SOURCE: “Poe's Most Poetic Subject,” in Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature, Greenwood Press, 1984, pp. 44-57.

[In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1982, Bassein suggests that Poe's concentration on dead women in his works has negatively influenced later treatments of women in American literature, as well as women's images of themselves.]

Charles Baudelaire pronounced Edgar Allan Poe's attitude toward women chivalric, and scholars have repeatedly done likewise, even within the past three decades, without finding chivalry incompatible with his proclamation that the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetic subject to be found. Even when seeing his life and works as inextricably bound together, writers generally look upon what they consider his chivalrous approach as the accepted mode for a Southern gentleman and seem to have no special misgivings about his statement on what is suitable subject matter for poetry.¹ With a similar blind spot, educators who may condemn extremes in twentieth-century literature and life do not flinch at making Poe's poetry and fiction required reading in our schools. Others who regard death as the ultimate terror find his stories highly entertaining. When looking at Poe's own immediate predecessors and contemporaries, it is obvious that he was not unique in his interest in dead females. Other writers with similar interests can be found, and crime statistics, among numerous other sources, bear out this fact. What has escaped many is that his skills as a poet and fiction writer, his theories regarding art, beauty, and pain, and the enthusiasm of his audience have all helped perpetuate a view of woman that identifies her with the most passive state occurring, that of the dead, and thus creates negative conditioning for generation after generation of vulnerable readers. That Poe's works emerged from and fed into the much-read Gothic tale, which often makes woman a victim, goes without saying.

Anyone separating out the definitions of chivalry as Poe's critics use it, as history hands it down to us, and as Poe practiced and/or wrote about it would have to take into account varying circumstances and diverse customs. A rigid definition of the term would be difficult to formulate, but some valuable generalizations can be made about it. The element that Poe adds to the custom of chivalry may be viewed as contradictory to it, or as the other side of a coin that poses as one thing while participating in another. The reading of his tales given here will produce evidence in support of the latter view.

The linkage of women and death is not an absolute in the traditional chivalric pose. Chivalry often praised woman for her beauty and intelligence and sometimes for her faithfulness and chastity. Its purpose was ostensibly to protect the woman from ravishment or other types of harm. When the relationship between the knight and lady was adulterous, the woman adored was most often well stationed, independent, and capable of performing courtly rituals. Sometimes the two lovers vowed faithfulness until death, and their dual death functioned symbolically as the consummation of love.² For the most part, however, the relationship purported to spur the knight into performing deeds of valor and motivated women to perform an active role in court life. Problematical as we may now think the lady's role to be, she was a life-oriented person, and her lover was not totally obsessed with viewing her in the throes of death.

Death either as cancellation or as a spectre in woman's path would seem to add to her sense of hopelessness and make her doubt her own worth or that of any kind of productive action. As we see love and death becoming more closely allied in Romantic writers, the result makes for a negative outlook, but this coupling of love and death contains less of the one-sided obsession Poe depicts in his works. To label Poe chivalric in his attitude toward women is obviously to gloss over a special set of negatives which his depictions contain. As this discussion will illustrate, numerous works by Poe are not the product of a chivalric attitude that places women on pedestals and leaves them there. Instead, they picture her as annihilated, as a plague upon man, and simply as a catalyst for a deep-seated obsession wherein there are no reciprocated benefits for her.

Many efforts have been made to explain why Poe linked women and death. But of far greater significance are those aspects of his works that would shape the impressionable reader's concepts of women, aspects that relegate her to a kind of vehicle for imaginatively carrying both Poe and his readers into the throes of death, thereby limiting the woman to a death-oriented function. Some would even have us believe that Poe worshipped woman even as he imagined her undergoing death. Rather, one suspects that whatever courtesy and adoration Poe exercised before woman fell away as he worked himself into an empathetic death orgy over her expiration. To clothe him in chivalry is to shroud the negative with a positive that can only deceive the unwary.

