poe's women: a feminist poe?

12
Poe’s Women: Joan Dayan University of Arizona A Feminist Poe? You talk of “lofty feelings, pure and high- Too pure, alas!” and then you gently sigh; You mourn the trials which a soul like yours- So true-amid the meaner herd endures. -Frances Sargent Osgood, “TO” To write about Poe-the man who loved women- at a time when we continue to argue about, to define and undefine terms such as “gender,” “fe- male,” “femininity,” “women” or “woman,” is to experience some discomfort. What does it mean to call Poe a “feminist” writer? Does the qualifica- tion help us to get at what makes Poe’s treatments of women-whether idealized or violated-so un- settling, and subversive? I will argue at the outset that something strange happens to any easy as- sumption of womanhood when we turn to Poe’s writings, whether his love letters, poems, or tales. Further, if Poe destabilizes any sure identifica- tion of women, he also questions what it means to speak, or to love, as a man. In both cases, I suspect that Poe was bothered by those culturally constructed categories that in opposing men and women removed the need to comprehend what we mean by sexual identity, love, or possession. It is too easy to perpetuate the commonplace that Poe turns women into objects, or as I once argued, uses women as pretexts for what tran- scends them. As I began to suggest in Fables of Mind, there is something unique about the way Poe presents ”the romantic idea of woman”: a burden of uniqueness more fiercely embodied in Madeline Usher’s erotic, bloody return in her “fi- nal death agonies” than in the entranced painter’s recognition that his “Oval Portrait” got life from the death of his bride.’ Poe takes his writings beyond what Leland Person has recently called a “masculine poetics,” the “male tendency to disembody women”’ that we’ve already heard so much about, as well as moving his readers beyond that comfortably un- derstood “romantic image.” For Poe’s often quoted “the death . . . of a beautiful woman is . . . the most poetical topic in the worldn3 demands that we ask what Poe means when he says “beautiful woman,” and more, what he intends to do when he decides to get “poetical.” There is a great deal at stake when we talk about Poe and women. If few critics have ana- lyzed Poe and feminism, it could reflect his obvi- ously excessive returns to ideas of femininity or womanliness that seem to accept, not question, the brute sexualization and reification of women in the nineteenth century. Indeed, he offers us some unforgettable examples of women splitting into dark and light, carnalized and spiritualized. But Poe goes beyond any simple virgin-and-whore dichotomy: his women are not mere symbols for what Baudelaire addressed as “Beauty, . . . your glance hellish and divine” (“Hymn to Beauty”). Poe does not sustain the eternal polarities, but in- stead analyzes the slippage in too convenient op- positions, the reversibility of all concepts, and ul- timately, the confounding of men and women. Poe’s writings urge us to examine critically what it might mean to work out a feminist epis- temology. Poe idealizes and hyperbolizes. But this spectacle of womanhood exposes the charade or confidence game of any call to “being” or to an “essential” self, whether masculine or feminine, whether promulgated by men or women. Poe in- terrogates (for he never totally assimilates or fully rejects anything) the most valued assumptions of his culture. At the same time, he ironizes the very possibility of speaking for or as a man. In Poe’s texts, as in his life, alternative possibilities coex- ist: every sacred binary opposition is exposed as problematic rather than known or assured. Before attempting to reconstruct Poe’s con- founding, often self-subverting calls to sentiment and feminizing love as one stage in a far more ambi- tious project-to refuse and resist the temptations of such mystifying phraseology as “real women,” 1

Upload: joan-dayan

Post on 29-Sep-2016

272 views

Category:

Documents


2 download

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Poe's Women: A Feminist Poe?

Poe’s Women:

Joan Dayan

University of Arizona

A Feminist Poe?

You talk of “lofty feelings, pure and high- Too pure, alas!” and then you gently sigh; You mourn the trials which a soul like yours- So true-amid the meaner herd endures.

-Frances Sargent Osgood, “TO”

To write about Poe-the man who loved women- at a time when we continue to argue about, to define and undefine terms such as “gender,” “fe- male,” “femininity,” “women” or “woman,” is to experience some discomfort. What does it mean to call Poe a “feminist” writer? Does the qualifica- tion help us to get at what makes Poe’s treatments of women-whether idealized or violated-so un- settling, and subversive? I will argue at the outset that something strange happens to any easy as- sumption of womanhood when we turn to Poe’s writings, whether his love letters, poems, or tales. Further, if Poe destabilizes any sure identifica- tion of women, he also questions what it means to speak, or to love, as a man. In both cases, I suspect that Poe was bothered by those culturally constructed categories that in opposing men and women removed the need to comprehend what we mean by sexual identity, love, or possession.

It is too easy to perpetuate the commonplace that Poe turns women into objects, or as I once argued, uses women as pretexts for what tran- scends them. As I began to suggest in Fables of Mind, there is something unique about the way Poe presents ”the romantic idea of woman”: a burden of uniqueness more fiercely embodied in Madeline Usher’s erotic, bloody return in her “fi- nal death agonies” than in the entranced painter’s recognition that his “Oval Portrait” got life from the death of his bride.’

Poe takes his writings beyond what Leland Person has recently called a “masculine poetics,” the “male tendency to disembody women”’ that we’ve already heard so much about, as well as moving his readers beyond that comfortably un-

derstood “romantic image.” For Poe’s often quoted “the death . . . of a beautiful woman is . . . the most poetical topic in the worldn3 demands that we ask what Poe means when he says “beautiful woman,” and more, what he intends to do when he decides to get “poetical.”

There is a great deal a t stake when we talk about Poe and women. If few critics have ana- lyzed Poe and feminism, it could reflect his obvi- ously excessive returns to ideas of femininity or womanliness that seem to accept, not question, the brute sexualization and reification of women in the nineteenth century. Indeed, he offers us some unforgettable examples of women splitting into dark and light, carnalized and spiritualized. But Poe goes beyond any simple virgin-and-whore dichotomy: his women are not mere symbols for what Baudelaire addressed as “Beauty, . . . your glance hellish and divine” (“Hymn to Beauty”). Poe does not sustain the eternal polarities, but in- stead analyzes the slippage in too convenient op- positions, the reversibility of all concepts, and ul- timately, the confounding of men and women.

Poe’s writings urge us to examine critically what it might mean to work out a feminist epis- temology. Poe idealizes and hyperbolizes. But this spectacle of womanhood exposes the charade or confidence game of any call to “being” or to an “essential” self, whether masculine or feminine, whether promulgated by men or women. Poe in- terrogates (for he never totally assimilates or fully rejects anything) the most valued assumptions of his culture. At the same time, he ironizes the very possibility of speaking for or as a man. In Poe’s texts, as in his life, alternative possibilities coex- ist: every sacred binary opposition is exposed as problematic rather than known or assured.

Before attempting to reconstruct Poe’s con- founding, often self-subverting calls to sentiment and feminizing love as one stage in a far more ambi- tious project-to refuse and resist the temptations of such mystifying phraseology as “real women,”

1

Page 2: Poe's Women: A Feminist Poe?

