Poelker Poe Blog

John Winthrop very much believed in the perfectibility of man; that through hard work and the grace of God, people could be perfect. He uses the word “perfect” eleven times in the twelve or so pages of “A Model of Christian Charity.” At times this is in reference to the perfect body of Christ, as in, “To instance in the most perfect of all bodies: Christ and his Church make one body.” At other times, it refers to a moral perfection to be sought in the face of humanity’s Natural Depravity, a result of the original sin of Adam: “Now when this quality [of Love] is thus formed in the souls of men, it works like the Spirit upon the dry bones. Ezek. 37:7 --- ‘Bone came to bone.’ It gathers together the scattered bones, or perfect old man Adam, and knits them into one body again in Christ, whereby a man is become again a living soul.” Here he quotes scripture to show how out of lifeless imperfection (“dry bones”) can come a perfect servant of God. Poe, on the other hand, is obsessed with the strange quirks and gory decay of both the mind and body, as some inescapable quality of mankind

We might first look to Poe’s use of scripture, a Puritan’s most trusty tactic, to see how he denies human perfectibility. “The Raven,” probably the author’s most famous work and definitely his most famous poem, features the irrational plea to a talking bird (albeit one with a limited vocabulary) for news of his lost love, Lenore. In stanza fifteen, after asking about her with the Raven’s only reply of “Nevermore,” the speaker makes a desperate plea, “Is there – is there balm in Gilead? – tell me – tell me, I implore!” The expression comes from Jeremiah 8:22: “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people?” It’s interesting for him to reference an instance regarding physical health and the human body, but what’s more important to this discussion is that by the end of the poem, we learn that there is in fact no relief for the speaker’s suffering. Lenore will never return, just as the raven will never leave just as the speaker’s “soul from out that shadow lies floating on the floor / Shall be lifted – nevermore!” This is no hopeful outlook for creating a perfect world.

In “The Black Cat,” the narrator seems to have a similar notion of original purity to that of the Puritans, but follows it to a much different conclusion. Having been fond of animals as a child, he develops a hatred for his pet cat which manifests itself suddenly in his first instance of violence against the animal: “The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to takes its flight from my body and a more that fiendish malevolence, gin-nutured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.” Poe has inherited the Puritan ideals about the soul and its corruptibility, but as the story progresses and the narrator commits more violence, we understand that Poe sees no solution to such evil but by punishment, which is in this case likely capitol.

In “The Masque of the Red Death,” Prince Prospero and his courtiers attempt to preserve an ideal society (complete with wealth and happiness) by secluding themselves in the walls of a country estate, which echoes the mission of the Puritan colony. The “revelers” are trying to escape the physical threat of a plague of consumption (Tuberculosis) as well as quite their fears with entertainment: “Their were buffons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine.” Such hedonism is, of course, a perversion of the “City on a Hill,” but their ultimate punishment doesn’t seem to come from God. Rather, when the masked image of Red Death kills the Prince and brings illness to the courtiers, he is in fact nothing more that an exterior, being “untenanted by any tangible form.” Thus, Poe provides a gothic cynicism to the fear of death in direct opposition to the theological certainty of his Puritan predecessors.

In both “Ligeia” and “The Murders on the Rue Morgue,” Poe toys with the relationship between mental capacities (i.e. the fear of death) and the limits and strengths of the physical form. As Ligeia nears death her husband, the narrator, is troubled by opium-induced hallucinations:

“In the excitement of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the shackles of the drug) I would call aloud upon her name, during the silence of the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by day, as if, through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the consuming ardor of my longing for the departed, I could restore her to the pathway she had abandoned.”

By the end of the story, the reader still has reasonable doubt that Lady Ligeia’s resurrection is anything more a product of her husband’s impaired imagination, which is the author’s way of complicating how we think about death and what it means to be certain of something that exists beyond the realm of worldly fact.

In “The Murders In The Rue Morgue,” consider the two main elements of the story. First is the description of Dupin and his extra-ordinary intelligence, second, the murder mystery of the murder and its solution the “Ourand-Outang.” The resultant juxtaposition is one of high mental capacity of a human being and the extreme physical capacity of the “lesser” primate. What makes the reader so uncomfortable (and makes the violence much scarier) is that the killer in many ways resembles a human being: “Razor in hand, and fully lathered, it was sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the operation of shaving, in which it had no doubt previously watched its master through the key-hole of the closet.” Also, the fact that he kills the old woman in the mechanism of shaving is intended to bring the reader great distress. Poe blurs the line between human reason and animal recklessness in such a way that Puritan perfectibility is an unlikely, if not impossible goal.