It is possible to see Poe's works merely as his life rewritten; it is also possible to label and dismiss him as a case study in necrophilia or misogyny and to put him on the shelf with the peculiar. Much in his approach, however, suggests a sweeping attitude stretching much before and beyond his time, an attitude that takes lightly literature made up of nine parts satisfaction at the death of the female and one part (at most) courtesy and adoration. Poe is but one of many who accept an extremely exaggerated and totally unreasonable coupling of women and death, to say nothing of taking satisfaction from finding her so overcome.

Medicine is only one example of a nonliterary field in which beauty and death have a special titillation. Several articles in Blackwood's magazine, which Poe read, coupled woman's beauty with disease. Margaret Alterton thinks Poe may have caught the suggestion for choosing his “most poetic topic” from medical articles found there. In “The Diary of the Late Physician,” which incidentally “touched a chord of interest” in London, he could have found the suggestion that a greater thrill will result from diseased conditions if beauty is added. According to this article, more morbid pleasure can be produced if disease works on a beautiful woman.³ With fascination the doctor describes developing cancer, calling attention to an eminent medical writer who thought the most beautiful women were usually the ones afflicted with this disease. Later, he is also fascinated with catalepsy in women:

“Beautiful, unfortunate creature!” thought I, as I stood gazing mournfully on her, with my candle in my hand, leaning against the bed-post.⁴

Poets and thinkers on an artistic level and nearly contemporaneous with Poe mingled pleasure and pain. Keats finds beauty in melancholy; Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” features life-in-death as female; and the conservative Edmund Burke in his “On the Sublime and Beautiful” says beauty in distress is the most affecting kind.⁵

Poe spawned much interest, but one suspects the attraction to him sprang from like preoccupations, already rooted. In England, the Pre-Raphaelites were impressed not just by his style but by the pictures of his heroines. Dante Gabriel Rossetti stated that when he set out to write “The Blessed Damozel,” he had to go beyond Poe's treatment of grief on earth, that he had “to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven.”⁶ Swinburne and Morris showed Poe's influence, and later, Wilde and Beardsley exploited the chaste and ethereal coupled with cruelty.

It was in France, however, that Poe inspired the most emulation. Baudelaire translated Poe's tales in 1856 and 1857, and their impact was felt all over Europe, even in Russia. Poe's influence is found in the Contes Cruels of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, in the writings of Barbey d'Aurevilly, and especially in the character of des Esseintes, the hero of J. K. Huysman's novel, À Rebours. Huysman read and absorbed Poe. Hints of incest, the depiction of the horrible along with asexual and learned women, and death-in-life agonies in Poe's fiction all interested him and found their way into his works.

French poetry was greatly influenced by Mallarmé's translation of Poe's poems in 1875. After previously having been attracted to Poe's “The Raven,” Verlaine and Rimbaud spoke of learning English as they read Poe. The influence went south to Italy to be found in D'Annunzio's plays and novels, and to Russia to appear in Dostoevski's The Idiot. The double; the blending of love and death; the neurotic, pleasure-loving, aesthetic hero; insanity; the use of drugs; pleasure sharpened by pain; hallucinations—all are found in writers subsequent to Poe.⁷ He was obviously not alone in his morbidity.

Some scholars explain Poe's interest in dead women by cataloging the deaths that occurred during his lifetime and by attempting to show how these affected him. The list is so extensive that we are left wondering how he could have escaped becoming blasé about death. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold Poe, died when he was three, having been deserted in July 1810 by Poe's father, who apparently disappeared at this point never to be seen again. Her husband's departure, her incipient tuberculosis, her being pregnant with Poe's sister, and her attempt to retain her glory on the stage brought her to death in December 1811. Acting as long as her strength lasted, she finally was bedridden:

All the while her little son and her baby daughter were with her, hearing her cough and moan, witnessing her tears at the knowledge that she must soon leave them … on the aware, sensitive mind of her intelligent three-year-old son, the sights and sounds of the sickroom … the mother's despair and anguish, the gradual change in the familiar face, must have left their unforgettable mark.⁸