“ethics of care,” or the now ceaselessly reiterated “female identity”-I turn briefly to a text that should serve as ground for my attempt to talk about a “feminist Poe.” Denise Riley’s =Am I that Name‘?”: Feminist and the Category of ‘Women’ in History offers one of the most discerning analy- ses to date of the danger in turning to something called “‘women’s experience’” and the “false uni- versality” it promotes. She writes: The question of how far anyone can take on the identity of being a woman in a thoroughgoing manner recalls the fictive status accorded to sexual identities by some psy- choanalytic thought. Can anyone fully inhabit a gender without a degree of horror? How could someone ‘be a woman’ through and through, make a final home in that classification without suffering claustrophobia? To lead a life soaked in the passionate consciousness of one’s gender at every single moment, to will to be a sex with a vengeance-these are impossibilities, and far from the aims of feminism.

Poe’s most grotesque tales, like his poems of “purest ideality,” demonstrate how ever intensified and refined femininities (whether characteristic of male lovers or female beloveds) are “impossibili- ties.” In the process, as we shall see, he presents the vacillations, the waverings, and, in Riley’s words, “the indeterminacy of sexual positionings”‘ that end up overturning his society’s stereotypes even as he seems to adopt them.

I. Poe and the Business of Romance The Puritans were not kind to their women.

Jonathan Edwards’s stories of remarkable conver- sions turn living women into figures consistent with the patriarchal ideal of godhead: in them, the Calvinist dread of the flesh is most often attached to the carnal lure of Eve’s progeny. Locke trans- ferred this fear of female physical excess into his critique of figurative language by staging the oppo- sition between sensible and sensational language as a kind of masquerade: “The art of rhetoric . . . all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented” are “perfect cheats.”’ In nineteenth-century America something curious would happen to masculine projections of women, and Poe was never immune to the excesses of his culture. He turns Locke’s “fair sex” into a “har- lot,” as he warns against decking truth in “gay robes,” or wreathing “her in gems and flowers” (ER, 685). It is no accident that the “feminine ideal” and the narrowing of women’s realm to the domestic haven of home, a pristine place of com- fort and compensation, would increase as women left their homes to fight for equal rights and for the abolition of slavery.

What do men love in women? Their transfor-

mation into superlatives, or as Poe will repeat and replay it, their reduction into generality. So, when Poe calls his addressee, whether “Annie,” Sarah Helen Whitman, or any of his women, “my heart of hearts,” he reveals something about his own in- volvement in a specific validation of woman. His difficulties with “womanliness,” his problems with “romance” as his contemporaries conceived it, Poe demonstrates by his tautological circlings around the overplayed idea.

Poe’s two landscape sketches, “The Domain of Arnheim” and “Landor’s Cottage,” seem to be hymns to beauty, with women either recalled or perceived as the “spirit of the place.” The narrator of “Arnheim” believes that one woman’s love can make a heaven of earth: “above all, it was in the sympathy of a woman, not unwomanly, whose love- liness and love enveloped his [Ellison’s] existence in the purple atmosphere of Paradise” (Works, 3:1277). But Poe also understood how “romance” could coerce, how the continued harping on what it means to be a woman, could-as Denise Riley put it-induce “claustrophobia.” Discourse is an instrument of domination, and Poe knew it. He takes the rhetoric of praise and exaggerates it until words themselves become as stifling, as horrific and circumscribing, as any of his closed rooms, tombs, or coffins. Recall the exaggerations of “Landor’s Cottage,” when the narrator introduces “Annie,” the angel of the house: “So intense an expression of romance . . . had never sunk into my heart of hearts before . . . . ‘Romance,’ provided my read- ers fully comprehend what I would here imply by the word-‘romance’ and ‘womanliness’ seem to me convertible terms: and, after all, what man truly loves in woman, is simply her womanhood” (Works, 3:1338-39). But just as Poe’s proverbial praise of the “sou1 of Poesy” or “breath of faery” screens a more earthy subject, I want to suggest that here it is the fact of repetition that should preoccupy us: Poe’s obsessive return to the same masquerade of love and courtship.

It might seem strange that I claim Poe as critic of the binding strategies of the romantic imagina- tion. Critics have found him to be the consummate idealist: assigning to the Adamic poet spiritus and mission, while granting “soulfulness” to women, along with the burden of making nature moral and regenerate. For what other writer seems to have so deliberately made his subjectivity the ground for poetry and philosophy? Indeed, if women exist at all in his letters, tale, or poems, they appear to be excuses for this continued fascination with himself. It is not surprising, then, that many com- plaints about Poe’s poetry, like those of T. S. Eliot or Yvor Winters, focus on his excess of sentiment,

Page 3: Poe's Women: A Feminist Poe?

his preoccupation with his own mood. The sublime is a production of excess in the

mind, and Poe allows himself to be consumed by the surfeit. We know that Poe fought against the “obscurity” of those he called “mystics for mysticism’s sake,” those who confused “darkness and depth.” When he condemns his contempo- raries’ vagueness or sentimentality, he makes his own words dramatize the fault. Using his love letters and poems to repeat romantic clich6, Poe shows how the language of ideal love petrifies the lover as well as his object. His own writing, then, becomes an exemplum of what he most hates, but sometimes he is consumed by the very language he intends to transgress.

In 1917 Virginia Woolf published an essay in the Times Literary Supplement on Caroline Tic- knor’s book Poe’s Helen (1916). Woolf was more carried away by “the figure of Mrs. Whitman” than by what she described as the “tedious let- ters” of the “discreditable romantic” Poe. She takes his letters and his love as examples of how Poe, whether he intended it or not, pays the price of stock idealization. Woolf wrote: “He might have been addressing a fashion plate in a ladies newspaper-a fashion plate which walked the cemetery by moonlight, for the atmosphere is one of withered roses and moonshine.” But isn’t this the point? Poe is an unredeemable lover. The language he adopts from ladies’ newspapers, ac- cording to Woolf, proves that Poe did not love He- len, that he could love no one: “When we read the letters we feel that the man who wrote them had no emotion left about anything; his world was a world of phantoms and fashion plates; his phrases are the cast-off phrases that were not quite good enough for a story.” The Poe Woolf describes is a skep- tic caught in a haze of lies, opium, and alcohol, a man who “had no emotion left about anything,”6 a man who was, to use one of Poe’s favorite phrases, ‘used up.”

We must continue to ask the question so power- fully articulated by Ann Douglas in The Feminiza- tion of American Culture: how could emotion-in the sense Woolf meant it-how could love survive in a society overtaken by what Douglas calls the “sen timen t a1 heresy.” “‘Feminization’ inevitably guaranteed. . . the continuation of male hegemony in different guises.”’ The very question of “sexual identity: as Douglas does not hesitate to stress, had to be de-natured when both ministers and “ladies” found themselves marginalized and awash in a language of the spirit, which allowed another language and another reality to perpetuate itself. While Sarah Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, celebrated the powers of feminizing and an-

gelic “influence” on the brute and money-making man, the divide between those who wielded the terms of mastery and power and those who were busy sanctifying and suffering increased.

