SOURCE: Philippon, Daniel J. “Poe in the Ragged Mountains: Environmental History and Romantic Aesthetics.” Southern Literary Journal 30, no. 2 (spring 1998): 1-16.

[In the following essay, Philippon considers whether Poe based his story “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” on the extant Ragged Mountains in Virginia and that “the discrepancy between the actual Ragged Mountains and the fanciful landscape his protagonist envisions is crucial to a complete understanding of the story.”]

A later work, written at the same time as some of his best-known tales of horror and ratiocination—such as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Gold-Bug,” “The Black Cat,” “The Premature Burial,” and “The Purloined Letter”—“A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844) has never been considered one of Edgar Allan Poe's more successful stories. As Doris V. Falk has noted, the plot seems to be “deliberately obscure, full of multifarious Romantic-Gothic elements which never quite cohere,” and as a result, the very intricacy of the tale has probably “discouraged criticism, to say nothing of readers” (540). At the same time, however, Poe is said to have identified “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” as one of his favorite compositions (Miller 32), and it is the only work in which he refers specifically to his experience in Charlottesville, where he attended the new University of Virginia during most of 1826.¹ Despite its weakness, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” raises two important questions that deserve consideration: first, did Poe base his tale on the actual landscape of the Ragged Mountains, and second, how might his having done so affect our reading of the tale?

William Carlos Williams claimed that Poe was “intimately shaped by his locality and time” (216) and that the local was Poe's “constant focus of attention” (218). “It is the New World,” Williams wrote in In the American Grain (1925), “or to leave that for the better term, it is a new locality that is in Poe assertive; it is America, the first great burst through to expression of a reawakened genius of place” (216). Yet Williams also suggested that Poe's work grew out of the local conditions “not of trees and mountains, but of the ‘soul’” (227). Although most of Poe's tales do indeed explore the inner landscape of his characters at the expense of the natural world, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” is an important exception to this rule. Close attention to the environmental and cultural history of the Ragged Mountains demonstrates not only that Poe most likely did base his tale on this familiar landscape, but also that the discrepancy between the actual Ragged Mountains and the fanciful landscape his protagonist envisions is crucial to a complete understanding of the story.

“A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” opens with the narrator's description of Augustus Bedloe, one of Poe's typical protagonists—a thin, corpse-like young man, pale and melancholy, who suffers from neuralgia. For this condition, he has long been treated by Doctor Templeton, an elderly physician trained in mesmerism. As a result, says the narrator, “a very distinct and strongly marked rapport, or magnetic relation” had grown up between the patient and his doctor.² A sensitive and excitable character, with a vigorous imagination and a heavy morphine habit, Bedloe would each day “set forth alone, or attended only by a dog, upon a long ramble among the chain of wild and dreary hills that lie westward and southward of Charlottesville, and are there dignified by the title of the Ragged Mountains” (942).³ One evening, when Bedloe returns home late from one of his daily jaunts in “rather more than ordinary spirits,” Templeton and the narrator are treated to a most extraordinary tale.

After several hours of walking in a drug-induced swoon through the “dreary desolation” of the mountains, Bedloe says, he was surprised to hear the beating of a drum, “a thing unknown” in these hills. Soon thereafter he encountered “a dusky visaged and half-naked man” rushing past him, followed closely by a hyena. When Bedloe paused a moment to collect himself, he then discovered that the tree beneath which he rested was a palm. Astonished by these strange events, he found himself entering into a dream like state in which he was overlooking—and then entering—an arabesque city with “long winding alleys” that “absolutely swarmed with inhabitants” (945). As he became caught up in the tumult and excitement of the crowd, “by some inconceivable impulse” he joined a British-led party battling the city's inhabitants, but was quickly killed in combat, shot in the right temple by a poisoned arrow “made to imitate the body of a creeping serpent” (947). Following his death, Bedloe says, he experienced a violent shock “as if of electricity”; he seemed to rise above his corpse; and he departed the city. Upon returning to the location where he first encountered the hyena, Bedloe was then awakened by another sudden shock, and he bent his steps “eagerly homewards” (948).⁴

At the conclusion of Bedloe's tale, a visibly shaken Doctor Templeton announces that “the soul of man today is upon the verge of some stupendous psychal discoveries,” and proceeds to inform Bedloe that “at the very period in which you fancied these things among the hills, I was engaged in detailing them on paper” (949). According to Templeton, Bedloe's vision perfectly matched a memoir he had been writing of his own experiences as a twenty-year-old British officer in Benares, India, serving under the administration of Warren Hastings. “The riots, the combats, the massacre, were the actual events of the insurrection of Cheyte Sing, which took place in 1780,” Templeton says, “when Hastings was put in imminent peril of his life” (949). Moreover, says Templeton, Bedloe's experience not only paralleled the shooting death of a fellow British officer named Oldeb, but Bedloe's “miraculous similarity” in appearance to Oldeb was what first attracted the doctor to his patient many years ago.