According to Frances Winwar, Poe's association with Jane Stanard, the mother of one of his friends, when he was fifteen did much to solidify his conception of the ideal of romantic womanhood. Jane is thought to have resembled Poe's mother and to have embodied for him a kind of purity and spirituality that evoked adoration. Poe seems to have thought Jane would guide him toward greater and greater heights as a poet and would stop any excesses that might pull him down. When she suddenly died in April 1824, he was distraught and for many weeks visited her grave every night.⁹

Frances Allan, his foster mother, died in 1829; his brother Henry in 1831 of tuberculosis; his grandmother Poe in 1835; and, probably most distressing of all for its lingering duration, his child-wife Virginia Clemm in 1847. Many believe that all these experiences with death colored his relationships with other women—Sarah Royster, Mary Devereaux, Frances Osgood, Helen Whitman, and Annie Richmond—by causing him to develop a strong dependence upon them, epitomized by his association with his Aunt Maria Clemm who often nursed him back to health or sobriety. He developed an acute fear of losing the person upon whom he depended, causing him to reenact her death repeatedly. It is believed that sexual passion was not part of these relationships to any extent, if at all. Intelligence in these women interested him sporadically and often only slightly. Death came to define nearly the whole of his concept of female reality. Other men have limited woman to sex, breeding, or dissembling, but most women would prefer these functions to being thought of as a vehicle for experiencing death. Poe makes memento mori of women. He forces, up out of his being, fictional character after fictional character in the throes of death. He handled death like a jeweler absorbed in his merchandise. His reading of the graveyard poets, Keats and Coleridge, his interest in mesmerism which he sees as a death-like state, his preoccupation with calling the dead back to life, his belief that contemplating beauty is a high challenge which must be done in the presence of death, his tendencies to elevate his dead mother into something which she was not—an English lady—along with strong melancholy tendencies, all helped establish around him an aura of death that seemed to obsess and nourish him. The character, of course, that most obsessed him and most often moved from life to cadaver was women. A look at a number of these women is a meaningful trip into a source of woman's crippled self-image.

The death woman appears in Poe's best known poems, and in “Romance” he claims to have met her in his youth when “I could not love except where Death / Was mingling his with Beauty's breath.”¹⁰ He would have Lenore, the “queenliest dead that ever died,”¹¹ be alive, but the intensity of his sorrow and his requests that the Raven tell him if he will be united with her overwhelm the reader to such an extent that little life shines through. He returns to the tomb of his lost Ulalume and wonders if a demon has tempted him there, seemingly to suggest that it is a fiend in the tomb which holds him in its grip, not woman. A thousand roses in “To Helen” give out, “in return for the love-light, / Their odorous souls in an ecstatic death—.”¹² Annabel Lee's highborn kinsmen bear her away from him, and he goes to lie in her tomb.¹³ In these poems sound gives a compelling gloss to the corpse of woman. Almost all of us can remember reciting these poems at an early age.

In Poe's tales, however, the death woman gets much fuller treatment. We can assume that his statement about the most poetic topic also held for fiction. In “Berenice,” Poe reduces his heroine to teeth just as street language has long turned woman into just a part of herself by designating her cunt, skirt, or any of dozens of other epithets most often suggestive of sexuality. Berenice's agility and beauty make little impression on the protagonist until she becomes emaciated by disease. Then her teeth hop out at him from a face that has lustreless, pupil-less eyes, a placid pale high forehead, and shrunken lips. Just as street language gives exaggerated efficacy to woman's sexual side, the protagonist speaks of the “sensitive and sentient power” of the teeth that can carry moral persuasion and restore peace to him.¹⁴ So determined is he to have these teeth that he opens her tomb, only to find her alive.¹⁵ His guilt, of course, shows on his spade and his clothes. We assume he got the teeth at the expense of her life.

Marie Bonaparte and other Freudians played into Poe's sadism when, in connection with this tale, they discussed the sadistic, castrating vagina, once thought to be equipped with teeth.¹⁶ One does not have to follow their thinking to see the protagonist's lukewarm, if not rejecting, attitude toward woman who is energetic and attractive, and his preference for woman in a diseased and finally dead state. If Poe had a chivalric attitude toward women and if by that is meant respect for them, it does not spill over into his depiction of the protagonist in this ugly little tale, either as a pose or with some degree of sincerity.