Rather than defend Poe’s private life or justify his compulsively repeated terms of endearment, I want to reflect on Woolf’s portrait of a man hol- lowed out, exhausted, and unbelieving. For this rather unlovable lover wrote “love poems” that would involve him in significant poetic exchanges with Frances Sargent Osgood and Sarah Helen Whitman. Speaking of the latter, Caroline Tick- nor praises her brief engagement to Poe in words no doubt too sentimental for Woolf: “these two po- ets, who loved to make love in poetic form.” Speak- ing about Poe’s “Helen of a thousand dreams,” Ticknor finds herself, along with Sarah Whitman, consumed by the force of his “great spirit grop- ing toward the light,” by this “man of brilliant in- tellect, splendid imagination and marvelous power of expression.”’ Whether we look at Ticknor, Os- good, or Whitman, most of Poe’s women, whether critics or lovers, seem to join him in the language of reverence and excess. Whitman found in Poe a fitting object for her psychal fancies and impossi- ble dreams. Her Edgar Allan Poe and his Critics (1860), an attempt to vindicate Poe’s name from the slurs of the vindictive Griswold, testifies to Poe’s grace, erudition, and magnetism, as well as “to that power of vivid and intense conception that made his dreams realities, and his life a dream.”’

Although Poe was a predictable lover, romanc- ing and recycling his beloveds in letters, poems, and tales, he remained a serious critic of women writers. During his editorship of Graham’s Mag- azine, he introduced to the American public the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who con- tributed many of her shorter poems to its pages. His review of Barrett’s The Drama of Exile, and Other Poems in The Broadway Journal in 1845, demonstrates his awareness of how women writ- ers are treated when “the race of critics,” as he puts it, “are masculine-men.” Poe does not spare Barrett his criticisms, for he respects her as an equal. The greatest evil resulting from the absence of women critics, he explains, is that “the critical man” finds it “an unpleasant task . . . ‘to speak ill of a woman’” (Writings, 3:l): In general, therefore, it is the unhappy lot of the au- thoress to be subjected, time after time, to the down- right degradation of mere puffery . . . . That Miss Bar- rett had done more, in poetry, than any woman, liv- ing or dead, will scarcely be questioned:-that she has surpaased all her poetical contemporaries of either sex (with a single exception) is our deliberate opinion-not idly entertained, we think, nor founded on any visionary

3

Page 4: Poe's Women: A Feminist Poe?

basis. (Writings, 3:2, 14)

Never one to let a good bit of prose serve only one purpose, Poe sent his words about Barrett to Sarah Helen Whitman before he finally met her in 1848. As Ticknor writes, “An article by Poe, on Elizabeth Barrett, whose work he had been one of the first to extol, had been sent to Mrs. Whitman at his request.””

In the early summer of 1848, while Poe was courting Mrs. Nancy Locke Richmond (whom he called “Annie”), and composing poetic valentines to Sarah Helen Whitman and Marie Louise Shew, he was also writing a favorable review of Rufus Griswold’s The Female Poets of America. Such inconsistencies between Poe’s life and his work, be- tween the romantic lover and the severe critic of idealization, make tricky business of any investiga- tion of Poe’s love poetry. And yet, the “love po- ems,” especially the later “To Marie Louise Shew” (1847-48), “To Helen” (1848-49), and “For Annie” (1849), carry further the radical project of Poe’s tales about women. If, as I have argued in Fables of Mind (226-27), Poe suspends gender as a com- ponent of identity, hoping to blur the distinctions between culturally constructed ideas of masculin- ity or femininity, in the late love poems he analyzes the inevitable reciprocities between the writer and his object of desire. Further, in turning Locke’s investigation of personal identity into a question of sexual identity, Poe hopes to analyze what it means to feel love. The feeling is so corrosive that to experience it is to be before and outside any subject, or any object.

Before turning to these later poems, I want briefly to suggest a reinterpretation of Poe’s ro- manticism, first, by reconsidering his unique sense of the “idea” of Beauty in the early poems, and then by turning to those tales that make a bur- lesque of sexual difference. Though many of Poe’s early poems lack the physical intensity or apoca- lyptic eroticism of those written at the end of his life, these glorifications of “ideality” and odes to the dead or dying set the stage for his struggles to expose the dark side of adoration, the terri- ble tyranny of what Baudelaire celebrated as Poe’s “cult of Beauty.”

11. “The Necromancy of Female Gracefulness”

Poe has been called the most ethereal of poets. Baudelaire’s Poe, for example, incar- nated the delicacy and spirituality lacking in an America obsessed with acquisition and sunk in materialism, what Baudelaire condemned as “l’arn&ocanomanie.” Poe was martyr to Baude- laire’s ideal of Beauty, and Poe’s women were no

more than tools for the exhibition of masculine genius. According to Baudelaire, Poe like Gau- tier had a talent for transformation, for the di- vinization so necessary when faced with “woman,” that “beautiful animal.” In “Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses oeuvres,” Baudelaire linked Poe’s spirituality to his portraits of those rarified phantom women; ”haloed,” they are types for Poe himself: “They burn amidst a supernatural vapor and are painted in the eloquent style of an adorer.”ll In Baude- laire’s view, Poe knew how to elevate and correct a monstrous nature, which Baudelaire identified with women, savages, and animals.

Yet Poe’s images of women are striking in the way they literally refute the assumption of ado- ration. If poems like the first “To Helen” (1831), “The Sleeper” (1831), and “Lenore” (1831) are sat- urated with love, that love depends upon the poet representing the woman as dead. Sarah Whit- man praises Poe’s “lingering pity and sorrow for the dead,” and recalls his letter that claims Jane Stith Craig Stanard (the original Helen who died in 1824) as “the one, idolatrous, and purely ideal love of his youth.” Yet what Whitman describes as Poe’s “devotional fidelity to the memory of those he loved” is often a dramatization of how adoration becomes the striking occasion for bru- tal repression.12 We cannot read the majestic “To Helen” without recalling another hideous ground for her “hyacinth hair,” “classic face,” and “Naiad airs” ( Works, 1:166). We must also recall how Poe describes the title character of “Ligeia,” soon to surrender to the “Conqueror Worm,” as he begins that tale of horror.

We need to see the first “To Helen,” “The Sleeper,” and “Lenore” as interacting with one an- other. Helen’s “Naiad airs” are rooted deep in those worms creeping softly around Irene in “The Sleeper.” Apparently a poem about his slumbering beloved, “The Sleeper” is shot through with im- ages (ghosts, worms, sepulchre, the dead) that sug- gest the poet’s wish has come to pass: “Oh, may her sleep, / Which is enduring, so be deep! / . . . / I pray to God that she may lie / Forever with un- opened eye, / While the pale sheeted ghosts go by” ( Works, 1:187-88; italics mine), “Lenore,” explic- itly a dirge for his beloved, “for the queenliest dead that ever died so young,” turns on the problem of language: how best to mourn the child virgin who dies before her marriage-“How shall the ritual then be read-the requiem how be sung”( Works, 1:336-37). Like “To One in Paradise” and the tales “Ligeia,” “Morella,” and “Berenice,” these laments turn on the call of memory, the urge to recall the phantoms of an unrelenting doom. As the narrator asks in “Berenice”: “How is i t that from beauty

4

Page 5: Poe's Women: A Feminist Poe?

I have derived a type of unloveliness?-from the covenant of peace, a simile of sorrow?” (Works, 2:209).

In thinking about Poe’s women, we must go beyond the fact of women as poetic subjects. In “The Women of Poe’s Poems and Tales,” Floyd Stovall writes: Poe’s women are either extremely innocent and unso- phisticated, like Eleanora and Annabel Lee, or else ab- normally intellectual, like Ligeia and Morella. They are all noble and good, and naturally very beautiful, though sometimes made ugly by disease as in the case of Berenice. Most remarkable of all is their passionate and enduring love for his hero.”

