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A theme I noticed across Poe’s writing was the use of an unreliable narrator in order to add suspense and dimension to the plot. In Poe’s stories the reader has to be conscious of the danger that the narrator is revealing as well as suspicious of the narrator’s account. In Ligeia the narrator explicitly acknowledges his lack of knowledge on important details regarding his wife Ligeria. For instance, he cannot recall her paternal name. While at times he justifies his lack of knowledge about his former wife by the large amount of time that has passed or his drug and alcohol use, as the narrative continues, it becomes evident that his overall knowledge of Ligeia is fairly base level and centers around her outward appearance. In repeatedly questioning whether he has ever known Ligeria to be wrong, he establishes his view of Ligeia as somewhat inhuman. The reappearance of Ligeria following the death of his second wife Rowena feels foreshadowed by the narrator’s ignorance to the character of Ligeria.  

Furthermore, in William Wilson. A Tale the narrator’s unreliability, established from the opening paragraph where he refuses to give his true name to the reader, keeps the reader suspicious of his account throughout the story. Wilson appears aware of his own wrongdoing revealed in the story, arguing “the fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation” (Poe 642).   However, while seeming to take accountability and to have knowledge that his actions were unethical, the narrator’s emotions, specifically regarding his classmate William Wilson, seem to be pertinent and used to justify his final action of the play. He dedicates almost a page of writing to the striking similarity between Wilson and himself in their school years to the extent where, “this most exquisite portraiture harassed [him]” (647, Poe). Wilson’s killing of Wilson in the final page is built up through the narrators contradicting account where he is simultaneously taking accountability and justifying his actions. 

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Part of how Poe managed to amass such an audience with his work is by exploiting themes of paranoia and sensory deception. What better way is there  to grip a reader, keep them invested, than to make them doubt the sanity of the narrator and the stability of the narrative? One of his most aggressive examples is, of course, “The Tell-Tale Heart”- which opens with the narrator desperately trying to convince the reader that he is not, in fact, mad, and that the disease has “sharpened [his] senses,” not dulled them- but the theme manifests in almost every one of his texts. Not just depressions which mirrored his own documented condition, but psychoses, hallucinations, senses of unreality realized through something supernatural or mundane. 

“Ligeia” follows a narrator who struggles with the madness of unexplained death and psychological torment through loss of loved ones. “William Wilson” depends on the paranoia produced by its narrative, as it is only due to the narrator’s increasing lack of connection to the world that he resorts to slaughtering his doppelganger, condemning himself due to his inability to approach his situation rationally. “The Masque of the Red Death” is perhaps less obvious, but if it were not for the partygoers’ drunkenness and mad revelry, events would not have unfolded as they did. Their fervor grants the Red Death entrance to the event as, once again, a severing from reality drives the plot forward. The titular fall in “The Fall of the House of Usher” comes about due to the characters’ utter dependency on the house itself. Their hysteria and in-fighting cause their relationships and home to crumble around them. And, of course, “The Man in the Crowd” is driven by the narrator’s desperation to figure out the one man he can’t manage to read, something which verges into an obsessive paranoia by the end of it.

Poe used the matter of senses and sanity to maintain suspense. Are his narrators unreliable due to their mental health? Are the torments they experience real in the world of fiction, or is everything explainable as a result of their deterioration? I’m curious as to how cognizant Poe was of his own health and how that fed into his use of mental instability as a horror device. Perhaps he recognized it enough to fear it. Or perhaps it was genuinely just that his writing was filtered through his understanding of the world, which would naturally be steeped in his own psychological state.

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In high school, I read a few of Poe’s stories in my English class, and had a great time writing about how his works draw inspiration from events in his own life. When I noticed that we are reading more of Poe’s work in this class, I was really excited to see if the connections I made then applied to a broader sample of his work.