At this, Poe's narrator closes the story by reprinting the newspaper obituary of Bedloe, who died one week after the events narrated. According to the death notice, Bedloe had contracted a slight cold and fever on his expedition to the Ragged Mountains, and to relieve the swelling in his head, Doctor Templeton bled Bedloe with leeches applied to the temples. Unfortunately, Templeton unknowingly applied a poisonous leech—the “poisonous sangsue of Charlottesville”—to Bedloe's right temple, thus causing his untimely death. As the newspaper account reveals, the “poisonous sangsue of Charlottesville may always be distinguished from the medicinal leech by its blackness, and especially by its writhing or vermicular motions, which very nearly resemble those of a snake” (950). Just as Oldeb was killed by a snakelike, poisoned arrow to his right temple, therefore, Bedloe died in a similar fashion from a snakelike, poisoned leech applied to his right temple by Templeton. Finally, to cement the connection between the two men, the narrator notes that Bedloe's name was misspelled in the obituary as “Bedlo”—a fact “stranger than any fiction,” he declares, “for Bedlo, without the e, what is it but Oldeb conversed?” (950).

To make sense of this swirling mass of incidents and coincidence, most commentators have understandably turned their attention to the tale's most prominent themes: mesmerism, metempsychosis, and animal magnetism. In an influential 1947 article on “Poe and Mesmerism,” Sidney E. Lind distinguished between the mesmerism (hypnosis) and metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls) in the tale, arguing that “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” was “intended by Poe to be a study in hypnosis, with the theme of metempsychosis subordinated to one character, Dr. Templeton” (1085). In 1969, however, Doris V. Falk argued, contra Lind, that Poe meant the story to be a study not in mesmerism but in “animal magnetism—that electromagnetic force capable of maintaining the nervous organization, complete with physical sensations, even after death, making time and space unreal and relative” (540).

These and other critics have avoided much discussion of the landscape of Poe's tale in part because it seems so irrelevant to the plot.⁵ James Southall Wilson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia and the first editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, for instance, claimed that “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” had “no local color” (216). Likewise, Frances Winwar wrote that although Poe “drew on the nature he observed … the story was as far removed from normal experience as an opium dream could make it” (242). And Daniel Hoffman has even suggested that “for those Poe stories in which the characters are still alive, it may be inessential, indeed distracting, to establish a recognizable place as the locus of the action” (206). Taken in by the circuitous windings of Poe's plot, critics such as these fail to recognize the degree to which Poe not only grounded his tale in the Virginia landscape, but also used the realities of that landscape to both justify and spoof the Romantic visions Bedloe claims to experience.

Although the extent of Poe's familiarity with the Ragged Mountains cannot be determined with certainty, documentary evidence suggests that the region sometimes served as a refuge for students, possibly including Poe, during the early years of the University of Virginia. The most detailed record of this practice appears in a letter of Thomas Goode Tucker, one of Poe's classmates, to Douglass Sherley, a student at the University in the late nineteenth century. Sherley incorporated the substance of the letter into one of his columns, called “Old Oddity Papers,” published in the University of Virginia Magazine in April 1880. According to Sherley, in May 1826, when Poe was enrolled at the University, a number of students fled to the Ragged Mountains to escape the local sheriff, who was seeking to bring them before the Albemarle County grand jury on charges of gambling. “With Edgar Allan Poe for a leader,” Sherley recounts, “they, to use the college expression, indiscriminately ‘bolted’ … off to the ‘Ragged Mountains’ over an unfrequented by-path, but one well known to Poe, and over which he had often travelled” (432). Although the minutes of the Faculty and other University records confirm the main features of this story, “Tucker's statement that Poe was the ringleader of the band is unconfirmed and probably fictitious,” Floyd Stovall suggests (6-7). Likewise, John S. Patton, librarian of the University of Virginia in 1908, characterized Poe's leadership of the fleeing collegians as “a graceful fiction” (726).