Richard Wilbur writes of “that supernal beauty which is symbolized in Poe by the shadowy and angelic figures of Ligeia, and Helen, and Lenore.” l4

Like Stovall and Wilbur, most men who write about Poe too easily divinize Poe’s women. They take his “Poetic Principle,” what Eric Carlson calls “the immemorial dream-ideal,” straight.” Edward Wagenknecht goes so far as t o argue that, “in his thinking about love, Poe was extremely idealistic, for he saw it as a manifestation of supernal beauty and a link between humanity and divinity.”“ Yet, the effect of Poe’s poetry, whether he intended it or not, is to contaminate “that Beauty,” which he claimed in “The Poetic Principle,” as “the atmo- sphere and the real essence of the poem” (ER, 79).

Since I believe that Poe’s thoughts about love are often monstrous, I can understand why it is comforting to men now, as it was in the nineteenth century, to know that his women project a saving ideal. In their nobility and goodness, t o repeat Stovall’s praise of Poe’s women, they combat or erase the threat of an overly willful (and carnal) Eve. In “Burke, Poe and ’Usher,’: The Sublime and Rising Woman,” Craig Howes explains those qualities that “make a woman beautiful”: “The insipid, the withdrawing, the ‘feminine’ raise the gentler affections.” Citing Edmund Burke, Howes reminds us, “‘The beauty of women is considerably owing to their weakness, or delicacy.’”17

Howes’ essay is crucial t o my examination of Poe’s women. While he argues that Poe retreats “from the vision of a powerful, self-determining woman,” and those other “agents of the beautiful, whether women, children, dogs, or the poor,” it would be more accurate to say that Poe has appre- hended the male fear of that power lurking in the beautiful, what Howes describes as “a power that can triumph over even that most sublime of sub- jects, death itself‘ (185). Having understood the demonic underside of men’s need to poeticize and feminize women, Poe confronts his readers again

and again with scenes of terror: Morella, Ligeia, and Berenice decay, die, and are mourned, but they return to teach the oppressive idolater a les- son he will not forget.

The return, revenge, or revision demanded by certain women in Poe’s tales cannot be ignored. Besides such “gothic” tales as “Morella,” “Ligeia,” “Berenice” or “The Fall of the House of Usher,” all of which present varying spectacles of reincar- nation or resurrection, Poe writes other sardonic commentaries on women’s position in a world al- ready circumscribed by men. In “The Prema- ture Burial,” the narrator is obsessed with what he calls “the one sepulchral Idea” (Works, 3:963). Yet, just as in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where the idea is ultimately given flesh with Made- line’s bloody return, this tale begins with a pre- mature interment. “The wife of one of the most respectable citizens . . . was seized with a sudden and unaccountable illness.” She dies, or is thought dead, and is buried. After three years, her hus- band opens the door of the vault, and “some white- apparelled object fell rattling within his arms. It was the skeleton of his wife in her yet unmouldered shroud.”

Vaults are opened, skeletons discovered, and women return. Indeed, most of Poe’s tales de- pend on the image of unveiling or revelation for their force. “The Spectacles,” Poe’s play on delu- sion and romance, works only because the young character Simpson believes in “‘love at first sight”’ but, because of vanity, refuses t o wear glasses, and thus has no sight. He supposedly marries his beloved Eughnie Lalande, with her “large luminous eyes!-that proud Grecian nose!-those dark lux- uriant curls!,” only to discover once he puts on his spectacles that she is an “old hag,” his great- great-grandmother ( Works, 3:909, 916). S’ impson is deluded as much by his expectations of “loveli- ness” in women as by his bad sight. So saturated has he been in the language of romantic adoration that “art” (Eugknie’s wig, rouge, false teeth, and false tournure), combined with his overblown en- thusiasm, produce the final comic effect.

111. The Beautiful Soul and the Unsexed Poet

Eureka, Poe’s “Essay on the Material and Spir- itual Universe,” ends with an apocalypse startling in its eroticism: “a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine.” The atoms in the intensity of their “spiritual passion,” in their appetite for “oneness,” will at last “flash . . . into a common embrace.” As all things go rushing into unity, pleasures that were imperfect collapse into godhead in what Poe calls “the finally collective

5

Page 6: Poe's Women: A Feminist Poe?

attraction.” There is a beat, a throb, and we are left with the “Spirit Divine.””

I now turn to Poe’s poems of the heart, or spirit (for him the two are interchangeable), and ask how, while ostensibly writing to his various beloveds, he articulates, interprets, and enforces women’s presence in his culture. Poe’s poems constitute, or represent, a powerfully romanti- cized conglomerate, but they are not romantic. Here, I take Carl Schmitt’s distinction in Politi- cal Romanticism as a way to understand what Poe meant when he wrote Sarah Helen Whitman about his heart’s “passionate history” (Letters, 2:383). Schmitt writes: “A robber knight can be a roman- tic figure, but he is not a romantic. . . . It is only the romanticizing subject and its activity that are of importance for the definition of the concept.”l9

In order to demonstrate how Poe marks the divide between the operations of romanticism and his own voice, I turn to the second “To Helen” sent to Sarah Helen Whitman on 1 June 1848. (He will meet “Annie” in Richmond July 10). Poe had already sent anonymously to Mrs. Whitman the 1831 printed “To Helen.” Here, in 1848, Woolf’s withered roses, moonlight, and dead lady, together with the tags of sentiment, form the background for Poe’s figuration of the romantic lover.

I saw thee once-once only-years ago: I must not say how many-but not many. It was a July midnight; and from out A full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul,

Sought a precipitate pathway up through heaven, There fell a silvery-silken veil of light, With quietude, and sultriness, and slumber, Upon the upturn’d faces of a thousand Roses . . . That gave out, in return for the love-light, Their odorous souls in an ecstatic death- Fell on the upturn’d faces of these roses That smiled and died in this parterre, enchanted By thee, and by the poetry of thy presence.

soaring,

Clad all in white, upon a violet bank I saw thee half reclining; while the moon Fell on the upturn’d faces of the roses, And on thine own, upturn’d-alas, in sorrow!

A soulful nature and a dead lady. But is the ob- serving, writing subject a “romantic”? It is the nature of the poet that should preoccupy us. Does he see this woman as the point of departure for a fanciful game? The ground for a new aesthetic? The stanza sets the stage for a masque of love, courtship, and death that has as its object the un- sexing of the masculine lover.

(Works, 1:445)

There is no precedent for this kind of poetry in Emerson, Longfellow, or Bryant. Though they might write about sentient landscapes or love, no one writes about women as does Poe. The moon, like the lady’s soul, soars up through heaven, and light from above falls on the roses’ upturned faces. The image of death is intensified as the roses surrender their souls, “upturn’d” in an ecstatic liebestod. Then, as the poem continues, the world of nature is progressively eliminated: “The pearly lustre of the moon went out: / The mossy banks and the meandering paths, / The happy‘ flowers and the repining trees, / Were seen no more.” As all disappears (much like the turn from green world to ashen loss in “Eleonora,” a conversion also presented in Frances Sargent Osgood’s “Er- mengarde’s Awakening”), every part of the lady is obliterated, except for her eyes: “Only thine eyes remained, / They would not go-they never yet have gone / . . . I see them still-two sweetly scintillant / Venuses, unextinguished by the sun” ( Works, 1:446-47).

