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American Lit I
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Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edgar_Allan_Poe_2.jpg

Introduction
We come now to a favorite of many readers: Poe. Most know him as the creator of dark tales of mystery and suspense -- the Mr. Gothic of the heading. He actually wielded many different pens: poet, short stories, editor, criticism, novelist. In other words, a writer.

And as a writer, from the poem "The Raven" to the story "The Fall of the House of Usher," a central theme of his work is death. As he wrote in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition," "the death... of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world" (724).

Like the continental romantics (I'm thinking of the German writer Goethe here) this seeming fixation on death fits into the prevailing aesthetic of heightened feelings and emotions. And what can be more heightened than death? The beautiful woman part stems from a long strain of "beauty is fleeting" imagery and ideals that tug at the heartstrings by making us mourn the death of something when killed in its prime (think Marilyn Monroe, Princess Di). That's the "positive" aspect of death. The other side, exhibited in "The Fall of the House of Usher" and other stories, was the fear of being buried alive, a possible, though not common occurrence. Poe, like Stephen King today, understood that people would pay to read a story that frightened them.

Also a writer of the unconscious: I can imagine he and Freud having many long discussions . . . . Dream visions and states fill his work. Review the "Questions a Psychoanalytic Critic Asks" for an idea of ways to discuss this aspect of his work.

Terms and People to Know
Temperance: The anti-drinking movement prevalent in the 19th century -- and which reared its ugly head in the early 20th century. Timothy Shay Arthur Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1854) was a popular play and novel that "exposed" the perils of drink. Hawthorne's "Rills from a Town Pump" is part of the movement as well.

Gothic: fiction that revels in gloomy and mysterious settings (often castles and with other medieval props), strange, often supernatural occurrences, and dangerous circumstances for the protagonist. And of course, there is the beautiful maiden in perilous circumstances.

Life
Yes he drank -- and was the kind of drunk that couldn't remember anything for three days. And yes he married a (very) young cousin named Virginia . . . okay, okay . . . she was thirteen and he was twenty-six. But given his usual penchant for older women, this union seems odd and my have more psychological than sexual meaning (not to separate psychology from sexuality or anything . . . ). Poe seemed to desire a family more than a partner.

But enough with the scandal: he also invented the modern detective story and put American poetry on the continental map; his work influenced the French poet Charles Baudelaire.

See the textbook for more specifics on his life.

Times
Death was all pervasive in the nineteenth century. Consider the following extracts.

Dily Richards, writing from Mason, Tennessee in 1855, delineates a roll-call of the dead to his brother-in-law: "Your Brother Jon is ded [;] he Died the 11 of Sptenber last I am her by Alone. . . .Jon dident live but five days[.] [S]uppose he died with the fluks . . . . Ammy Richards is dead[,] Rebecah Richards is dead [,] Henison is Dead[.] [M]y yongest child About Twenty too years old an my our step son died in Mexico[.] Burrels oldest son is dead [;] he was About twenty years old[.][H]is dagter is dead[;] she was About five years old" (Saum 82)

A Georgian girl, from a school composition titled "Things that I Love," penned a rhapsody to graveyards which mirrors Poe's passion: "I love to walk in the graveyard, and read the inscriptions on the tombstones, the weeping willows fall so gracefully over the silent dead; here and there you may see a rosebush, or a bed of violets, planted and trained by some gentle hand over a dead friend" (Saum 91)

Godey's Lady's Book (the most popular woman's magazine of the antebellum period) vol. 26, 1843 boasts two poems entitled "The Dying Girl" Henry S. Hagert, and Mrs. John K. Lasky, as well as "The Memory of the Departed" "The Young Southern Widow" "The Mother's Lament" (about the death of a child), "The Trial of the Dead" "The Angel's Visits" ("And the Angel soars to his home on high,/While faith reveals, to the mother's eye,/ That he bears her sweet child to heaven!" Mrs. S. J. Hale), "The Mourner" ("She sleeps -- `the long and dreamless sleep' -- that voice is silent now,/ The seal is on her clay-cold lip, the death-dew on her brow.). And even a title as seemingly as carefree and lively as "To a Child at Play" ends, after picturing the "sweet frolic" of a "fair and lovely boy," ends with "And, when thy life is o'er,/ Translate thee to that `better land'/ Where sin and sorrow come not, and/ Where death shall be no more." (127) Lewis J. Cist

Drinking? Consider the following statistics.

Estimated consumption of Absolute Alcohol per Capita of Drinking Age (17+) population in gallons (Lender and Martin 205-206)

Lender, Mark Edward and James Kirby Martin. Drinking in America: A History. New York: The Free Press, 1987. Print.