With the exception of his own participation, Poe himself confirmed the basic facts of Tucker's account in a letter written to his foster father, John Allan, on 25 May 1826:

Soon after you left here the Grand Jury met and put the students in a terrible fright—so much so that the lectures were unattended—and those whose names were upon the Sheriff's list—travelled off into the woods & mountains—taking their beds & provisions along with them—there were about 50 on the list—so you may suppose the College was very well thinned—this was the first day of the fright—the second day, “A proclamation” was issued by the faculty forbidding “any student under pain of a major punishment to leave his dormitory between the hours of 8 & 10 AM—(at which time the Sheriffs would be about) or in any way to resist the lawful authority of the Sheriffs”—This order was very little attended to—as the fear of the Faculty could not counterbalance that of the Grand Jury—most of the “indicted” ran off a second time into the woods and upon an examination the next morning by the Faculty—Some were reprimanded—some suspended—and one expelled—

(Letters I: 4).⁶

Because Poe was not among the “indicted,” if he went with the students who fled to the Ragged Mountains, Stovall concludes, “it was evidently not as ringleader and apparently not from fear of the sheriff; it might have been for fear he would be called as a witness, or it might have been only for the fun of it or because he was better acquainted with the area than other students” (10).

Even if Poe did not participate in this particular trip, it seems more than likely he at some time traveled to the mountains—or at the very least was acquainted with their characteristics. Poe's best biographer, Arthur Hobson Quinn, claims that the description of the scenery in this tale “probably was based on memories too deeply impressed on a young imaginative mind to be forgotten” (114), and the many accounts of student excursions to the mountains of Virginia during the nineteenth century suggest that Quinn is probably correct. Antebellum novelist William Alexander Caruthers, for instance, described his 1818 expedition to the Natural Bridge with three friends from Washington College in “Climbing the Natural Bridge” (1838); Henry Ruffner recounted his many visits to House Mountain, west of Lexington, in his autobiographical novel Judith Bensaddi (1839); and Henry Clay Pate's American Vade Mecum; or, The Companion of Youth, and Guide to College (1852) includes a representative account of a trip to the Peaks of Otter, near Bedford. Just as Poe seems to have derived his description of the streams of the imaginary island of Tsalal in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) from his knowledge of the mineral springs of Virginia, so too did he probably base his description of the “chain of wild and dreary hills” in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” on his knowledge of the local landscape.⁷

Poe's likely familiarity with the Ragged Mountains is further indicated by a close reading of the early portion of the tale, in which Poe alludes to the historic inhabitation of this region by American Indians. According to the narrator, Bedloe departed for the hills “[u]pon a dim, warm, misty day, towards the close of November, and during the strange interregnum of the seasons which in America is termed the Indian Summer” (942). Bedloe himself also refers to the distinctiveness of the season when he notes that “[t]he thick and peculiar mist, or smoke, which distinguishes the Indian summer, and which … hung heavily over all the objects, served, no doubt to deepen the vague impressions which these objects created” (943). One of the earliest references to the term “Indian Summer” was made by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in a 1778 essay on “A Snow-Storm as It Affects the American Farmer,” in which Crèvecoeur simply described the period as “a short interval of smoke and mildness” (41), but a later, further detailed reference to the term is more revealing—and may even have influenced Poe's own usage. In his 1824 Notes, on the Settlement and Indian Wars, of the Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania, the historian Joseph Doddridge claimed that the “smokey time” known as Indian Summer was so called “because it afforded the Indians another opportunity of visiting the settlements with their destructive warfare” (266). A popular text in mid-nineteenth-century Virginia, Doddridge's Notes were appended to Samuel Kercheval's widely read History of the Valley of Virginia (1833), a book with which Poe may well have been familiar. Placed in the context of Doddridge's definition, then, Poe's choice of seasons can be seen not only to foreshadow the events that take place in the “Indian” city of Benares, but also to link these events to the American Indian history of central Virginia.