There is something less than ideal or sanc- tifying about these eyes, since the reader re- calls Berenice’s teeth forever imprinted on the narrator’s mind or the eyes of the Lady Ligeia. The “sweetly scintillant / Venuses” of the poem’s end also recall the “sinfully scintillant planet” of “Ulalume” ( Works, 1:419). How “poetical,” after all, is the death of this “beautiful woman,” to para- phrase the gist of Poe’s “Poetic Principle”? In the process of abstraction, once every piece of nature is blotted out, we read not the woman, but what Poe calls “less than thou” ( Works, 1:446). For the observing poet, “the fair sex” and the “romance” she bears can only be experienced here as frag- ment. Her distillation into nothing but eyes will be repeated at the end of “For Annie,” when the poet thinks “of the light / Of the eyes of my An- nie” ( Works, 1:459).

If the beloved is experienced as saving remnant (the poet in “To Helen,” haunted by his beloved’s eyes, hopes “to be saved by their bright light” [Works, 1:446 I), what happens to the poet? The observing “I” of “To Helen” does not commit him- self to “manlinessn as the patriarchs would have it. Yielding himself passive to the lovelight, as will the death-obsessed imaginist of “For Annie,” Poe ren- ders himself up as the typologically familiar, gen- dered female. Or rather, the merger of “thee and me” in “To Helen”-“Oh, Heaven!-oh, God! / How my heart beats in coupling these two words! / Save only thee and me” (Works, 1:445)-becomes a coupling of words that holds the woman and the man, beloved and lover, fragmented and stalled at the boundaries of gender identity.

Page 7: Poe's Women: A Feminist Poe?

Poe’s violation of his own identity, presenting himself as neither subject nor object, carries with it all the wantonness of the apocalyptic. Nowhere is the fantasy of gender transgression so powerful as in Poe’s never-anthologized poem “To-.” Writ- ten to Marie Louise Shew in 1848, the same year that Poe delivered Eureka as a lecture at the New York Historical Society, “To-” is arguably Poe’s greatest poem and philosophical exercise. In con- stituting love as the convertibility of varying an- tagonisms, “To-” records the difficult colloquy between the pulsations of Love and the demands of Truth, thus preparing the way for the androgynous universe of Eureka, the “Romance” Poe would call his “Book of Truths.”

Terms such as “saintliness,” “sweet ,” “ideal” or any notion of “feminine perfection” (words used by some critics to describe the women of Poe’s poems) have nothing to do with this poem. In contrast to the Emersonian declaration, “Give All to Love” (which really tells the disappointed male how not to give, how not to feel loss), Poe’s ut- terance breaks down before the terrible risks of reciprocal desire. In the alternating violence and tenderness, loss and gain of this communication, Poe undermines the principles of difference and the terms of sexuality in his culture.

Romance becomes convertible with mind mat- ters; and a woman’s sex-imaged in the poem’s fi- nal lines as the “gate of dreams” and “empurpled vapors” that entrance and encompass the poet as vaginal womb ( Works, 1:408)-becomes cotermi- nous with the ‘real knowledge’ held to be man’s possession alone. The first part of the poem, a setting for the final climax, is, if we can ever say such a thing about Poe, the sincere presentation of what a poet, electric with passion, can expect from language.

Not long ago, the writer of these lines, In the mad pride of intellectuality, Maintained the “power of words”-denied that ever A thought arose within the human brain Beyond the utterance of the human tongue; And now, as if in mockery of that boast, Two words-two foreign soft dissyllables- Italian tones made only to be murmured By angels dreaming in the moonlit “dew That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill”- Have stirred from out the abysses of his heart, Unthought-like thoughts that are the souls of

Richer, far wilder, far diviner visions Than even the seraph harper, Israfel, Who has “the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures,” Could hope to utter.

thought ,

( Worke, 1:407)

Poe repeats lines from his “Marginalia,” “The Power of Words,” “Politian,” “Israfel,” Eureka, and the 1 October 1848 letter to Sarah Helen Whitman. As in Eureka, Poe writes “To-” in order to reconsider and interrogate his previous work. For the subject of the poem is in part the unpowering of words. The plot of “True philoso- phy” hinted at in Eureka Poe here articulates as the disconnections engendered when intellect es- pouses the cause of the heart.

“To-” does not leave us with a vague, in- definite effect, what Poe in “The Poetic Princi- ple” calls “an elevating excitement of the SouZ,” distinct from passion (the claims of the heart) or Truth (the satisfactions of reason) (ER, 93). The emotions of the poem are not “soul-reveries rather than conclusions or even considerations of the in- tellect,” as Poe described in his Marginalia of 1846. They do not elevate above nature, above intellect, but put the writer smack in the middle of phenom- ena. What has negated the poet’s former writings? The “foreign dissyllables,” the names of the Lady “Marie Louise,” a name unnamed in the published version. Yet if what the poet experiences is not feeling, as he tells us as the end of the poem, what is it?

I am reminded of the disclaimer made by the narrator in “Berenice”: “Feelings, with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind” ( Works, 2:214). Passions of the mind and feelings of the heart cancel each other out. This indiference-the impact of matter and mind interconnected-gives off, on the personal level, what was in Eureka cosmic: a coincidence of opposites that Poe will call “electricity” or “a strictly spiritual principle.” But nothing in Poe is ever reconciled: any union of contraries never de- stroys opposition, for the coupling manifests the shock of relationship between things, at once com- plementarity and antagonism.

The rest of the poem attests not only to the passion of this philosophy but to the force of what ultimately defies definition: a sensation that neu- tralizes the dualisms of materialism and idealism, even as it neuters the conceptual divide between femininity and masculinity. In the conclusion of the poem, do we identify with the intellect or with the pulsing, effeminized body? The poet is at the threshold “of the wide-open gate of dreams,” which more precisely suggests the “empurpled” sex of his beloved.

. . . And I! my spells are broken. The pen falls powerless from my shivering hand. With thy dear name as text, though bidden by thee, I cannot write-I cannot speak or think, Alas, I cannot feel; for ’tis not feeling,

7

Page 8: Poe's Women: A Feminist Poe?

This standing motionless upon the golden Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams, Gazing, entranced, adown the gorgeous vista, And thrilling as I see upon the right, Upon the left, and all the way along Amid empurpled vapors, far away To where the prospect terminates-thee only.

A vanishing ritual, love becomes the internaliza- tion of apocalypse. With the exclamation, “And I! my spells are broken!”, the poem turns around on itself, putting the poet on the threshold, stopped- neither subject nor object-before the “wide-open gate of dreams,” which is, as so often in Poe’s work, something much more physical than his invocation of dream might suggest.”