Class Discussion

"Cask"

• look closely at the opening sentence -- is too much information packed into it? What does the sentence tell you about the narrator? Why doesn't Poe tell us Montresor's "injuries"?
• Would this story be as effective if told in the third person? Why or why not?
• The irony is heavy here. Mark the ironic passages -- what do they contribute to the story? What do they reveal about the characters?
• Why doesn't Poe let us know what the "insults" suffered by Montresor were?
• The setting is an important component of all of Poe's fiction. How does it work here? Consider the time, the place, and any objects in the story.
• Why does Poe make F keep repeating "Amontillado!"
• What is M. doing on page 1594 when he says "You are sick . . ." and " " and " " and even later when he tells him (1116) "Once more let me implore you. . ."
• Is there any humor in this story?
• In the family crest, who is Montresor and who is Fortunato?
• Is he being ironic about his heart?
• What about the final words? Are they directed to Fortunato . . . or to Montresor?
• What fears of readers is Poe playing with?
• One critic writes that the "Cask" is "on its surface, completely amoral, (yet) is perhaps the most moral of his tales" (qtd. in Reynolds 72). How is this so?
• What is the significance of Montresor's coat of arms?
• What is the significance of the names of the two characters? Fortunato = a pun -- both "lucky" and "fated"? Their costumes? The flagon of De Grave?
• Why should the narrator's heart grow sick? What is the meaning of Montresor's own scream? Why does he choose to tell it 50 years later? Who is he talking to?
• Characterize the narrator. Does his character develop or remain static? How can you tell that he understands human psychology?
• What hints does Montresor give Fortunato several hints of what's coming? Why does he do this? Does he secretly want Fortunato to catch on, or is Poe just manipulating the reader?
• Apropos of Poe's essay on 1488, does "The Cask" have only a single effect? If so, what is it? If not, what are they?
• Is Montresor insane?
• Who is Montresor talking to -- and why?
• Does Montresor succeed in his revenge?

"Masque of the Red Death"

• Prospero: ironic b/c he is both prosperous (a duke) and poor in moral (turning his back on his people). Also echo of Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
• Why have Prospero love "the bizarre" (1568)?
• What’s the purpose of the clock in this story? (1568) What does it symbolize? What is Prospero trying to stop?
• What does he set up in his abbey? "all the appliances of pleasure" (1568)
• Why so many references to dreams? (1569)
• Why does the mummer of the red death appear at midnight?
• "who dares thus to make a mockery of our woes?" (1570) -- who says this? Who did this refer to? How is this ironic?
• What does the mummer symbolize: Why personify this?

"The Fall of the House of Usher "

• What's the setting? How does Poe describe?
• The house almost seems like a character in the story: how does Poe does this -- and why?
• 1536 "In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air" Why this analogy? How does it help the understanding of the story?

Group Questions

Group Questions #1

1. Both "Cask" and "Masque" have carnival scenes. The Russian Critic Mikal Bakhtin has argued that "During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom" (7). Carnival's "freedom" exists outside the contraints of law or religion; in other words, outside the influence of the forces which proscribe and/or enforce the mores and social codes of a culture. Why, then, does Poe include them? What, for instance, is Poe suggesting about human psychology? Consider, especially, Freud's theory of moral development.
2. Consider the following definition from Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature :

   gothic 1. Of or relating to a late 18th -- and early 19th -- century style of fiction characterized by the use of medieval settings, a murky atmosphere of horror and gloom, and macabre, mysterious, and violent incidents. 2. Of or relating to a literary style or an example of such style characterized by grotesque, macabre, or fantastic incidents or by an atmosphere of irrational violence, desolation, and decay.

   How do Poe's stories match this definition? What quotes suggest it?
3. Richard Wilbur, commenting on the prevalence of dreams in Poe's fiction, notes that "the dreaming psyche separates itself wholly from the bodily senses -- the "rudimental senses," as Poe called them" (Wilbur 820). What does this dream symbolism lend to Poe's fiction? What does he gain by including it?

On "Fall of the House of Usher"

1. What's the connection between "The Haunted Palace" (1558) and "The Fall of the House of Usher" itself?
2. Why does the story end with the destruction of the house? What could it symbolize?
3. Any connections -- or differences -- between Poe and Transcendental theories or ideas?

Images From the Past

IMPROVED BURIAL-CASE US Patent No. 81,437 Issued: August 25, 1868 Inventor: Franz Vester, Newark NJ

 "The nature of this invention consists in placing on the lid of the coffin, and directly over the face of the body laid therein, a square tube, which extends from the coffin up through and over the surface of the grave, said tube containing a ladder and a cord, one end of said cord being placed in the hand of the person laid in the coffin, and the other end of said cord being attached to a bell on the top of the square tube, so that, should a person be interred ere life is extinct, he can, on recovery to consciousness, ascend from the grave and the coffin by the ladder; or, if not able to ascend by said ladder, ring the bell, thereby giving an alarm, and thus save himself from premature burial and death; and if, on inspection, life is extinct, the tube is withdrawn, the sliding door closed, and the tube used for a similar purpose. . ."