Although no battles similar to the insurrection of Cheyte Sing occurred between Indians and settlers in Albemarle County (in which Charlottesville is located), warfare was common between rival tribes before the arrival of Europeans. The earliest reference to the Indians of this region appears on John Smith's 1612 map of Virginia, in which Smith indicates that a group of Indians called the Monacans lived in this area and that their chief village was named Monasukapanough. Amoroleck, a Manahoac Indian from the Rappahannock River region, described the Monacans as peaceful in August 1608, according to Smith's General Historie (1624): “The Monacans he sayd were their neighbors and friends, and did dwell as they in the hilly Countries by small rivers, living upon rootes and fruits, but chiefly by hunting” (II: 176). But in the text accompanying his 1612 map, Smith offered a more bellicose description of the tribe, in his discussion of the tidewater Powhatans in relation to the Monacans: “They seldome make warre for lands or goods, but for women and children, and principally for revenge. They have many enemies, namely all their westernely Countries beyond the mountaines, and the heads of the rivers” (I: 165).

Another important source from which Poe may have learned of the Indian inhabitants of this region was Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), written by Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia. In Query XI of his Notes, Jefferson explained how he examined a Monacan burial mound north of the Ragged Mountain region, “on the low grounds of the Rivanna [River], about two miles above its principal fork, and opposite to some hills, on which had been an Indian town [Monasukapanough]” (98). The mound, Jefferson says, “was of a spheroidical form, of about 40 feet in diameter at the base, and had been of about twelve feet altitude, though now reduced by the plow to seven and a half, having been under cultivation about a dozen years” (98). After making a number of excavations, Jefferson observed that the mound held about one thousand bodies arranged in several layers, with each layer being covered with dirt and stones. Given that he discovered no holes “as if made with bullets, arrows, or other weapons” in any of the bones, Jefferson also conjectured that this was probably not the grave marker of a great battle, nor was it “the common sepulchre of a town” (99). Whatever the occasion for the mound, Jefferson concluded, the bones “are of considerable notoriety among the Indians”:

for a party passing, about thirty years ago, through the part of the country where this barrow is, went through the woods directly to it, without any instructions or enquiry, and having staid about it some time, with expressions which were construed to be those of sorrow, they returned to the high road, which they had left about half a dozen miles to pay this visit, and pursued their journey.

(100)

Although no burial mounds of this size exist farther south, twelve sites—including two rock shelters—are located in the Ragged Mountain region, along the north and south forks of the Hardware River (Holland 12).⁸

According to Albemarle County historian John Hammond Moore, local legend also has it that another party of Indians appeared in the county sometime around 1840, seeking permission to perform memorial services at a burial mound near the Ragged Mountains. When their request was granted, the Indians “conducted a series of dances watched with considerable interest by many citizens,” and then, like the Indians observed by Jefferson, went away without incident (5-6).⁹ Poe, in Philadelphia at the time, in all likelihood remained unaware of this particular event (if indeed it did occur), but he nevertheless must have learned something about the situation of the American Indians by the mid-1840s, because he was clearly growing sympathetic to their cause. Two years after “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” appeared, Poe argued in Graham's Magazine (Dec. 1846) that the term “Appalachia” was preferable to “America” as a name for the United States because “in employing this word we do honor to the Aborigines, whom, hitherto, we have at all points unmercifully despoiled, assassinated and dishonored” (Brevities 310).

In addition to his allusions to the American Indian inhabitants of the region in his tale, Poe also relied on popular stereotypes of the poor whites who lived in the Ragged Mountains to strengthen the credibility of Bedloe's visionary experiences. Although Bedloe emphasizes that he may have been “the first adventurer—the very first and sole adventurer who had ever penetrated … [the mountains'] recesses,” he also claims to have remembered “strange stories told about these Ragged Hills, and of the uncouth and fierce races of men who tenanted their groves and caverns” (943).

Despite the limited information that exists about the mountain people of this region during the mid-nineteenth century, a few pieces of evidence suggest that Poe's characterization of their unfavorable reputation was in keeping with the popular beliefs of his time.¹⁰ In a 15 April 1875 letter to John Henry Ingram, Poe's English biographer, George Long, one of the first professors at the University, wrote that the Ragged Mountains were

inhabited by a considerable number of very ignorant, brutal whites. This hilly region is very picturesque and the geology very interesting. I often rode out to see it, but I kept clear of the barbarous inhabitants one of whom I had unintentionally offended by a harmless joke. In those days a Virginian was a dangerous man to joke with, for he could not comprehend a joke and could only take it as an insult.