In “Morella,” the heroine tastes of intelligence and fathoms the unearthly so subtly that she terrorizes the protagonist. Her erudition includes determining that one's identity persists beyond the tomb. She dies but not before leaving him a daughter to take her place; even if both have separate and different identities, neither is palatable because of an exaggerated intelligence, which is as much a part of these women as teeth were for Berenice. All erudition and no passion, the first Morella can only give birth to “the most hideous.”¹⁷ As his wife's end approaches, the protagonist longs for her death. Fiendishly he prompts the death of the child by calling her by her mother's name, the sound of which is death-producing. His “long and bitter laugh” at the end is a “mad” and sinister I-got-ya-this-time response, perhaps because there will be no future child to trouble him as there had been when the mother died.¹⁸ In this tale we find little chivalry.

“The Assignation” and “The Oblong Box,” like the poems “Annabel Lee” and “For Annie,” are about meeting the beloved in death. In “The Assignation,” there is a kind of telepathic union when two lovers take poison. Evidently unable to see the Marchesa Aphrodite except under the stress of rescuing her child, the male lover retrieves the infant which she has let slip into the water. Although this woman seems to fit better than Berenice or Morella the goddess-to-be-worshipped stereotype (and her lover a brave knight doing a good deed), we scarcely see her enough to realize her nature since she is at a distance from her lover whom we constantly see in the company of the male character who tells the story. She, “the adoration of all Venice,”¹⁹ is adulterous, as many women in the early chivalric tradition were, but she seems to have more in common with adulterous female sinners, much written about before and after Poe in nineteenth-century fiction, who have no choice but death. The tale is told from a male perspective, and it is mostly about males; the woman's role has its focus in death.

“Ligeia” presents an extravagant picture of woman's beauty, intelligence, and devotion, but even as Poe begins his laudatory description of this heroine, he seems to undercut the idealization, when he mentions the “ill-omened” marriage she has with the protagonist. Ligeia has some “strangeness” about her.²⁰ Like most of Poe's women, she gives but receives little from others; what she gives is a sense of the importance of will which, if exercised with strength, she thinks can save one from death. If this were Poe's only tale and if we read only the passages leading up to her illness, we might think Poe worshipped woman and took great pleasure in her vitality of spirit and mind. However, not only Ligeia but also Rowena, the new wife, dies in order that Ligeia may live again and in order, it would seem, that the protagonist may relish not one, but two, journeys into necrophilia. In opium fantasy and influenced by the phantasmagoric effect of a new abbey, he is able to will Rowena's return from death prior to willing her change into Ligeia. The night he spends with Rowena, who lapses into death and returns to life alternately and finally into Ligeia, is a rich orchestration of the death process that Poe employs often but nowhere with such prolonged intensity as in this case. Poe's most deeply felt and intense writing is not on woman alive but on woman experiencing death.

“The Fall of the House of Usher,” like other tales, does not point to a conventional chivalric attitude toward women, nor does it make the death of a beautiful woman anything more than what it often is—a terror-producing experience. Poe's first-person narrator has another necrophilic adventure; the whole story appears to be a trip into a grave. The narrator visits a house of “excessive antiquity” reminiscent of “some neglected vault.”²¹ His cadaverous host Roderick Usher, whose lips have a “surpassingly beautiful curve,”²² makes him aware of his “tenderly beloved-sister” who, as was also the case with the Marchesa Aphrodite, is never seen for more than a few seconds and who is never revealed as more than a tortured victim who is buried alive. We learn that she had been wasting away for some time with a lingering disease that had baffled the skill of doctors. Called a life-in-death symbol by various critics, she, like Poe's mother and wife Virginia, dies a slow death. Bonaparte, for example, who sees a very close link between sex and cruelty, says she was “a mother symbol to Poe Usher.”²³ Provisions are made to have Madeline's corpse put in a vault within one of the main walls of the building, and the two men see to its being put there:

The vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission of light; lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment.²⁴