Taking the name that he will not name as his text, Poe commits himself not to Beauty, not to soul, but to sex. To drop his pen marks the hia- tus that encourages the slippage of the beloved’s body into the lover’s mind, as the lover in turn is consumed by the beloved. The experience of ec- stasy thus produces a poem bold in its insistent visibility. The emphatic, final perception-”This standing motionless upon the golden / Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams, / Gazing, en- tranced, adown the gorgeous vista, / And thrilling as I see upon the right, / Upon the left, and all the way along / Amid empurpled vapors, far away / To where the prospect terminates-thee only”- recalls Usher’s marvelous abstraction, the light- filled tunnel painting. While evoking a mysterious hollow, it does not so much represent the idea of sexual penetration as that of being wholly inside that hollow, consumed by it.

Poe’s threshold experience intentionally re- casts Prospero’s unveiling in The Tempest-”I will discase me”-and replays his farewell to art, “I’ll break my staff . . . / I’ll drown my book.” Yet something further goes on in Poe’s poem, if we note the flamboyant sentimentalism of Poe’s 18 October 1848 letter to Sarah Helen Whitman: “Oh God! how I now curse the impotence of the pen” (Letters, 2:391). For the poet says here, “I can- not write-I cannot speak or think, / . . . I cannot feel.” After the poem’s quadruple decimation of writing, speaking, thinking, and feeling, what re- mains? A walk through a landscape, a standing still on the verge of what he cannot name, a gaze to the right and to the left, which I take to be Poe’s startling revision of Prospero’s words: “a turn or two I’ll walk / To still my beating mind.” Poe has made mind matter, or as he put it in Eureka: “Matter become animate-sensitive . . . reaching a degree of sensitiveness involving what we call Thought” (1354). The merger Poe announced in

( Works, 1:405-09)

his preface to Eureka as sentient mind or heartfelt intellect here becomes a scenic wonder.

The revelation is an act not so much of pos- session as of consumption. The poet trades his subjectivity, his very power to speak or write, for the most sensible part of his beloved, looking into her heart of hearts. He must give up his language, for anything he once called poetical is despotic. It always destroys the thing it makes available to ap- prehension. So Adam gives up his task. Poe’s final ecstasy encourages the reversal of gender position- ings, as the speaker is somehow not yet classifiable fully as either subject or object, masculine or fem- inine, mind or heart.

How can we begin to understand the subver- siveness of Poe’s deliberate impotence, not his bi- ographer Joseph Wood Krutch’s notion of consti- tutional incapacity, but the writer’s repeated pos- ture of enfeeblement? I have been arguing that Poe means to attack the subordination of women, and that we might see his preoccupation with “love” as the more serious desire to dramatize how women struggle with the idea someone else has made of them. I quote two passages of willed passivity, from “For Annie” and from a letter to Sarah He- len Whitman. Note how the diminishing enacted by the poet is not only expressive, but bodily.

Sadly, I know

And no muscle I move

But no matter!-I feel

I am shorn of my strength,

As I lie at full length-

I am better at length.

And I rest so composedly, Now in my bed,

That any beholder Might fancy me dead-

Might start at beholding me, Thinking me dead.

(Works, 1:456)

Oh God! how I now curse the impotence of the pen- the inexorable distance between us! I am pining to speak to you, Helen,-to you in person-to be near you while I speak-gently to press your hand in mine-to look into your soul through your eyes-and thus to be sure that my voice passes into your heart. (Letters,

The male philosopher might put beauty in con- tradiction to thought, the supine body jealously regarding the exacting mind, as Mallarmk would stage Igitur, the “therefore” of masculine patri- mony in opposition to his He‘rodiade, the spectacle of sterile beauty. But in “For Annie” Poe puts himself down before his female beholder. And

2:391-92)

Page 9: Poe's Women: A Feminist Poe?

in the epistolary passage to Helen, impotence or inexpressibility allows a merger with the beloved through the repositioning of bodily parts: “to press your hand in mine-to look into your soul through your eyes-and thus to be sure that my voice passes into your heart.” To gain a voice ne- cessitates the writer’s becoming the beloved. Yet I insist that this is no mere appropriation: the “possession” is reciprocal (and if we recall Whit- man’s part in the secrecy and scandal of their af- fair we can accept that mutuality). To want to be in the place of another is t o be possessed. And though Poe appropriates the social constructions and clichds of love, he does not appropriate his ad- dressee. He is most deliberately not representing the other.

Poe’s possession, then, amounts to nothing less than his dispossession, a radical divesting of his own identity. Since this is perhaps the most debat- able part of my argument, I move for a moment be- yond Poe’s writings to a concept that bears much on what I have said: the concept of the “Beauti- ful Soul.” Though expressed by Goethe in Wilhelm Meister and Schiller in On Grace and Beauty, I a m building on Hegel’s characterization. The identity of the “Beautiful Soul” helps us to understand the vehemence of Poe’s postures; and further, to un- derstand the nature of his use and reuse of certain totalizing images of women.

For Hegel in his Phenomenology, the “identity” of the “Beautiful Soul” comes about “merely in a negative way as a state of being devoid of spiritual character. The ‘beautiful soul’ . . . has no con- crete reality.” Poe goes further. Writing his love poems, he turns himself as well as his beloved into a hollow. If his beloved is emptied of all qualities that would attach her to reality (even when she adheres to things, she is de-realized), the voice of Poe as poet, its monotony and repetition-what some critics have scorned-reconstitutes himself, the male lover in nineteenth-century America, as a wholly negative consciousness: As Hegel puts it, Its activity consists in yearning, which merely loses it- self in becoming an unsubstantial shadowy object, and, rising above this loss and falling back on itself, finds itself merely as lost. In this transparent purity of its moments it becomes a sorrow-laden ‘beautiful soul’, as it is called; its light dims and dies within it, and it van- ishes as a shapeless vapour dissolving into thin air.21

If Poe’s women become shadowy, losing sub- stance in attributes repeated and recycled no mat- ter for whom or when he wrote, the writer himself seems to be most “heartfelt” when most vague. Poe’s narrators in the tales about women, in “Ligeia,” “Berenice,” or “Morella,” for example,

become as vain, abstract, and diseased as their objects of desire-the women the madmen had idolized.22 But Poe’s letters and love poems also trade on a sexual exchange that can be accom- plished only because the writing subject is himself an anomalous identity. The trial of thought or de- sire is always for Poe a fragmentation of assumed identity, and the ungendering that lurks beneath Poe’s surface play on gothic ghosts and hauntings begins here, with the unsettling of the subject.

Poe’s “ethereality” and “vaporousness,” what he calls “the breath of faery” can thus be seen as his successful adaptation of the role of the romantic “beautiful soul.” In order to preserve the purity (or piety) of i ts heart, it flees from action and takes refuge in self-willed impotence. To mutilate what his society constructed as manhood seems to be the point of much of Poe’s writing. Recall these lines on love from the early “Tamerlane” (1827):

I lov’d-and 0, how tenderly! Yes! she was worthy of all love!

