Dougherty-Poe blog

            Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” is reputed to be the best known poem in American literature.  To appreciate its rhymatic cadence, alliteration and use of onomatopoeia, it is best to read the poem out loud. It conveys a feeling of death, gloom and the supernational by its tone and use of symbolism.  The protagonist and narrator is an unnamed man distraught over the death of his lover, Lenore.  The setting is in the narrator’s apartment.  It is midnight sometime in December and the fireplace is a simmering of coals, suggesting the end to something.  There is a chill in the air.  The narrator has been reading a book of folklore in an effort to distract himself from his sorrow, but he nods off.  He is suddenly awakened by a tapping on the door, but no one is there. Another tapping occurs at the window, and upon opening it, a raven appears.  The raven, an ominous symbol, lands on a bust of Pallas, the goddess of wisdom.  The narrator at first amuses himself by asking the raven its name to which it replies, “Nevermore.”  Although the narrator appreciates that the bird is limited to this one word, he continues to ask the raven questions.  He wants to forget his loss (“respite and nepenthe – a drug that allows one to forget sorrow) – from thy memories of Lenore!”), yet he appears to want to retain his memories of Lenora by prompting the bird to answer and providing his own interpretation to the one word response.    He asks if there is a spiritual medicine to heal his sorrow (“is there balm in Gilead”) and if Lenore is in heaven (“within distant Aidenn”) to which the bird again responds, Nevermore.  The poem slowly builds a certain tension, stanza by stanza, until it reaches an emotional crescendo, the realization that narrator’s sorrow and torment will be unrelenting forevermore.  He curses the raven as an agent of the god of the underworld (“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!”) under whose shadow he is destined live.

With “The Murders of the Rue Morgue,” Poe creates a new genre of writing, the much imitated detective story (see authors, Stephen King and Arthur Conan Doyle).  The protagonist is C. Auguste Dupin, the gifted French detective who uses his extraordinary observational ability, imagination, psychological insights, scientific method and intuition to analyse and solve a crime that is both grotesque and insoluble.  The victims’ bodies are horribly mutilated (madame’s head severed from her body and her daughter’s body stuffed upside down in a chimney), but Dupin remains unemotional in his step by step analysis of the case.  The perpetrator is found to be an Ourang-Outang, presenting  a surprisingly ludicrous ending to the story.  The culprit had no perverse motive, or intent, and acted without reason.  The narrator of the story is clearly intended as a foil to Dupin’s brilliance (much like Dr. Watson is for Sherlock Holmes).  

“Ligeia” is not a traditional love story.  Although he does not know her maiden name or her place of birth, the narrator is obsessed with the memory of his deceased wife (both her mind and her strange beauty and sensuality) who dominates the story.  Yet, he marries a second time, ostensibly to a woman with opposite traits to those of his first wife.  Ligeia has a mystic quality (“raven-black hair” and large black eyes which hide a profound secret), whereas Rowena has a more pragmatic and rational perspective.  Ligeia’s fiercely resisted death in her final hours and predicted her return (“Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will”).  Rowena’s Gothic bridal chamber has special significance in that it has mystical qualities and strange visual effects seemingly reminiscent of Ligeia.  During the final illness of Rowena, her sensitivity to sounds and fear of the golden tapestries enhances the dramatic effect of the story as do the drops of blood in her wine.  Finally, the flashes of life and the reawakening of the corpse culminate in the transformation of Rowena into Ligeia.  The primary theme of this Gothic tale appears to be that love can prevail over death and that humans can manipulate the supernatural.  The admission by the narrator that he is addicted to opium lends an element of contradiction to his credibility.

Contrary to the theme of “Ligeia,” “The Masque of the Red Death” highlights the inexorable march of time and man’s inability to escape death even though powerful and rich.  The protagonist of the story, a self-indulgent prince, locks himself in a castle with other royalty in an effort to avoid contracting the plague which is killing the citizenry.  His name is Prospero (named for his wealth and status?).  He arranges a rather grotesque masquerade ball within the castle for his friends and decorates seven rooms in different colors.  The last room is painted in black and blood red.  He situates the rooms east to west, probably representing the cycle of life, with the black room representing death.  The other prop is an ebony clock in the black room which chimes on the hour at which time the orchestra stops playing and the festivities pause, indicating the passing of time.  The appearance of a character dressed as the Red Death kills the prince and everyone else thereby emphasizing that death comes to everyman.   This story is also provides a psychological perspective of fear.  Cloistering in a castle to avoid death and the reaction to the Red Death’s costume are examples.

“The Black Cat” is a story of horrific violence with plot twists bordering on the supernatural.  The story follows the descent of the narrator into madness exhibiting alcohol addiction, violent mood swings and eventually perversity in the hanging of his cat which he says was the result of his doing wrong for wrong’s sake only and the killing of his wife with an axe.  Note the cat is named Pluto, the god of the underworld.  As the narrator sits in prison awaiting his execution (by hanging?), he meticulously recounts the historical facts of his crimes and a number of supernatural interventions (the burning of his house, the image on the wall of a giant cat with a rope around its neck, a replacement cat with one eye and whose fur projects the image of a gallows, and finally the survival of the entombed cat).  The narrator’s hatred for his victims and his lack of remorse are part of a psychological study not just of madness, but the tenuous border between reality and the supernatural.