(“Poe at the University” 166)

A similar account appears in a fictional sequel to “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” written by Emory Widener, a student at the University, for the University of Virginia Magazine in 1909. In Widener's updated “Tale,” the narrator describes an expedition he and two other students took to the Ragged Mountains one morning in May, in tribute to “poor Eddie Poe.”

The little hills seemed only a short distance away when we started, but it was high noon ere we reached their summit. And such mountains! Only a nest of hills, inhabited by a strange, rude people, who have lived in the shadow of Mr. Jefferson's institution since its founding without ever being able to write a word that is spoken there. As we climbed the mountain, one of these fellows was standing in his yard. He motioned us towards him. “Any booze?” he queried, and when we denied him, he went into his cabin, sad. Such is the life of the inhabitants of Ragged Mountains.

(217)

The economic circumstances of these people is further illustrated by a comment in the Rev. Edgar Woods's 1909 history of Albemarle County, in which Woods writes that “[i]n early times the Mountains … were called Ragged, from their disordered appearance, and not from the garments of their inhabitants, as has sometimes been suggested” (20).

Unfortunately, the most detailed discussion of the residents of this region does not appear until more than 68 years after Poe's story first appeared, when the University of Virginia Civic Club in 1912 published An Investigation of Conditions in the Ragged Mountains of Virginia. Assuming that the situation of the inhabitants of this region would most likely have improved, and not declined, over time, this 26-page booklet—heavily marred though it is by class bias—may nevertheless offer some indication of the conditions in which the inhabitants of the Ragged Mountains must have been living in the mid-nineteenth century. “The larger part of the Ragged Mountain people,” the club found, “are reasonably prosperous, of good intelligence and moral fiber, and possess at least a rudimentary education” (25). A small portion of the inhabitants, however, were discovered to be living “in a practically separate community—which is vastly more backward, in greater poverty and moral darkness than its neighbors” (25). Situated within a narrow strip of land eight miles long and from two to four miles wide, and located a little more than two miles southwest of Charlottesville, this community was said to be composed of people “not only very poor, but also tainted with various forms of physical and moral degeneracy which make them not only useless citizens but bad neighbors” (16). It is their moral laxity, according to the Civic Club, that “has in times past cast an unmerited reproach upon all the inhabitants of the Ragged Mountains” (25).

Given the continuity that seems to have existed throughout the years in the perception of these people by outsiders, Poe's local audience in the nineteenth century probably would have recognized a similarity between Bedloe's fear of the “uncouth and fierce races of men” who lived in the Ragged Mountains and the “deep sense of animosity” he felt toward “the swarming rabble of the alleys” in Benares (946), just as they might have associated the Indian summer of the tale's setting with the idea of warfare. Nevertheless, in the same way Poe's sympathy with the American Indian today helps us find irony in his use of the Indian summer as a foreshadowing device, Poe's local audience would no doubt also have recognized a difference between the dwellings of this poorest class of Ragged Mountain residents and the Oriental city envisioned by Bedloe. According to the Civic Club, the homes of “this community of backward and, in part, aberrant individuals” (5) are “of the wretchedest type” (20):

the cabins are pitifully small, the families occupying them pitifully large; and often the pigs and chickens live in the same room with seven or eight people. Some of the cabins are so tumbled down and open to the weather that it is amazing that human beings can dwell in them, particularly in the winter. The premises about the cabins are in equally as bad condition; stables, pigsties and privies are placed without regard for drainage into the wells and springs; the stables and other outbuildings are often merely shelters, sometimes built of the thick branches of trees; and the fences, porches, and yards are ill kept and unkempt to a degree that is astonishing. Horses and cows are rarely owned by these people, but nearly every family has one or more pigs and a collection of chickens; there are few agricultural implements, and these are of the poorest type, and in bad repair.

(20)

The contrast between this description and Bedloe's view of Benares could not be more striking. Looking down on the Indian city from above, Bedloe notes:

The houses were wildly picturesque. On every hand was a wilderness of balconies, of verandahs, of minarets, of shrines, and fantastically carved oriels. Bazaars abounded; and in these were displayed rich wares in infinite variety and profusion—silks, muslins, the most dazzling cutlery, the most magnificent jewels and palanquins, litters with stately dames close veiled, elephants gorgeously caparisoned, idols grotesquely hewn, drums, banners and gongs, spears, silver and gilded mace. And amid the crowd, and the clamor, and the general intricacy and confusion—amid the million of black and yellow men, turbaned and robed, and of flowing beard, there roamed a countless multitude of holy filleted bulls, while vast legions of the filthy but sacred ape clambered, chattering and shrieking, about the cornices of the mosques, or clung to the minarets and oriels.