From http://www.bpmlegal.com/wcoffin.html which offers good information on this topic.

On Poe's popularity

http://www.lfchosting.com/eapoe/GENINFO/poef001.htm

Links

The Poe Society of Baltimore's list of links is a good start.

Quotes from Critics

"Poe famoulsy borrowed crime stories from the penny press" (Reynolds Beneath 171)

"Sensational literature . . . . had precedents in foreign collections of criminal biography such as teh Newgate Calendar. .[he notes dickens, bulwer and ainsworth] . . Since there was still no international copyright, American publishers issued many cheap reprintsing of such foreign sensational writings, which found a huge market in America." (Reynolds beneath 172)

"The crucial transitional moment in American jounalism was 1833, the year that the first penny newspapers, Horation David Sheppard's New York Morning Post and Benjamin H. Day's New York Sun, appeared." (Reynolds Beneath 174)

On James Gordon Bennet's New York Herald: Bennet said "[I found out that Americans] were more ready to seek six columns of the details of a brutal murder, or the testimony of a divorce case, or the trial of a divine for improprieties of conduct, than the saem amount of words poured forth by the genius of the noblest author of th etimes" (qtd. in Reynolds Beneath 174)

George Wilkes made a series in 1847 entitled The lives of the Felons, or American Criminal Calendar (Reynolds Beneath 177) compare with newgate calendar

John Harpe -- convicted murderer circa 1830s: "I have not the least regret for the murders I have committed. I have taekn pleasure in the sight of humna blood shed by my own hands . . . I curse you and all mankind, for I hate you and the whole human race. One of my own childern I have murdered. . . Think you then that I cared for the blood of strangers?" (Reynolds Beneath 177)

"What relations did the penny papers and the crime writings have with the major literature? In the most direct sense, they generated popular images and stereotypes that were absorbed into the major literature" (Reynolds Beneath 177)

"Whereas previous American crime reports, from Puritan times through the mid -- 1820s, were carful to draw religious or moral lessons from criminals' experiences, the antebellum reports wer, in the main, gloating rcords of unthinkable atrocities obviously designed to please a ssensation-hungry public" (Reynolds Beneath 178)

"Poe's central theme is a quest, psychal and cosmic, for a supernal Beauty and unifying, transcendental Truth. The tales of psychic conflic, often referred to as moral allegories, are indeed psychomoral or psycho-transcendental" (Carlson 169)

ON CASK

D.H. Lawrence: "The Lust of Montresor is to devour utterly the soul of Fortunato" (qtd. in Joswick 251) and "the result is the dissolution of both souls, each losing itself in transgressing its own bounds" (qtd. in Joswick 251)

Cf. Reynolds on the moral neutrality of popular crime fiction.

Gerald "Kennedy argues that by recounting the events in a confessional narrative, Montresor becomes the vicitm himself of the very irony of language he plays upon -- 'the psychological captive of his own perfect strategy'" (Joswick 251)

Joswick, Thomas. "Moods of Mind: Tales of Detection, Crime, and Punishment." A Companion to Poe Studies . Ed. ___ Carlson. 236-256.

"Poe revises the conversational mode to present dreams, fantasies, passions, and obessions" (Frieden 136)

Frieden, Ken. "Poe's Narrative Monologues." The Tales of Poe . Ed. Harold Bloom. New York : Chelsea House, 1987. 135-147.

"Poe's criticism places a positive value on the obscuration of meaning, on a dark suggestivness, on a deliberate vagueness by means of which the reader's mind may be set adrift toward the beyond" (Wilbur 809)

"Poe conceived of God as a poet. The universe, therefore, was an artistic creation, a poem composed by God. Now, if the universe is a poem, it follows that the one proper response to it is aesthetic, and that God's creatures are attuned to Him in proportion as their imaginations are ravished by the beauty and harmony of his creation. Not to worship beauty, not to regard poetic knowledge as divine, would be to turn one's back on God and fall from grace" (Wilbur 809)

"These, then, are Poe's 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 presentations of these conflicts [. . . ]" (Wilbur 810)

811 argues that Poe's characters escape the earthly self through dreams

"the scenes and situations of Poe's tales are always concrete representations of states of mind [. . . .] The most important of these recurrent motifs is that of enclosure or circumspection " (Wilbur 811)