One reoccurring trope in Poe’s work is the death of any and all women in the story. Stories like Ligeia, and The Fall of the House of Usher center around the death of their only female characters, while the rest simply neglect to mention women at all.  Even The Masque of the Red Death, which describes an entire ball full of people, ends with everyone dying. So no women survive there either. Poe had tragic experiences with many of the women in his life. His mother and foster mother both died of tuberculosis when he was young, his first love died of brain cancer when he was 15, and his wife Virginia died of tuberculosis later on. The motif of death and despair is ever-present in Poe’s work, likely because it followed him throughout his life. The trauma of his real life likely inspired the tragedy in his writing.

Other common themes in Poe’s work include madness, intoxication, and gambling, which likely stemmed from his own insecurities/flaws. Poe made terrible decisions like the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart, which led to public humiliation. Drinking in excess before important interviews is less catastrophic than bring the police to the place where you hid a body, but both demonstrate a sort of self sabotage. Alcohol was one of Poe’s many vices, which is likely where the idea for the narrator in William Wilson came from, and why so many of his stories feature notes about intoxication, whether it be by alcohol or opium. Also, like Glendinning in William Wilson, Poe was known to gamble away more than he had. 

It is believed that Poe’s main motivation was money, he wrote knowing what would sell, but I believe that many themes in his writing stemmed from his own life and experiences.

 

Citations:

(myself) I wrote an essay related to this in high school but I affirm this is new original work building upon the ideas I came up with then, incorporating a wider sample of stories. 

The information on Poe’s life came from the sources cited below:

“Edgar Allan Poe.” Britannica School, Encyclopædia Britannica, 7 Jan. 2021.
school-eb-wswhe.orc.scoolaid.net/levels/high/article/Edgar-Allan-Poe/60519?. Accessed 19 Oct.
2021.

Patterson, R. “Once upon a Midnight Dreary: the Life and Addictions of Edgar Allan Poe.” CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association Journal = Journal De L’Association Medicale Canadienne, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 15 Oct. 1992,www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1336506/?page=1.

 

 

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Last week I attended sample lectures for professors who were looking to come work in the Literature department to give student feedback to the hiring committee. In my first sample lecture, we looked at a text by Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man which was published in 1952. Here is a link to the free version of the text if you want to look at it: https://www.are.na/block/13323900. In the very beginning of the text it says, “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe,” and when reading The Tell-Tale Heart, I was immediately taken back to when I was analyzing this text in the lecture. 

Within the first pages of the Invisible Man he describes a violent interaction with a man (this can be found on page 4 of the PDF) and his realization that the man could not see him, and was later described as mugged in the newspapers. In Poe’s description of being haunted by a ghost (which I would like to acknowledge the invisible man is not a ghost). Poe was being haunted by someone that he could see saying that he saw a “pale blue eye” which he believed he was being haunted by, in this same page he states that he was never wronged by the man who was haunting him but he could not see. This contrasts with the invisible man who was not able to be seen, and had wronged the man that he had interacted with on the street. 

The Invisible Man text began by stating that he wasn’t a ghost that was haunting, but in the text he also describes living in dark corners of basements, and “living in a hole in the ground”. The book starts by setting the ground work that he is not a haunting ghost, however, while I was reading The Tell-Tale Heart, all I could think about was the sections of the Invisible Man that we had explored in the lecture. I encourage you to take a look at the prologue of the link that I put above for the book and further read the similarities and differences between that text and Poe’s story. I liked analyzing the stories and seeing how they compared to each other and how they were very similar but also very different at the exact same time. 

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One similar theme I noticed in both “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” was the presence of resurrection. In “Ligeia”, the narrator’s dead wife Rowena comes back to life, but then she appears to turn into the form of the dead Ligeia. In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the dead Madeline comes back to life. In both instances, the resurrection of the dead serves to disturb the narrator greatly. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” the narrator is so disturbed that he leaves the house immediately (641). The narrator of “Ligeia”, meanwhile, describes himself as “a helpless prey to a whirl of violent emotions” while he watches the resurrection of his dead wife (628). Poe’s stories show resurrection as a frightening event that disrupts the balance of nature, and leaves the narrator, and the reader, feeling unsettled. I thought this was interesting, because I feel like most people would be happy to find a way to bring their dead loved ones back to life. But Poe’s stories suggest that disrupting the boundaries between life and death would not be a good thing. 