. . . . . . . . . . . . For passionate love is still divine: I lov’d her as an angel might

(Works, 1:30, 31)

Poe’s poetry is a rite of the image. If it is “woman” in nineteenth-century America who must bear the trappings of style, Poe shows, by assum- ing a lady’s style and postures, how such a spec- tacle both exploits and consumes its participants. Taking Luce Irigaray in This Sex Which Is Not One as our medium here, let us say that Poe’s gen- eralizations, his totalizing images are ways of “‘re- opening’ the figures of philosophical discourse- idea, substance, subject, transcendental subjectiv- i ty, absolute knowledge-in order t o pry out of them what they have borrowed that is feminine, to make them ‘render up’ and give back what they owe the feminine.”2s There is a two-way program here. On one hand, Poe plays with the possi- bility of one thing passing into another and vice versa-the convertibility that is so much a part of his project t o annihilate innate principles. One the other hand, since a man performs the ungendering operation, or the project of indifference, the writ- ing subject Mr. Poe appropriates and replays the attributes of women projected in his society. He dramatizes this appropriation in order t o expose and overturn all gestures of idealization. When Poe fights t o make physical and spiritual mutually adaptable-as in the poems we have discussed, in Eureka, and in many of his tales-he destroys the gap between what is perceptible and what is in- telligible in order to take further his analysis of subordination by gender.

9

Page 10: Poe's Women: A Feminist Poe?

Toni Morrison tells us in Beloved, “Defini- tions belonged to the definers-not the defined.” It could be argued that Poe’s power to undefine is itself proof of authority. When Poe combats the distinctions between women and men on both the bodily and social fronts, he knows he contends with the force of a metaphysical formulation. Philoso- phy is often singled out as patriarchal discourse par ezcellence. Yet Poe’s philosophy shows that philos- ophy can be otherwise. And women are not con- stitutionally outside its ken. That many women internalized and repeated the image others made of them-writing themselves into someone else’s history-only reminds us again of the force of lan- guage, and especially literary language, to perpet- uate d ~ m i n a t i o n . ~ ~

IV. Crimes Of The Heart

Poe’s gothic depends upon experiences that trade on unspeakable slippages between men and women, humans and animals, life and death. In “The Oblong Box,” Poe presents a narrator duped into thinking that the box containing his fellow passenger’s dead wife houses “a copy of Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper.’” Inside the box lies a corpse; out- side strides “the pseudo wife” (the deceased’s maid) who counterfeits the first wife by day, while at night the bereft husband communes with the treasure preserved in “that box.” When the ship wrecks, the husband straps himself to the box (rather than abandon it), and the narrator notes, “both body and box were in the sea-disappearing suddenly, at once and forever.” But the captain re- minds both narrator and reader that although they sank, “‘They will soon rise again, however-but not till the salt melts.” By the end of the tale, bound- aries between life and death dissolve. Against a scenario of revival, the “survivors” land on a beach “more dead than alive, after four days of in- tense distress” ( Works, 3:925,927, 932,933). Why should their landing on a beach after four days be distinct from Marie RogBt’s fourth-day reappear- ance as a “corpse . . . floating in the Seine”? Most of Poe’s tales involve the reader in the ambiguity of what Poe called in his review of Stephen’s Ara- bia Petraea, “the whole truth of revelation” (ER, 930). Yet in Poe’s tales the revelation is either in- complete or false. Poe sets the stage for resurrec- tion, but catches grave clothes on iron nails (“The Premature Burial”), lets dry-boned teeth scatter (“Berenice”), and leaves dead or rotting characters suspended until either a fourth-day return or in- determinate putrefaction (“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”).

But what are we to do with Poe’s bleeding, raped, decapitated, dead, and resurrected women,

brutalized, buried, cemented in cellars, and stuffed up chimneys? No matter where you turn in the tales, women-and their bodies (or sex as in the “The Oblong Box”)-remain crucial to Poe’s tools of terror. Scenes of violation and Poe’s in- domitable “imp of the perverse” depend on women for their effect. So, characterizations of women as “innocent,” “angelic” or “evil,” “beauties” or “hags”-the traditional stereotypes-become use- less in interpreting Poe’s fiction. Whether Dupin’s quest to know who done it, or a pathological at- tempt to get into a room (“The Tell-Tale Heart”), or the discovery of a ”rotted, erect” wife (“The Premature Burial”), Poe is after nothing less than an exhumation of the lived, but disavowed or suppressed experiences of women in his soci- ety. Demonstrating how the terms for denigra- tion or praise are themselves covers for an expe- rience of subjugation shared by both “ladies” and “wenches,” he lays bare the mechanics of cultural control in the Anglo-American experience.

Both Tori1 Moi and Rosi Braidotti have argued in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis that the specificity of the body, the sexed self, must be part of the feminist project.26 In “Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge,” Moi describes how psychoanalysis, the scene of knowing, is bound to the body and sexuality. Moi offers feminists “new ways to think about objectivity, knowledge, and modes of intellectual activity”: There is, then, in the psychoanalytic situation a model of knowledge which at once radically questions and dis- places traditional notions of subject-object relationships and deconstructs the firm boundaries between knowl- edge and non-knowledge. As this situation of knowledge offers no firmly established binary opposites, it cannot be gendered as either masculine or feminine, thereby offering us a chance to escape the patriarchal tyranny of thought by sexual analogy. (198)

As I have tried to demonstrate, Poe attempts to ensnare his readers in a process of knowing that “offers no firmly established binary opposites.” His labor of thought is inseparable from the body, evoking a somewhat arduous erotic bind. Poe puts body back into mind: he urges a gut knowing, something like a biological spirituality. What Poe calls the “thirst to know” in “The Poetic Princi- ple” becomes in much of his work coordinate with desire. Though rarely noted by critics, the erotic innuendoes of Poe’s prose are pronounced. We fol- low his narrators’ frantic searches through drawers, closets and other circumscribed spaces, and their involvement in varying kinds of immurements, dis- membering, cutting and hacking. Mere bodily parts enact a telling reconstruction by a black valet

10

Page 11: Poe's Women: A Feminist Poe?

in “The Man That Was Used Up” or tokens of sentiment (“a set of false teeth, two pair of hips, an eye, and a bundle of billets-doux”) in “Loss of Breath.” When the silenced husband searches with “palpitating heart” for his lost breath, he describes his failure in terms that suggest women’s powers of penetration as equal to men’s: “With a heavy heart I returned to my boudoir-there to ponder upon some method of eluding my wife’s penetra- tion” (Works, 2:63-64).

In concluding this meditation on what I have argued to be Poe’s radical questioning of feminiza- tion, I want to stress that his fictional elaboration of what it means to know (or in Dupin’s words to “disentangle”)-in coming so close to what pa- triarchal myths have touted as not knowing (e.g. desire or feeling)-overturns the societal construc- tion of sexual identities. It is no accident that re- cent attempts to come to terms with Poe’s feminist perspective concentrate most on the detective fic- tion, especially “The Mystery of Marie Rogtt.”2s Poe’s note to “The Mystery” turns on coincidence, the exchange between truth and fiction, where a real “Mary Cecilia Rogers” can be convertible with an ideal “Marie Rogtt”: Herein, under pretence of relating the fate of a Parisian grbe t t e , the author has followed, in minute detail, the essential, while merely paralleling the inessential facts of the real murder of Mary Rogers. Thus all argument founded upon the fiction is applicable to the truth; and the investigation of the truth was the object. ( Works, 3:723)

This tale of doubling and indefinability perpetu- ally returns to details that are essential to Dupin’s working through: a dress or outfit “much torn and otherwise disordered” ; and fragments of feminin- i ty (“a white petticoat,” “a silk scarf,” a “para- sol, gloves and a pocket-handkerchief“), which are nothing but false leads (Works, 3:734). The an- swer to the question-“Is this corpse the real Marie Rogtt?”-is never fully known. For what matters in this tale of false resemblances is how a commu- nity constitutes a woman of “youth and beauty.” The ideal Marie Rogtt is convertible with the real in a system that commodifies as it praises certain types of ideal womanhood. Her identity is ana- lyzed or catalogued as what she wears, the com- modities that make an idea of woman a site for vi- olence and degradation. Note that the counterfeit woman of “The Spectacles” also hinges on Simp- son’s individual quest for beauty. In “The Mys- tery of Marie Rogtt,” however, society’s expecta- tions and, more particularly, the assumptions elab- orated by the nineteenth-century white patriarchal establishment are brought to bear on the puzzle

of Marie’s disappearance. Did she arrange a false death to escape “a charge against her chastity”? Was the “brutal outrage” and “appalling violence” committed on her body the result of “a quarrel be- tween lovers” (Works, 3:754)?