"What does it mean that Poe's heroes are invariably enclosed or circumscribed? The answer is simple: circumspection, in Poe's tales, means the exclusion from consciousness of the so-called real world, the world of time and reason and physical fact; it means the isolation of the poetic soul in visionary reverie or trance. When we find one of Poe's characters in a remote valley, or a claustral room, we know that he is in the process of dreaming his way out of the world" (Wilbur 812)

"the dreaming psyche separates itself wholly from the bodily senses -- the "rudimental senses," as Poe called them. The bodily senses are dependent on objective stimuli -- on the lights and sounds and odors of the physical world. But the sensuous life of dream is self-sufficient and immaterial, and consists in the imagination's Godlike enjoyment of its own creations" (Wilbur 820)

Wilbur, Richard. "The House of Poe." Norton Edition.

"Most critics of "The Masque" interpret it as an allegory and assume that, as such, it must point to a moral truth. But the truth in the story is existential, not moral. Poe as narrator presents characters who arm themselves against death through whatever means possible. Through his art, the author is a more formidable opponent to death than is Prospero. The Prince loses control and faces defeat, but Poe remains far removed. He voices no disapproval of the characters, but neither does he show sympathy for their fate. He maintains in his tone the superiority of what he portrays as the only, although feeble, defense against death--a perfect mask of indifference." (Wheat)

Patricia H. Wheat, "The Mask of Indifference in 'The Masque of the Red Death.'" Studies in Short Fiction 19 (winter 1982): 51-6. Gale Literature Resource Center . Ocean County College . 14 December 2008.

Poe takes the issue one step further, however. If indeed all things are willed into being ex nihilo, then not only all humanity but also all matter is part and parcel with God. Such a view Poe expresses as his infamous "sentience theory" in "The Fall of the House of Usher."10 In particular the theory exerts itself twice. When Usher reveals that he has not left the mansion in many years, he describes the effect that the "mere form and substance" of the mansion has had upon him: "An effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought upon the morale of his existence" ("Usher" 403).11 Later, after Usher's rhapsody of creative expressions, the narrator and Usher fall into a conversation on "the sentience of all vegetable things" (408). Remembering Usher's description of this, the narrator describes the preternatural interconnectedness of mansion and family, and concludes, in Usher's terms, that "The result was discoverable ... in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him--what he was" (408).12 (Timmerman)

"Madeline therefore becomes abstracted to little more than a mental evanescence--Enlightenment at its extreme, out of touch with reality. When the narrator first sees her passing in the distance, he is filled with unaccountable dread, so otherworldly she appears. She is, Roderick discloses, simply wasting away of some illness with no known etiology. At the very same time, Roderick diverges in the opposite direction. While Madeline disappears into a vaporific mist, Roderick flames into an unrestricted creative power, full of unrestrained, raw passion. He becomes the fiery polar to Madeline's cold abstraction. The narrator describes his successive days with Usher and his artmaking thus: "An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphurous luster over all" ("Usher" 405). Usher thereby enters a creative mania, churning out songs, paintings, and poems against the coming dark.

That is precisely the point Poe makes in this tale. When split apart, as they are here, Enlightenment thinking becomes all cold, analytic, and detached; Romanticism, on the other hand, blazes into a self-consuming passion. Aesthetically and ideally they ought to be mirrors to each other, working in a complementary fashion to serve art. When split from each other, they become mutually self-destructive. Preternaturally charged with his Romantic instincts, Roderick hears, above the storm, the approaching footsteps of Madeline. She enters, falls upon her brother, and together they die. The splitting pairs have conjoined once again, but tragically this time. The separation had gone to the extreme, disrupting the sentient balance, destroying both. As the narrator flees, the house itself parallels the act of Roderick and Madeline, first splitting apart along the zigzag fissure and then collapsing together into the tarn." (Timmerman)

Timmerman, John. "House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher.'" Papers on Language & Literature 39 (summer 2003): 227-44. 14 December 2008.

On the importance of twins in the story -- which he identifies as a gothic motif "Madeline [. . . ] is a visible embodiment of the alter ego. She stands for the emotional or instinctive side of her brother's personality which has stagnated under the domination of the intellect" (Stein 111)

The Twin Motif in "The Fall of the House of Usher" The Twin Motif in "The Fall of the House of Usher" William Bysshe Stein Modern Language Notes, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Feb., 1960), pp. 109-111

"Through his arrangement of incident and motifs in the story, Poe contrives to 'prove' that the Pure intellect cannot rationally understand the process of creating Beauty" (Olson 556)

Poe's Strategy in "The Fall of the House of Usher" Poe's Strategy in "The Fall of the House of Usher" Bruce Olson Modern Language Notes, Vol. 75, No. 7 (Nov., 1960), pp. 556-559

 © 2009 David Bordelon