RITUALS OF LIFE AND DEATH: RECURRING THEMES IN THE WORKS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE
Giddings, Robert. "Poe: Rituals of Life and Death."
Ed. Brian Docherty.
American Horror Fiction: From
Brockden Brown to Stephen King.
New York: St. Martins Press, 1990.
46-56.
THE AUTHOR’S THESIS
It has long been almost uncontested that Poe invariably wrote about himself. Julian Symons speaks on behalf of a considerable body of critical opinion when he says, ‘He had no subject except himself.’ It is my contention that Poe wrote as much about his own time as about himself: the leading themes of his tales of horror and terror reflect ideas current in the early nineteenth century. The problem lies in the way in which we read Poe. We read him as a nineteenth-century writer, and his Gothic fiction takes on a quaint spooky quality that has come to be associated with he period in which he wrote; yet his fiction was once modern and contemporary. And, if we make the effort to see it like that, we shall have to concede that, like many great creative artists before and since, Edgar Allan Poe took the thinks he found to hand and worked them into the stuff of his art.
The Gothic achieved its effect by inverting the values of the classical: in place of ancient Greece and Rome, it sought its haven in the Middle Ages; in place of order, harmony and the light of reason we have darkness and chaos; and in place of moral certainties, we have evil and confusion. Poe draws considerably on this well-established tradition, but adds some very important ingredients of his own. Since Marie Bonaparte published her Freudian study The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1949), the tendency in assessing and explicating Poe’s work has been to concentrate on his inner psychology, rather than to consider the impact of the outside world on his imagination. This is the inner-directed Poe, so well categorised by A. Robert Lee, the Poe who was in real life something out of his own work:
Poe the dweller among the undead and their crypts, the would-be
necrophiliac or vampire, the madman, the drug-taker, the alcoholic, the husband of a child-bride, the gambler and celebrant of ‘the perverse’, in effect none other than his own tormented figure of Roderick Usher . . . .
If we examine the textual evidence it seems clear that Poe was fascinated not by death itself (as the Graveyard School and Gothic romance writers had been) but by the rituals of death, and by the terrors implicit in prolonging a form of manifestation of life after the moment of bodily death. These are the themes endlessly rehearsed in Poe’s horror stories. If we move the focus of our attention away from the subject-centered Poe which Marie Bonaparte and her followers have more or less succeeded in making obligatory, we shall see that the intellectual furniture of the period in which Poe spent his creative life offers several possible sources for his preoccupations.
RECURRING THEMES IN POE’S WORKS
If we look first at Poe’s horror stories as a group, we shall see that certain themes are very strong and frequently recur, in varying forms. One theme is death and dying, given an elaborate, ceremonial treatment. This is new in horror fiction: the early English writers of Gothic fiction may have dealt in terrible goings-on, but they did not linger over death and showed little interest in its rituals. A second theme is the mistaking of life for death: Poe was obsessed with the catatonic condition in which life imitated death—a condition dealt with in morbid seriousness in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, and given the joke-in-the-tail treatment in ‘The Premature Burial’. A third theme is that of the continuing dialogue between the living and the dead. The most famous example of this is ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, and the theme receives comic treatment in ‘Some Words with a Mummy’. These recurring themes suggest to me that, besides drawing (whether consciously or unconsciously) on his own inner psychological tensions, Poe was deftly handling some of the leading ideas of his generation, and exploiting them to create some of the most exciting and dramatic horror writing of the nineteenth century. This, in my view, makes Poe a great American writer: unlike the European masters of horror writing, he belonged to a society of comparatively recent origin, with little of a past to which he could have recourse. A Southerner, too, so far as the cast of his mind was concerned, he was ot drawn to exploit the Puritan past of New England, as Hawthorne did. One of the unifying qualities of European Gothic was the exploitation of the Gothic/medieval past. Poe frequently attempts to associate his horror stories with the ‘Gothic’ past through copious references to Joseph Glanvill (author of Lux Orientalis, 1662, and Saducismus Triumphatus, 1667), Sir Thomas Browne (author of Hydriotaphia, Urne-Burial, 1658) and other older authorities, but in fact his most brilliant effects are achieved in his exploitation of contemporary themes, concepts, obsessions, and ideas.