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As I was trying to find meaning in “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson. A Tale,” “A Man of the Crowd,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” I was confounded with the issue of an unreliable narrator. While this makes perfect sense with what we’ve discussed about Poe and his genre, it left me with a bit of a conundrum. His stories are fantastical, suspenseful and yet not suspenseful (he usually tells you what’s going to happen in the first paragraph), and yet always leave me wondering if any of it is “real.” Perfect for selling magazines. 

However, one of the stories that was the most clear to me and of which I was able to make some meaning was “William Wilson. A Tale.” It became clear to me fairly early on in the story what the other William Wilson is sort of a physical manifestation of conscience. However, it also seemed as if there was almost a sexual tension between William Wilson and the other William Wilson. This potential homoeroticism is also seen in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and perhaps in the violence of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” There is limited scholarship on these themes in Poe’s stories, because it seems that the prevailing belief is that he was straight, but I did find a master’s thesis exploring this (linked below).

https://fau.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fau%3A9933

Loading Likes... I find the narrative voices in all of these short stories to be very interesting. Poe makes it a point in each piece to have an aura of mystery and authority in each of his narrators, who seem to be coming to the reader as if to share a long-awaited and famed story. For example, in William Wilson, the narrator makes a point many times to tell us that William Wilson is not his real name, and that he is using a fake one. We don’t know why, and it’s very interesting to consider why Poe would take this character to another level of fiction that seems unnecessary to the story. However, it does add to the gothic mood he creates and fills the story and the character with even more mystique. He does a number of similar things with all of his narrators, which I found peculiar (for example, when the husband in Ligeia can’t remember his wife’s last name) but they all seem to fit the story well and add to the uniquely thrilling tone he constructs. I also loved his use of magical realism in Ligeia, The tell-tale heart, and Usher. He makes his narrators unreliable, making them opium addicts, alcoholics, or just plain crazy to blur the line between what is actually happening or what is made up in their minds.

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There were two quotes that stuck out to me while I was reading “The American Scholar.” The first relates to the question of what Emerson argued for and what he argued against. As we discussed in class, Emerson was critical of capitalism which I found very apparent in a quote on page 211 where he stated, “But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that is is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, –a good ginger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.” I find this quote extremely interesting because it argues that capitalism doesn’t just detract from someone, it actually makes them not a whole man by boiling down their entire being into a trait or job. As if it is cutting a person up until they are no longer recognizable as a whole person and become something else entirely. 

The second quote I find interesting more because I am a lit major than anything else. As someone who studies books from other ages his comment that “each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this” stuck out to me (Emerson, 213). I think as a lit major I spend a lot of time with the so-called “books of an older period” and I feel as if a lot of emphasis is placed on them and their value to us as a society, but there is significantly less focus on the books from our generation that will be passed down. Maybe that is a thought that might appear more in a creative writing class, rather than a lit class, but I still find it interesting that we spend so little time comparatively on contemporary novels. There are often few courses offered on present-day novels and its something I’d never really thought much about before. 