(945)

Noting that Poe's references to “strange stories” and “fierce races” are reminiscent of similar devices used by Washington Irving in “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), Stuart Levine suggests that Poe “may have selected the mountains of Virginia for much the same reason that Irving chose the Catskills: because he thought he could ‘get away’ with more than he could in more prosaic places” (138-39). Moreover, Levine argues, the hint of folklore present in the tale suggests that Poe, “like Hawthorne and other contemporaries, was worried by the problem of creating romance in a matter-of-fact new country” (139). While Levine is correct in suggesting that Poe was following the practices of other Romantic authors in his use of folkloric elements in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” unlike them, Poe was also interested in satirizing Romantic aesthetics. Indeed, if Poe's only intent was to romanticize the mountainous Virginia landscape, he could have developed the roles of the Indian and the mountaineer much further than he did. Instead, by turning to India to provide the substance of his tale—by choosing to transform “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” into “A Tale of Benares”—Poe was able to poke fun at the very Romantic practices he seemed to be embracing. As Mukhtar Ali Isani points out,

Poe's choice of an Oriental element for his tale appears to have been influenced by the contemporary vogue for Orientalism in America. Only in this case, Poe was not writing an Oriental tale, though he may for a while give this impression. … Poe's Orientalism is a lure, the claims to authenticity skillfully diverting the reader from the more mundane truth that the story is a tale of Charlottesville, with a psychological explanation of the exotic cover.

(38)

In other words, as Edward Said has written, Poe's Orientalism “has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world” (12).¹¹

Poe further suggests that Bedloe's Romantic vision is literally “out of place” in the Virginia mountains by borrowing elements of his Orientalized landscape from other sources. Of the many studies that trace the sources of this tale, the most convincing are those that discuss the similarities between “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” and Thomas Babington Macaulay's famous essay on Warren Hastings, which first appeared in the Edinburgh Review in October 1841.¹² Like Poe, Macaulay writes of Benares as a “labyrinth of lofty alleys, rich with shrines, and minarets, and balconies, and carved oriels, to which the sacred apes clung by hundreds”; he describes India as filled with “the black faces, the long beards, the yellow streaks of sect; the turbans and the flowing robes; the spears and the silver maces; the elephants with their canopies of state”; and he refers to “the jungle where the lonely courier shakes his bunch of iron rings to scare away the hyaenas” (Mabbott III: 937-38).

The extent of Poe's borrowings from Macaulay to orientalize his Virginia setting also suggests the degree to which we should interpret the rest of his tale as a spoof on popular Romanticism in America. Poe not only plays on the contemporary taste for exotic destinations, but he also makes fun of those Romantic writers who suggest that every landscape is a knowable entity with which one can communicate. Between the delight Bedloe expresses in the “pleasant fog” of Indian summer and the oppression he feels from his “thousand vague fancies” about the mountains and their inhabitants, Bedloe also experiences another emotion—a drug-induced Romantic revery. As his walk progressed, Bedloe recounts,

the morphine had its customary effect—that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf—in the hue of a blade of grass—in the shape of a trefoil—in the humming of a bee—in the gleaming of a dewdrop—in the breathing of the wind—in the faint odors that came from the forest—there came a whole universe of suggestion—a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought.

(943)

Such rhapsodies do not bring about transcendence for Bedloe, of course, but rather the heightening of terror, a state of fearful agitation, and, ultimately, complete delusion.¹³ Our attempts to “commune” with nature in the Romantic fashion, Poe seems to suggest, are doomed to utter failure. Nature, despite our deepest desires, will always remain a foreign country.