POE: RITUALS AND CEREMONIES ASSOCIATED WITH DEATH
"The Cask of Amontillado"
Poe’s interest in rituals and ceremonies associate with death is very striking. Several of the stories deal with a death very elaborately planned, staged, and executed. In ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ the narrator plans to revenge the thousand insults he has borne at the hands of Fortunato. He lures him to his death with the bait of a favourite bottle of wine, but does not kill him immediately he has him in his power in the cellars. The victim is slowly bricked up, after having been rendered drunk by the wine which has brought him to his fate. The atmosphere of the story is generated not so much by the darkness, the damp and the scattered bones down below, as by the punctilious and time-consuming ritual of his entombment. Fortunato is treated to a personal funeral ceremony all on his own in which the references to the brotherhood of the Masons has its own ghastly irony:
At the most remote end of the crypt there appeared another less
spacious. Its walls had been lined with human remains, piled to the vault overhead . . . . It was in vain that Fortunato, uplifting his dull torch, endeavored to pry into the depth of the recess. . . . . ‘Proceed,’ I said, ‘herein is the Amontillado. . . .’
Fortunato is easily manipulated into the cavity and is chained to the interior wall and
then carefully bricked up. The murderer then re-erects the old rampart of bones to mark
the grave and resting place. The tale ends with the admission that this occurred fifty
years ago and that the place has not been disturbed: ‘In pace requiescat!’
"The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Oblong Box," "Hop-Frog," "The Masque of the Red Death"
‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ involves the attempted killing of a victim by highly elaborate machinery which would render his death into a ritual. The religious context of this story of the tortures of the Inquisition is not a piece of accidental colour. ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ concerns the murder of an old man, the careful, almost ritualistic dismembering of his corpse, and its concealment between the floor boards. ‘The Oblong Box’ is the study of a man’s obsessive desperation in taking his wife’s body from Charleston to New York by sea. In ‘Hop-Frog’ the King and his seven counsellors are ritualistically slain by burning, and swing in chains ‘ a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass’. ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ concerns the attempt by Prince Prospero and his court to take refuge from the Red Death which has ravaged the country, but Death intrudes into the elaborately prepared masque they have been enjoying. Death appears dramatically like the chief dignitary at a public ceremony. ‘And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. . . .And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.’
The Influence of Archaeology, Egyptology, and Mesmerism
Another very important influence was the establishment of archaeology as a respected academic discipline and the wide popular interest in Egyptology which resulted from the translation of the Rosetta Stone by Jean-Francois Champollion in 1822. . . . The revelations of the early Egyptologists (including Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, Karl Richard Lepsius, Samuel Birch and Heinrich Karl Brugsch) aroused popular interest in funeral rites, mummification, and the disposal of the dead in ancient Egypt.
In America, the first to lecture publicly on these discoveries (during the 1830s) was G. R. Gliddon, who appears in person in Edgar Allan Poe’s amusing little story ‘Some Words with a Mummy’. In this tale Poe himself is present at a scientific gathering where an Egyptian mummy is brought to life by the application of electrical power in much the same was as Dr. Frankenstein brings his creature to life. Gliddon is there to explain scientific matters and add the insights of Egyptology to the proceedings. He is also able to communicate directly with the mummy in its own language.
Looking beneath the comic surface of this tale, we can recognise that it is a satiric treatment of another favourite theme in Poe’s horror stories: communication with the dead. Here Poe shows himself familiar not only with the great craze for Egyptology but also with mesmerism and animal magnetism. Probably the most famous example of his interest in mesmerism is the ghastly little story ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’.
"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"
The narrator is an expert mesmerist who is allowed by Valdemar to experiment at maintaining communication with him as he crosses the borders of life and death during the final stages of a mortal illness. He talks with Valdemar as the latter’s body dies:
While I spoke, there came a marked change over the countenance of the sleep-walker. The eyes rolled themselves slowly open, the pupils disappearing upwardly; the skin generally assumed a cadaverous hue. . . and the circular hectic spots which . . . had been strongly defined in the centre of each cheek, went out at once . . . . The upper lip, at the same time, writhed itself away from the teeth . . . while the lower jaw fell with an audible jerk, leaving the mouth widely extended, and disclosing in full view the swollen and blackened tongue . . . .
