A Poe expert looks at the master of the macabre as the gothic writer turns 200.
One of the nice things about being an Edgar Allan Poe scholar is that every now and then you get invited to middle schools, where there's a chance (remote, and possibly imaginary) that somebody might think what you do is cool.
Back in May, I got to talk about Poe with eighth-graders at Northside Middle School in Columbia, S.C., and one of the students asked me: If I could hang out with Poe for a day, where would I take him? I had no idea. But I didn't want to say that, so I said that I would take Poe to Barnes and Noble, get some coffee, let him look around, see how many editions of his work were on the shelves, including the illustrated editions in the bargain racks (where the prices would still seem extravagant to a guy who never made more than $1,000 in a year). I would show him the mystery section, a couple of aisles filled with writers who regard him as the genre's founding father. Eventually we'd get around to Googling him, checking his Amazon sales rankings and so on. As I told the eighth-graders, I suspect that Poe would be extremely pleased that, at the age of 200, and 160 years after his death, he was one of the world's most popular writers, but that he would act as if he weren't surprised at all. And he would demand royalties.
Poe's continuing popularity might not surprise Poe, but it probably would surprise many of his contemporaries. For instance, several years after his death, the Boston-based North American Review suggested that "if the human brain is indeed a palimpsest ... then most assuredly should we pray for some more potent chemistry to blot out from our brain-roll for ever ... the greater part of what has been inscribed on it by the ghastly and charnel-hued pen of Edgar Allan Poe." Poe had many, equally vehement defenders, but even a friend such as publisher George Rex Graham regretted that Poe's genius "was not such as to command a ready or lucrative market." In a satirical poem written just before Poe's untimely death, James Russell Lowell split the difference: "There comes Poe, with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge, / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge." Years later, in 1876 to be precise, Henry James dismissed all future Poe scholars by remarking that "an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection."
That's not a line I like to use with middle-schoolers, nor do I include it in my tenure-and-promotion packet, but I actually think there's some truth to James' heartless remark, if we take "primitive" in this case to mean "early" or even "adolescent." Though Poe's reputation as a writer of mysteries rests on a few detective stories ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget"), he was also a mystery writer in the larger sense that his stories repeatedly ask insoluble questions. Many of these are questions that preoccupy adolescents: Am I really the person I think I am? Why do I do things that get me into trouble even though I know they're going to get me into trouble? How do I know that the real world is real? (Is it really more real than the world I make up?) What's it like to be dead? If someone you love dies, do they still know that you're thinking about them? Poe addresses these questions rather differently than most "young adult" fiction does, which might be the key to his success with young readers. The key to his success with older readers, perhaps, is the fact that those "primitive" questions don't get answered when you hit 21; they may even bother you just as much in middle age as in adolescence.
Poe doesn't answer the big questions, of course. Instead, he confronts them honestly and dramatically, with little regard for realism or good taste. The narrator of "William Wilson" believes that his own will (pun clearly intended by Poe) determines who he is, and that as a unique, strong-willed person, he can control any situation. Then he meets someone who looks just like him, who has the same name and who thwarts his attempts to impose his will on other people. At the story's climax, the narrator plunges his sword into the rival Wilson, then in a moment of confusion believes he sees himself in a mirror: "as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait." Or not - he tells us he was wrong, it was the other Wilson, but really, who can be sure? With his dying words the double informs him, "In me didst thou exist - and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself." The easy reading of this story is that it's a parable of conscience, which it is, sort of - but it strikes me as less about morality than about the construction of identity: Am I really the unique, self-governing person I thought I was? Do I even get to decide who I am?
"The Tell-Tale Heart" also gives the appearance of a story about conscience: as any middle-school student knows, the beating of the old man's "hideous heart," which drives the narrator to confess his murder, is really the sound of the killer's guilt and fear. But that's not what makes it such a good story. What makes it a good story, aside from Poe's use of verbal repetition and rhythm to register the increasing anxiety of the narrator, is the problem of motive. "Object there was none," the killer tells us. "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. ... For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye!" He thinks - but I don't buy it. He loved the old man. He probably looked into that "pale blue eye" from time to time and saw his own reflection in it. He tells us he knows how the old man feels sitting up in bed, listening - "just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall." Is the evil eye that he wants to vanquish really the evil I, as a number of readers have supposed? Those death watches (beetles) in the wall are echoed - twice - in the story by his comparison of the beating of the old man's heart to the sound of a watch. Watching - eye - watch - time - heartbeats, each one bringing the old man, and the young man who loves him, closer to death. Is it time, and the mortality that comes with it, that he's really afraid of, and that he's trying to kill? I'm not sure, but there's definitely more going on here than a psycho killer and an evil eye.
In the opening paragraph of one of Poe's most frightening tales, "The Black Cat," another confessed murderer attributes his crimes to "the spirit of perverseness," which Poe refers to elsewhere as the "Imp of the Perverse." The narrator hanged his cat "with tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse in my heart," but he did it "because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin"; he breaks the law just because it's the law. He insists that this impulse is in everyone, just as he believes his bizarre story to be an "ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects." The story asks, is the difference between a healthy, sane person and a psychopath nothing more than the ounce of self-control (or social control) that keeps the "Imp of the Perverse" at bay?
Poe didn't mind recycling plot elements, and "The Black Cat" ends much like "The Tell-Tale Heart," this time with a doppelganger cat, entombed in the wall along with the wife, alerting the police with its cries. As I often tell my students, nothing stays buried in a Poe story. An obvious point, perhaps, but Poe demonstrates again and again that not only crimes but impulses, memories, dreams and desires find their way back to the surface, whether we like it or not. In his most famous work, "The Raven," a grieving man realizes, by asking questions to which the answer can only be "nevermore," that the pain he feels is not going away.
Poe didn't invent gothic motifs such as doppelgangers, black cats, creepy old houses and premature burial, nor were his stories the goriest or most sensational of his time. His genius lay in tying these macabre elements to existential questions, while carefully crafting his stories to heighten their mysteries and intensify their effects. In so doing, Poe created fiction that is accessible but never disposable. On the contrary, filmmakers, writers, musicians and other artists continue to resurrect him in various ways, and he continues to be one of the most written-about American authors, from middle school to graduate school. Like the corpses in his fiction, his writing has a way of not staying buried. 