The night they discover they have buried Madeline alive is one of “singular” terror and beauty.²⁵ Missing in this tale is an element that is not altogether absent in Poe, excessive mooning over the loveliness of woman. A sickly smile quivers on the host's lips as he discovers that he has buried his sister; guilt and “madness” seize him, and when Madeline does come forth alive only to fall heavily upon the person of her brother, she becomes the instrument of his death. Madeline is given no feelings, or for that matter much substance as a human being; she is victim-destroyer. Poe spends greatly less time on Madeline than he does on his two male characters. That he does not allow either the sister or the brother to live suggests that they were perhaps involved with the mysteriously “terrible”: incest likely in the manner of that in Byron's Manfred. This tale clearly shows why the Freudians found so much in Poe, as well as why Leslie Fiedler insisted that American literature was basically a homosexual one written by authors incapable of depicting a realistic woman.²⁶

“Eleonora” treats the innocence and decline to death of a woman whom the protagonist comes to love. Poe here blends transitions from childlike love to the delirious bliss of ardent passion with changes in nature. Their love is sharply cut off from the outside world and is soon darkened by impending death: “she had been made perfect in loveliness only to die.”²⁷ Vowing fidelity after her death, he then watches nature become sterile in her absence. The Spirit of Love absolves him of his promises, and we learn that Ermengarde will take Eleonora's place. This tale was written when Virginia's health had worsened, and Poe apparently realized a certain uselessness of vows. Eleonora is as ephemeral as the daisies or the asphodel. At the end of this tale Poe is without any pretense to chivalry and is down to his own basic needs.

“The Oval Portrait” is of special significance because here Poe might be indicating that he realizes artists exploit women in the throes of death to produce art and that sadism and art are closely allied. In this work, the artist's canvas grows to perfection; his wife, the model, shrinks to death. She waxes pale and weak as her strength and beauty are transferred to the portrait. The painter grows “wild with the ardor of the work” and rarely removes his eyes from the canvas, “even to regard the countenance of his wife.”²⁸ Standing proudly over his accomplishment, he proclaims it Life, but when he turns to his wife, she is no more. When we watch the mounting obsession and pleasure in the artist, we become more and more aware that a woman is being used to produce that pleasure and ultimately profit. How much Poe felt this exploitation also explained his art is not clear; had it made much of a dent in his makeup, he might have written more on the subject than is found in “The Oval Portrait,” a slight four-page account.

Anyone searching for relief from the death woman in Poe's tales should not turn to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” where Madame L'Espanaye is mutilated and decapitated and her daughter is killed and stuffed head downward in the chimney; or to “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” where a girl's corpse is found in the Seine after a rape-murder; or to “The Black Cat” where the wife is axed to death by her drunken husband as she stays his hand when he is about to kill the cat with which he is obsessed; or to “Scheherazade” where the main character stalls death by talking, but in the end is done in as we might expect. Scheherazade's destroyer, incidentally, is a certain monarch who “having good cause to be jealous of his queen” put her to death and made a vow “to espouse each night the most beautiful maiden in his dominions, and the next morning to deliver her up to the executioner.” When Scheherazade enters the picture, he had fulfilled his vow for many years “to the letter, and with a religious punctuality and method that conferred great credit upon him as a man of devout feelings and excellent sense.”²⁹ This fellow, whom we hope is just a figment of the imagination used at least somewhat satirically, might find a parallel in the seventeenth-century Countess Elisabeth Báthory, who in the Carpathian Mountains put to death 650 virgins. Their slaughter aroused her sexually, after which she would bucket up their blood to bathe in, ostensibly to improve her complexion.³⁰

If Poe had the conventional chivalric attitude toward women with the attendant sincerity that many of his critics thought he had, this attitude is not much in evidence in his poems and fiction. That he did exploit the death of females is quite apparent in his works. The life-orientation of chivalry does not seem to be compatible with his noticeable emphasis on death. If all women had to read was a steady diet of Poe, they would likely develop so keen a sense of their demise that they would have only a negative approach to life. If women believed that Poe's attitude toward women was chivalric, then they would come to think of chivalry as something having to do with graves, gasping their last breath, and coming alive again. They would soon unmask chivalry, as the term has recently been used, as a ritual that elevates women in order to topple them with a more pronounced thud. It goes without saying that many people still do not view chivalry in this light, although the number that do has increased sharply.