Poe's exposé of Romantic aesthetics in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” culminates in the device by which the narrator announces the death of Bedloe: his contact with “one of the venomous vermicular sangsues which are now and then found in the neighboring ponds” (950). As Thomas Ollive Mabbott points out in his introduction to the tale in the Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1969-78), “Neither in fact, nor in fable (before Poe's), can a poisonous sangsue (or leech) be found” (936). In addition, according to W. Otto Friesen, Professor of Biology at the University of Virginia, of the ten or so pond leeches found in and around the Charlottesville area, not only is none poisonous, but many are not even bloodsuckers. As Mabbott also notes, although Poe may have found the French term for the leech (sangsue) in either Cuvier's Le Règne Animal (1817) or Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1832), he may also have chosen to pun on the name of Samuel Leitch, Jr., a Charlottesville merchant who billed John Allan for a debt of $68.46, incurred by “Edgar A. Powe,” while at the University (952-23).¹⁴ Whatever the source of his leech, Poe's intention is clear: Romantics who surrender themselves completely to nature—who allow their imaginations to overwhelm their perceptions—can expect to meet with a deadly fate. Inattention to the actualities of the landscape, in short, can have tragic consequences.¹⁵

Although the mesmerism, metempsychosis, and animal magnetism of “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” all provide a convenient explanation for Bedloe's Romantic vision, these aspects of the tale fail to address the full significance of his experience. Restoring the centrality of the landscape to Poe's tale helps us better to understand Bedloe's vision as an expression of both the ease with which we can find the supernatural in the natural and the consequences of our looking for more in a landscape than it actually contains. According to Reinhard H. Friederich, “In a number of ways ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ is typical of what irritates the reader in much of Poe's fiction: there are both oblique and obvious repetitions, excitement and exhaustion, exotic prospects which turn out to be commonplace. For a while life seems to invent exciting alternatives to a normally drab existence, but after a short while such semblances collapse in death” (155-56). Yet this is precisely the point of Poe's tale: “exotic prospects” often exceed the ability of the “commonplace” to sustain them, and “exciting alternatives” are usually nothing but “semblances” of daily life. To succeed, therefore, any search for a “whole universe of suggestion” must be held in check by the realities of the landscape in which it occurs.

Notes

1. Although the narrator dates the events of “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” as occurring during the fall of 1827, Poe attended the University from February to December of 1826.

2. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969-78) III: 941. Subsequent references to this volume will be made parenthetically in the text by page number.

3. Modern geological survey maps confine the Ragged Mountains to a few square miles, which include four main peaks: Round Top (919 ft.), Bear Den Mountain (1,248 ft.), Newcomb Mountain (1,262 ft.), and Woodson Mountain (1,297 ft.). Earlier maps of Albemarle County are more generous, however, and the first country history shows the term “Ragged Mountains” to be rather flexible, sometimes designating mountains in the northwest part of the county in addition to those “heaped up for some miles” to the southwest (Woods 15).

4. Portions of Bedloe's vision resemble Thomas De Quincey's dreams in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), which Poe had read by 1835, especially De Quincey's imagery of mountains and valleys, solitude and crowds, and the terror of the East (Poe, Letters I: 58). For more on Poe and opium, see Hayter and Milligan.

5. An important exception to the general disregard for the landscape of Poe's tales is Ljungquist, although his discussion of “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” is all too brief (127-29).

6. Only twenty-five students' names were on the “Proclamation,” according to Stovall, and Poe's name was not among them (9).

7. For a comparison of Pym and the mineral springs, see Cecil.

8. For more on the Monacans, see Bushnell; Hantman; and Houck.

9. See also the account noted by Bushnell in “‘The Indian Grave.’”

10. These beliefs are consistent with the longstanding negative perception of Appalachian mountain dwellers by outside observers. For the history of the idea of Appalachia, see Batteau and Shapiro.

11. For more on Orientalism and Romanticism in America, see Kleitz.

12. Several critics have noticed this similarity, the most recent being Isani. Poe probably read the essay in the first two volumes of the (unauthorized) Philadelphia edition of Macaulay's Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1841), which he reviewed for Graham's Magazine in June (Mabbott III: 937). For other source studies, see Carter; Cobb; Kopley; and Pittman.

13. Bedloe's reliance upon morphine to induce his hyperesthesia, or intensity of sense perception, heightens the discrepancy between real and imagined landscapes in the tale. See also De Quincey's contrast between the “Pleasures” and “Pains” of opium.

14. For more on Poe's use of Hugo, see Pollin.

15. This interpretation is consistent with recent readings of Poe's three landscape sketches—“The Landscape Garden” (1842), “The Domain of Arnheim” (1847), and “Landor's Cottage” (1849)—with which “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” shares many elements. See, for instance, Rainwater. For another important discussion of landscape in Poe, see Baym.

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