Loading Likes... I am not sure if it was Emerson’s flowing, sermon-like syntax, his memorable one-liners “Goodness must have some edge to it” (219) or the fact that I still feel like a college freshman figuring out my life, but “Self-Reliance” moved me more than his other works thus far. I found myself engaged and agreeing with Emerson’s notions of self-confidence and individuality. Through his allusions to “greats” of history such as Plato and Milton, I felt Emerson’s passion in emphasizing the importance of being true to one’s own ideas despite society’s standards. I felt particularly moved by Emerson’s defense of youth. Although they may not level up to the opinions and eloquence of older generations, Emerson says to not count them out. As someone who was once (still is) “that very lump of bashfulness and phlegm for which weeks has done nothing but eat when you were by, that now rolls out these words like bell-strokes,” I appreciated this representation. Although I relate less to being a “sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont,” I am endeared by the notion of having many chances in life rather than being defined by a singular moment in the past(228). The notion of “self-trust” and certainty that things will work out also seems to come with the added perk of making “his name dear to all History” (228).
Additionally, I am a strong proponent of letting “words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward” (222). In particular, throughout the beginning of my college experience I caught myself self-editing and undercutting my own ideas before I could express them. Whether meeting new people or speaking in new situations, I found that carefully crafted ideas often hindered myself from freer expression. I interpret Emerson’s ideas as encouragement to just chat freely, which I think is liberating. Furthermore, I think I could benefit from channeling Emerson’s attitude that “What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think” (219). Part of me wonders if this essay emerged in some sort of frustrated stream-of-consciousness after Emerson spent too much time with old-fashioned or ostentatious intellectuals of the 1800s. Whether or not that is the case, I appreciate his call to subvert conformity. I can’t imagine Emerson wasn’t a bit of a quirky fella himself, and I find that idea reinforced in his direct call-out of conformists in this essay.
Perhaps I catered heavily to my “creative reading” of this essay by focusing solely on what applied to my current situation and sentiments, but I appreciated “Self-Reliance” as a reminder to remain true to myself. Emerson writes, “But do your thing, and I shall know you” (220). To that I say, “Thanks Emerson, I will.”

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Of the three essays, I found “Self Reliance” to be simultaneously the most compelling and the one I found myself disagreeing with regularly. I admire his philosophy of independence and our need as individuals to break free from the past and our routine in order to achieve progress. However, I found myself frustrated with two of Emerson’s main points. 

The first, which has been mentioned in other blog posts, is his stance on philanthropy. I recognize that political thought at the time is not what it is today, but his disregard for individuals who are struggling financially was obnoxiously blatant and ignorant. Specifically his question of “Are they my poor?” made me question his ability to have basic empathy for those in a different and less fortunate situation (239). Especially as he is someone who has been through the misfortune of losing his wife at a young age and then subsequently was able to quit his job and follow his passion because of the money he was left. I would expect that these two experiences would cause him to realize that other individuals may be going through difficult times and that having money makes your life significantly easier (and that not having money is not a moral fault). 

The second issue I found within “Self Reliance” was his stance that consistency is an enemy to self reliance. I understand where he’s coming from, but I think he is incorrect that consistency is the issue. In my mind, consistency is often the basis for progress; our consistency in completing assignments and devoting time to study is what allows us to excel as students; athletes’ consistency in the gym is what allows them to improve upon their performance; spending time and effort on friends and family is what allows up to maintain deep and meaningful relationships. None of these things could be accomplished if we didn’t have consistency, and, I would argue, if we didn’t focus on and learn from our past mistakes (ex. if you do poorly on an exam, you can learn from that and change your study strategy for next time). Emerson argues that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” and that “with consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do” (241). While I understand his point that we can get stuck in the past and in our routine, resulting in us relying too heavily on others and our own consistency instead of investing in ourselves and progress, I still think having some consistency in your life is actually necessary for you to be able to progress in whatever your chief endeavor is. In this sense, I think he got too caught up in the extreme of denouncing consistency in favor of self reliance, when I think for the optimal effect the two must actually co-exist in order for true progress to be made. 