The thoughtful reader would want to have little to do with Poe's works or any literature exploiting similar stereotypes. However, given the abundance of Gothic romances written by women, apart from all those written by men, and given the number of female readers of those Gothic tales, it can be said that repulsion from the stereotypes that the Gothic tale perpetuates is not as strong as one would wish it to be. Interestingly, during periods of low emphasis on women's freedom, such as the fifties and early sixties, the publication of Gothic romances tends to increase. Perhaps the Gothic tale is thought to be necessary to uphold, through the support of identification, female capacity to go on in a victimized and subservient position.³¹

Poe does not, of course, hold up the entire weight of the Gothic tradition, for it existed long before him and branched into areas that he never treated. He did have considerable influence on this tradition, however, and it is time we addressed the question of what the legacy of that tradition has done to the image of women. It is important to analyze Poe's antagonisms,³² his sexuality or lack of it, the influence of the deaths in his family, the American literary preoccupation with death, or whatever caused him to write as he did. Since we can neither alter Poe nor his works, we should concentrate on what his pictures of women have done and will do to the self-image and aspirations of generations of readers. If attitudes are to be changed, we need to school ourselves in how they are shaped. It would be good to label him more according to what he was and to read him with full awareness of literature's power to mold thought and action. All that Poe has done to relegate women to the world of the dead must be exorcised.

Notes

1. Lois Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop, trans. and ed., Baudelaire on Poe (State College, Pa.: Bald Eagle, 1952), p. 110; Edward Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Oxford, 1963), p. 25; Edd Winfield Parks, Edgar Allan Poe As Literary Critic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1964), p. 62; and Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, A Critical Biography (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1969), especially his discussion of Poe's “The Philosophy of Composition.” While these writers equate chivalry with protection, courtesy, and adoration or the show of same, others such as Kate Millett see it as sugarcoated lip service to placate the oppressed. Susan Griffin calls it an old protection racket that could not exist without rape.

2. Wayland Young, Eros Denied: Sex in Western Society (New York: Grove, 1964), pp. 211-14.

3. Margaret Alterton, Origins of Poe's Critical Theory (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), p. 24.

4. Ibid., p. 25.

5. Edmund Burke, “On the Sublime and Beautiful,” The Harvard Classics 24 (New York: Collier, 1909), Section IX, p. 94.

6. Jerome Hamilton Buckley and George Benjamin Woods, eds., Poetry of the Victorian Period, 3d ed. (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1965), Notes, p. 505.

7. Frances Winwar, The Haunted Palace: A Life of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Harper, 1959), pp. 387-88.

8. Ibid., p. 24.

9. Ibid., pp. 54-57.

10. James A. Harrison, ed., The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: AMS Press, 1965), VII: 164.

11. Ibid., p. 53.

12. Ibid., p. 107.

13. Ibid., p. 118.

14. Ibid., II, p. 24.

15. Ibid., V, p. 256. Poe indicates in “The Premature Burial” that being buried alive is believed to be the most horrible death possible.

16. Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Imago, 1949), p. 218.

17. Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, II, p. 28.

18. Ibid., p. 34.

19. Ibid., p. 111.

20. Ibid., pp. 249-50.

21. Ibid., III, pp. 276-77.

22. Ibid., p. 278.

23. Bonaparte, Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, p. 249.

24. Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, III, p. 288.

25. Ibid., p. 291.

26. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960), pp. 325-45.

27. Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, IV, p. 240.

28. Ibid., p. 248.

29. Ibid., VI, p. 79.

30. Gabriel Ronay, The Truth About Dracula (New York: Stein and Day, 1973), pp. 93-145.

31. Janice Radway, “Dialogue: Is Popular Culture Social History?” in Humanities 1, no. 1 (January-February 1980): 14.

32. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, p. 413. Fiedler thinks that Poe was in flight from woman when he died.