not categorically against all allegory; "Of allegory properly handled, judi­ ciously subdued, seen only as a shadow or by suggestive glimpses, and making its nearest approach to truth in a not obtrusive and therefore not unpleasant appositeness, the "Undine" of De La Motte Fouque is the best, and undoubtedly a very remarkable specimen" (Works. XIII, l49). In an earlier essay on Twice-Told Tales. Poe had praised the "strong undercurrent of suggestion" (Works. XI, 107), an expression repeated in one form or another elsewhere in his criticism. Poe, in an almost grudging way, hints at an interest in theme and meaning, even though his vocabulary, e.g., "truth" and "strong undercurrent of suggestion," is admittedly vague. It is through his assertive pronouncements on unity of effect, and in his denigration of allegory, that Poe offers Winters some support for his position. Neverthe­ less, it is Edwin Honig, rather than Yvor Winters, who presents what has probably become a normative critical view of Poe: . the novels and tales of Melville, Poe, Hawthorne and James, like the narrative poems of Coleridge, seem often to hide behind the fanoifi even when they are most serious. Generally in tneir work the qualities of elusiveness and understatement, of mystification and wit, presented in an excruciating tone of lightness that pretends to be a salutary suppression of the horrible and irrational, make for a growing tension that ultimately reveals the dead­ seriousness behind the make-believe. These qualities, expressed in different ways by each of them, unite such writers on a common ground of symbolic intent; the same qualities also attract modern readers who see in them the essence of symbolic and allegorical art without necessarily distinguishing between the two.5 That Poe cultivated a symbolic and allegorical vein is, by now, a matter of literary history and needs no further argu­ ment. The crucial question, and one that is open to debate, concerns the meaning of Poe’s allegorical level and the extent to which it permeates the poetry and/or the fiction. One major view of Poe’s allegorical intent that I should like to consider is that of Richard Wilbur who has stated his position in three separate but closely related essays.^ Wilbur’s elucidation of Poe’s central allegorical level rests on what is basically a dated, as well as an over­ stated, romantic archetype: the poet as escapist. The substance of his argument is that Poe had two great subjects: "first, the war between the poetic soul and the external world; second, the war between the poetic soul and the earthly self to which it is bound. All of Poe’s major stories are allegorical representations of these conflicts, and everything he wrote bore somehow on them.The result of such conflict, Wilbur feels, is ". the effort of the 5 poetic soul to escape all consciousness of the world in dream. The withdrawal of the romantic poet from an abrasive materialistic world is hardly a new idea, but Wilbur develops it with great ingenuity as it applies both to Poe's poetry and fiction, finding support for his thesis in one of Poe's recurrent symbols, the enclosure: whirlpools, tarns, decaying houses, secluded mansions, "When we find one of Poe's characters in a remote valley, or a claustral room," Wilbur remarks, "we know that he is in the process of dream- 9 ing his way out of the world." My own interpretation of Poe's enclosures, and their function within the fiction, is essentially different from Wilbur's and will be taken up later in this study. More important, however, is my disagree­ ment with Wilbur on the larger matter, the question of whether Poe is actually endorsing the kind of solipsism that he represents in the fiction. Wilbur, it seems to me, is much too exclusive in his view of Poe as essentially a romantic-allegorical artist, and ignores the fact that there was also a more tough-minded Poe, a man who was a literary critic, a literary theorist, a social critic, as well as a popular author who occasionally satirized his own romantic themes and techniques. What he fails to see is that Poe the neo-classicist repudiates Poe the romanticist. Of the thirty-six stories I examine in the body of this dissertation almost all of them subscribe to a pattern that seems invariable : the protagonist who lives 6 within his own consciousness, who psychologically and spiritually isolates himself from his fellow men, is thwarted, punished, or made the object of satire. In fact, any form of perverted self-reliance, whether it comes from a withdrawal into an imaginative realm or through the arrogance of intel­ lectual superiority, is ultimately repudiated.