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There were a lot of points that Emerson made in both of the essays that we read that I want to talk about but the first is Emerson’s mentions of science across the poems. In The Divinity School Address, on page 226 he says, “By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power.” Personally, I am a firm believer in science so this sentence immediately caught my eye, I marked it as something that I wanted to review later on, but then later when reading I marked another sentence mentioning science on page 257, “This day shall be better than my birth-day: then I became an animal: now I am invited into the science of the real.” This sentence stuck out to me because I immediately thought of the other mention of science and I was questioning if Emerson’s points. He says that the universe is not made safe and habitable by science, but then later says that he is being invited into the science of the real. I want to know more about what Emerson considers to be “the science of the real”, or as I am interpreting that statement, “real science”. I want to explore the connections between Emerson’s ideas of science and the universe. 

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As a Creative Writer myself, I have thoroughly come to enjoy reading the works of Emerson. His writing is exceptionally thought-provoking and descriptive, and I was particularly drawn to his essay on Self-Reliance. The concept of “self-reliance” is something I’ve encountered frequently in my own life, so I was pleased to read Emerson’s take on it as well.

Emerson’s perspective is much like my own: the ability to rely on one’s sense of self, cultivating their own individual ideas and opinions, even if they are at odds with those around us, is one of the proudest acts we can achieve as individuals. Our differences–the variance between our ideas and opinions–is what sets humanity apart. We would never be able to discover new ways of doing, of seeing, of simply being, if we neglect to embrace being ourselves. I will admit, there was a time where I was easily swayed by others (as many are nowadays by the many forms of widespread influence, such as social media). I am a Writer; I’ve always found great passion in creating my own narratives. But, up until last semester, I didn’t write for myself–I wrote for what I believed others wanted to hear. And, naturally, I found myself struggling. I was struggling to construct something that had the same passion as my content from years ago, and that bothered me. Not to mention, at the same time I was convinced I was going to be a Neuroscience major. Only, it wasn’t because I was interested in pursuing it professionally, I just thought society would value such sophisticated choice. It took last summer to knock some sense into myself and finally begin writing again–but this time, it wasn’t for anyone else but myself. Finally, I began creating uninhibitedly. I began fleshing out a long-ignored idea I had for a book, writing it how I wanted to write it, not how others told me it should be done. I switched my major (to Creative Writing) and have been pursuing a passion deep within myself that I never should have ignored. And, lo and behold, I wholeheartedly believe I am creating my best work because I have learned to accept and trust myself as I am–a Writer.

Although there are flaws that can be plucked out of Emerson’s argument (as with any other debate, which I’m sure includes mine as well), I do agree with several of his points and find a lot of truth in them. I especially enjoyed Emerson’s quote, “in every work of genius we recognize as our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty,” as it is what ultimately inspired the topic of this blog post. Only, instead of being envious of seeing my rejected thoughts in others’ works of art, I am creating those thoughts for myself when they appear, because it is what I am–and everyone else is– meant to do with their individualism.

-Siena Rose

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I was intrigued by Emerson’s thoughts on philanthropy and the responsibility to do “good actions” throughout one’s life in Self Reliance. Emerson categorizes Man’s instinct to do “good actions” during one’s life as an “apology…of their living in the world.” He argues that he does not view his life as an “apology” and thus, he doesn’t think he should be indebted to society and forced to commit these “good actions” as a symbol of his virtues. He continues that he “cannot consent to pay for a privilege where [he has] intrinsic right” because Emerson viewed charitable actions as a fee to pay simply for the pleasure of living. I found these thoughts surprising for a couple of reasons.

First, at one point, Emerson committed his life as a pastor and thus someone deeply committed to spreading the word of God and to God’s teachings themselves. Historically, the bible has often encouraged Man to think of one’s life as a journey of paying off one’s sins and thus, the bible has always encouraged morally right living (i.e. giving to charities etc.). I wonder if when Emerson decided to leave that life, that this sentiment against charities is a rebellion against that old life and following God’s teachings at will. Secondly, we discussed in class that he married a wealthy woman and when she passed away, he received that wealth. I am curious why he acquired that wealth and then decided to preach against a moral responsibility to give back to his community. In this case, I wonder if his reasoning was, in some way, a justification for not donating the money that he received and using it for charity instead of himself.