In progressing from Freud to Poe, Naomi Schor in “Female Paranoia: The Case for Psy- choanalytic Feminist Criticism” returns to crimes against women by re-reading “The Mystery of Marie R~gd t . ”~ ’ Cynthia Jordan in “Poe’s Re- Vision: The Recovery of the Second Story” turns to what she calls “Poe’s women-centered fictions,” argues for “the androgynous Dupin as feminist critic,” and thereby hopes to recover “the second story-‘the woman’s story’-which has previously gone untold” : In the three detective stories published between 1841 and 1845, Poe moved from the timeless, dreamlike worlds of remote gothic mansions, turrets, and dun- geons to the social realm of neighborhoods, shops, news- papers, and political intrigue where the investigation of seemingly isolated crimes against women uncovers a network of covert gender-related ‘crimes” that pervades the entire social order.28

To understand how Poe’s politics and his unabated critique of his society operate, we must seek out his treatments of women as key: not only their victimization, but also their power and endurance in the most unexpected places. As Judith Fetterley notes in “Reading about Reading,” “the mutilated bodies of the female victims remain center stage, providing the crucial though unremarked source of interest.” 29

The destruction or death of Poe’s women is never final, as shown in the haunting bodily re- turns of Lady Madeline, Ligeia, or Morella. Other women mark his fiction in less obvious, but equally significant ways. Even though Poe destroys the idea of femininity, pulverizing something called “purity” in loathsome physical dismemberments, women’s sexed bodies remain. A woman dies, but the oblong box remains with its unnameable con- tents: too secretive or vulgar for words perhaps, as the confused narrator ventures “a home thrust,” asking Cornelius Wyatt, the aggrieved husband, leading questions, but also touching “him gently with [his] fore-finger in the ribs” (Works, 3:927). The old man with the knowing, viscous eye is killed in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but the thumping heart remains: an uncanny premonition of Freud’s “throbbing in the clitoris.” To know an answer for these narrators demands a re-physicalizing of what their culture had spiritualized, giving blood to the beautiful illusion, and contaminating those “angels in the house.”

11

Page 12: Poe's Women: A Feminist Poe?

NOTES

Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 133-93. The present essay was written be- fore “Romance and Race,” The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991, 89-110, and “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American Litera- ture 66 (1994): 239-73, in which Dayan examines the way institutionized slavery complicated the concept of romantic love and the “cult of pure womanhood.”

Leland Person, Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988), 19, 46. ’ Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 19. All further references to this edition cite ER parenthet- ically in the text.

Denise Riley, uAm I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988), 0.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Un- derstanding, 1089, ed. A. C. Fraser, vol. 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), 146. ‘ Virginia Woolf, “Poe’s Helen,” in Collected Es- says, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1907), 40, 42. ’ Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 11, 13.

a Caroline Ticknor, Poe’s Helen (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), ix, 1. ’ Sarah Helen Whitman, Edgar Poe and His Crit- ics, (New Brunswick: Trustees of Rutgers College, 1949), 54.

lo Ticknor, 44-45. Charles Baudelaire, Curiositds esthdtique, L’art

romantique et autres oeuvres critiques de Baudelaire (Paris: Editions Garnier, 1962), 597, 011-012.

l2 Whitman, 61-02. ’’ Floyd Stovall, “The Women of Poe’s Poems and Tales,” Texas Studies in English, no. 5 (1925): 197.

l4 Richard Wilbur, “The House of Poe,”in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1970), 259.

l6 Eric Carlson, Poe on the Soul of Man (Balti- more: The Enoch Pratt Free Library and the Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1973), 5.

Edward Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), 173. ’’ Craig Howes, “Burke, Poe, and ‘Usher’: The Sublime and Rising Women,” ESQ: Journal of the American Renaissance 31 (1985): 179.

Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1356, 1353, 1355, 1359. Future references to Eureka cite this edition parenthetically.

l’ Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik (1919), trans. Guy Oakes as Political Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 99.

2o See Dayan, Fables of Mind, 120-28. 21 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind,

trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 070, 660-07.

22 See Dayan, Fables of Mind, 171. 2’ Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans.

Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca and New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 74.

24 Poe’s women suffered oblivion and, known only through his work, were not, until recently, studied through their own literary productions. It’s time that we substituted for Wagenknecht’s Man Behind the Leg- end projects revealing “the Women Behind the Legend.” Think about what it would mean to reread Poe from the ground of those women he read, wrote about, and wrote to. For example, read Poe’s “Eleonora” in the context of Frances Sargent Osgood’s “Ermengarde’s Awakening,” or reconstitute Poe’s “love poems” through a careful reading of Sarah Helen Whitman. Mary De Jong has begun the work of resurrection in two important essays: “Her Fair Fame: The Reputation of Frances Sargent Os- good, Woman Poet,” Studies in the American Renais- sance, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1987), 205-83; and “Lines from a Partly Pub- lished Drama: The Romance of Frances Sargent Osgood and Edgar Allan Poe,” Patrons and ProtLggCea: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century Amer- ica, ed. Shirley Marchalonis (New Brunswick and Lon- don: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1988), 31-59.

Tori1 Moi, “Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge,” and Rosi Braidotti, “The politics of on- tological difference,” in Between Feminism and Psycho- analysie, ed. Theresa Brennan (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).

26 See the exchange that introduced what became known as the “new” French Poe: Jacques Lacan, =Semi- nar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 39-72; Jacques Hulbert, Moshe Ron, and Marie-Rose Logan, Yale French Stud- ies 52 (1972): 31-113; Claude Richard, “Destin, Design, Dasein: Lacan, Derrida and ‘The Purloined Letter,’” The Iowa Review, 12 (Fall 1981), 1-22. Barbara John- son extended the investigation of “The Purloined Let- ter” in “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,” Yale French Studies 55/50 (1977), 457-505, reprinted in The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), 110-40, and Donald Pease comments on the exhange at length in “Marginal Politics and ‘The Purloined Letter,”’ Poe Studies 16 (1982): 18-23.

Naomi Schor, “Female Paranoia: The Case for Psycholanalytic Feminist Criticism,” Yale French Stud- ies 02 (1981): 204-19.

28 Cynthia Jordan, “Poe’s Re-Vision: The Recov- ery of the Second Story,” American Literature59 (1987): 1, 18, 5, 12.

Judith Fetterley, “Reading about Reading,” in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contezts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980), 157.

12