Poe reinforces the horror of this moment by adding that, when the patient’s face assumed this set of expressions, there was a general shrinking-back from the region of the bed by those in the room. Various tests demonstrate that the man is physically dead, and yet the mesmerist is able to continue to communicate with him, and Valdemar, in his turn, is able to reply by means of a ghastly disembodied voice. This manner of communication continues for seven months after his death. When attempts are made to awake the patient, his whole frame immediately shrinks, crumbles and rots away upon the bed into a loathsome mass of detestable putridity.;
What Poe does here is to take the known state of the mesmerist’s art and apply it in an extreme context. Friedrich Anton Mesmer was born in 1733 and, after studying medicine in Vienna, developed an interest in astrology. He believed that the stars exerted a direct influence upon living creatures here in earth, and he developed various theories about the ‘life force’, which he associated with electricity. . . . he had started a vogue for hypnotism, mesmerism and spiritualism which became one of the great social fads of the nineteenth century. . . .
TOP OF THE PAGECommunication with the Dead: "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart"
"The Black Cat"
Communication between the living and the dead, which is the essence of spiritualism, is a recurring theme in Poe’s fiction, and invariably the message from that other side of the grave is a frightening one. In ‘The Black Cat’ the feline who denounces the narrator and exposes his crime is undoubtedly his own conscience personified, but he reacts like one who hears a voice from the other side:
Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman . . .
"
The Tell-Tale Heart"In ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, it is the loud beating of the concealed victim’s heart, rising in a crescendo, which, like a sign from the other world, betrays the guilt of the murderer:
No doubt I now grew very pale; -- But Talked more fluently and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased—and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound—much such a sound as watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath . . . but the noise steadily increased . . . . O God! What could I do? . . . I felt that I must scream or die—and now—again—hark! louder! louder! louder!
‘Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks! here, here! it is the beating of his hideous heart!’
The Similarities Between Life and Death: Catalepsy, Hallucinations, Insanity: the Divided/Split Self
Insanity was a subject of considerable interest to Romantic writers and poets—not only because of the extreme imaginative activity and bizarre behaviour of the insane, but also because insanity was the polar opposite of reason, supposedly the guiding principle of classicism. The controversy and debate that surrounded the diagnosis and treatment of the insane, as new and more scientific methods came to the fore, also excited interest. Poe seems to have been particularly fascinated by the schizophrenic group of illnesses, marked by a disintegration of thought processes, hallucination, and an unrealistic and wholly subjective relationship with the outside world, based on fantasy. The various kinds of schizophrenia are difficult to define, but they all involve disturbances of thought, emotions and contacts with reality. Andrew Crowcroft divides the schizophrenic disorders into four main groups.
What unites these terrible mental illnesses is the occurrence of hallucinations, of mental impressions of sensory vividness which occur without external stimulus. . . . Hallucinations and catalepsy—the conditions which seem most to have interested Poe—were well-known centuries before this time and had already been well-documented and frequently brilliantly described and exploited by writers, poets, and dramatists.
Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ has frequently been analysed as largely autobiographical, but it may also be seen as a brilliant account of a subject afflicted with hallucinations.
"William Wilson"
Wilson is always being pursued by his double, he hears whispering, and, when he kills the other William Wilson, he sees in the mirror his own pale, blood-stained person:
A large mirror, so at first it seemed tome in my confusion, now stood where none had been perceptible before; and, as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait. Thus it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my antagonist—it was Wilson, who then stood in all his rainment—not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute identity, mine own!
"The Fall of the House of Usher"
‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ also employs the theme of the divided personality, as Roderick and Madeline are twins and seem to be intended to represent two sides of a single personality. The theme of catalepsy so severe that it may well be mistaken for death itself is treated with grisly humour in ‘The Premature Burial’ and with full attention to its horrific potential in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, in which Madeline Usher is put living into her tomb, from which she escapes to terrify her brother.