Loading Likes... It is known that Emerson found himself traveling across Europe and engaging with the ideas of the great European thinkers. This influence appears in his writing style that reads as a poetic, philosophical text. He utilizes occasional verses to emphasize his points and relies on descriptions of natural scenery to bring out the wisdom he attributes to it. In this eloquently designed lecture, Emerson argues that the poet functions as the sayer or the son of the holy trinity. He is immersed in nature that he patiently observes allowing for him to participate in art which he defines as the creation of beauty.

Emerson writes, “And this hidden truth, that the foundation whence all this river of Time, and its creatures, floweth, are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of nature and functions of the poet, or the man of beauty” (255). He believes that art is created by man as he stands still and observes nature and its movement as it changes or as the river flows, that beauty is found in the successful imitation of nature, and that only the poet is truly capable of this unity with nature. This ideology seems to draw heavily from the philosophical rhetoric of Germany, particularly the works of Heidegger and Winckelman.

Johannes Winckelman, the father of art history argues that true beauty comes from the successful imitation of nature after a careful study and examination of it, a feat that was only ever accomplished by the ancient Greeks in his view. This idea became the basis of the future philosophical cannon that was uptaken by Lessing, Hegel, Goethe, Heidegger and so forth. It is also apparent in the writing of Emerson who views nature as the source of wisdom and ideal beauty. In addition, his work seems to overlap with the ideas generated later on by Heidegger in his university lectures in which he claimed a river flowed in all directions in time and space to the acutely observational eyes of a poet. Only the poet was capable of seeing the true beauty and art in the world, similarly to how Emerson depicts the poet in his own work.

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This blog is just a collection of my impression on the essay, rather than attempting to make a point. Please excuse the seemingly fragmented manner in which I convey my thoughts below.

There is a very comprehensive lens through which Emerson attempts to have the reader contemplate on the idea of nature: to view it is not as an absolute substance, but as a “phenomenon” (Nature, Chapter VI). I am very much compelled to the more expansive idea of nature that it is not simply the physical landscape or the environment that is untouched by mankind, but rather everything that makes up the universe, the material and immaterial. From physical matter to its connection with our perception and feelings of reality, how the soul interacts with the world.

I particularly like the example of poetry, such as Shakespeare’s poem in the same chapter:

“Take those lips away
Which so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes,—the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.”

Through these samples of poems Emerson brings to us the idea that nature, or the perception of it through the eyes of the soul, is a form of communication in which the attractions of the physical world reciprocates the soul’s desire to perceive beauty. As poets tend to use figurative language to associate one thing with another – in this case the eyes of a person that is associated with the image of dawn’s light. It’s a spiritual connection that brings two seemingly unrelated things in nature together.

What I find troubling is how Emerson seems to advocate for so individualistic a way to approach/perceive the natural world but he also speaks of the “permanence of nature”, that “we are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand,” (Chapter VI). He is admitting to the idea that we as humans have been so successful in ensuring our survival because we understand how the natural world works and build tools/structure to adapt to this world, and yet to me his argument is that it wouldn’t matter if things worked differently. If I interpret the text correctly, there is a lot of issues that comes with this stance.

At this point I must admit that the text has become lost on me due to the amount of content and context that I’ve consumed in such a short amount of time reading it.

Between James Fenimore Cooper’s ideals in The Last of the Mohicans and Emerson’s essay: the emphasis on learning and feeling God’s presence through observation of the natural world and the surrounding environment. It’s one of the main emphases of Transcendentalism. While one might think of it as a very Hawkeye-like mindset, it is the only common ground that Emerson finds with Cooper’s “heroic” character. Hawkeye is otherwise a person favoring the wisdom of experience and logical reasoning (in his own blatantly racist way) and is one to suppress his own feelings, which I think is conflicting with Emerson’s Transcendentalist ideals: feelings over logic.