<
 



INTRODUCTION + READING ASSIGNMENT + WRITING ASSIGNMENT
Assignment 23:
EDGAR ALLAN POE

In Poe we have the first internationally famous writer from the American south, a writer whose poems and tales have influenced generations of readers the world over. Robert Louis Stevenson got the idea for his novel, Treasure Island, from Poe's story, "The Gold Bug"; Friedrich Neitzsche evidently grew up reading Poe; Arthur Conan Doyle traced his own development of the detective story to Poe's tales of crime and detection; and in his writings, Vladimir Nabokov paid homage to his reading of Poe through a number of allusions. This list could go on.

In his own time, Poe's popularity was sizable. His tales and journalism (book reviews, essays) were influential and widely read. During his two-and-one-half year tenure as editor of The Southern Literary Messenger, Poe virtually made the magazine's reputation. He was equally vital in building the success of various other magazines with which he was affiliated: Graham's Magazine and Burton Gentlemen's Magazine, for example. Poe's popularity derived, in part, from his ability to work into his writing so many different bits of popular knowledge and contemporary concern. Popular, pseudo-scientific theories like phrenology and mesmerism, or (for example) John Symmes's eccentric geographical theory about the Earth's hollow axis, with huge maelstrom's of water circulating at each of the poles, all found their way into Poe's work. In "The Masque of Red Death" Poe drew upon a contemporary interest in medieval history and the 14th century plagues, having himself edited articles on these topics for The Southern Literary Messenger.

One curious feature about Poe's writing is that American landscapes and social contexts are mostly absent from it. The stories and poems are often set in either European or somewhat indistinct, universalized landscapes. Thus, while a southern writer, Poe consciously sought to occupy a territory that was generalized--what he himself described as a territory of "True Art."

Poe never had an explicit word to say in print about some of the most pressing concerns of his time: Andrew Jackson's controversial presidency, the financial crisis of the mid-1830s, the annexation of Texas and the settling of the West, slavery. Many readers have argued that these issues are allegorically treated, in various of the stories; still, Poe's disconnection from his times is a notable feature of his work. Nevertheless, for students of cultural history it's an irresistible strategy to see these stories as expressions of their times.

For example, Poe's tentative balance of themes of reason and madness in his poems and tales is notable. In the figure of Montressor, in "A Cask of Amontillado," we have a character whose rationality, whose concisely reasoned plan for murder, is so well ordered that its towering success finally tips over into insanity. We might well say the same thing of the speaker in "The Raven," or the narrator in "Ligeia." Indeed, Poe's maddest characters are also often the most highly cultured. Roderick Usher, in "The Fall of the House of Usher," is not only the sole surviving descendant of an ancient aristocratic family, he is also the full inheritor of its liberal tradition in learning. He is the complete man; yet none of these gifts and achievements can save the house, which is identified with him, from inexplicably crumbling. And, speaking of the inexplicable, we should note as well that Poe habitually explores the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. In "Ligeia" for example, any explanation of apparently natural events (does the narrator's first wife arise from the dead, upon the death of his second?) must slide over into the supernatural.

It's impossible, finally, to read Poe without making some effort to hypothesize connections between his work and American civilization in the 1830's and 1840's. In exploring these boundaries between reason and madness, the natural and the supernatural, cultural order and personal chaos, was Poe not voicing the paramount anxieties of his time? The stories' clear doubts about the powers and limits of human rationality or about empirical science and its uses, and their depiction of aristocracy as a lingering, but isolated and utterly degenerate tendency, are themes whose popular reception may tell us much about Poe's time. Compared to Emerson's confident argument in Nature on behalf of the human ability to reason from Nature, towards the Supernatural, thereby achieving a transcendent unity, Poe's themes of doubt and uncertainty reveal another, darker side to the "American Renaissance."

Reading Assignment
  1. Edgar Allan Poe, "Sonnet--To Science" (pp. 1480-1483), "The Raven" (pp. 1492-1495), "Ligeia," "The Fall of the House of Usher" (pp. 1499-1521), and "The Cask of Amontillado" (pp. 1567-1572).
Writing Assignment
  1. Read Poe's "Sonnet--To Science," and compare his attitude toward Science (by what comparisons and metaphors does he represent Science?) with that of Emerson, in Nature.
  2. Read Poe's most famous poem, "The Raven," and answer the following questions:

    1. What is the time and date of the poem's action; where does that action unfold; what objects surround the speaker; and what has he been doing, before the "tapping" on his door?

    2. Now, in paragraph or two, say how these details of setting become significant in the poem.

    3. In his essay "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe states that beauty influences the soul best when the subject is sad, and that therefore the death of a beautiful woman is the "soul" of poetry. How does "The Raven" illustrate Poe's practice of this theory?

  3. Read "The Fall of the House of Usher" and write two or three paragraphs on the following question: What is solved by reading this story as an allegory, so that the "House" is interpreted as Usher's mind? Yet what problems are also created by such an allegorical reading? (For example, there is Madeline's apparent return to life.)

  4. Read "A Cask of Amontillado" and answer the following:

    1. What is the narrative situation for this tale; that is, to whom is it being told, when, and why? And how do such facts influence our reading of it?

    2. Does Fortunato (with his ironic name) ever understand why he's being chained up in a catacomb, to die? (Indeed, why does Montressor kill him this way?) Is it significant that the punishment does not seem to fit the crime? Why?

  5. Read "Ligeia" and answer the following:

    1. What significance do we see in the narrator's concise descriptions of character and setting?

    2. The central enigma of "Ligeia" is, simply: What happens? Do you think the narrator's deceased first wife comes back to life at the moment of his second wife's death? Discuss the reasons for your answer.

CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT ASSIGNMENT
CONTENTS | DESCRIPTION | GUIDELINES | TIMELINE | ASSIGNMENTS | INDEPENDENT STUDY PROGRAM