ENG 201: Southern Literature |
ObjectivesBy the end of this lesson, you should be able to do the following:
AssignmentRead “Edgar Allan Poe,” “Introduction,” “To Helen,” “Israfel,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Philosophy of Composition” (97-124). Think Fast:
Respond to the questions I assign you in classes. These questions generally will cover objective information,
such as names, dates, and terms. Presentation: Romanticism (Professor Canada) Cooperative Learning: Discuss one of the “Questions for
Discussion” with the other members of your group. Discussion: During
this time, we will discuss the insights and questions that have emerged
during our “Think Fast” exercise, my presentation, and cooperative learning. Conferences: During
these one-on-one conferences, I will review some of your writing, orally quiz
you on lesson objectives, and field your questions. Think Again: Write your own response to one of the “Questions for Discussion.” IdentificationsMake sure you know the meaning and significance of each of the following:
Resources
All American: Edgar Allan Poe features a chronology, study questions, and more. Updated September 5, 2003
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IntroductionIn our last lesson, we enjoyed some polite and witty
conversation in some well-lighted plantation parlors. In this lesson, however, our travels
will take us into some darker regions of Southern literature as we pay a
visit to Edgar Allan Poe. NotesBackground
The period from 1784 to 1865 was a time of both expansion and division in the United States. After winning their independence from Britain in the Revolutionary War, Americans gradually expanded their nation to the West. Indeed, newspaper editor John O'Sullivan famously proclaimed in 1845 that the land to the West of the original colonies belonged to the United States "by right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federatative self-government entrusted to us." The reality was not as attractive as this idealistic sentiment. For one thing, while the Mormons who migrated to modern-day Utah in the 1840s certainly sought liberty, most of the other people who settled the West were motivated by material concerns. The pioneers who traveled on the Oregon Trail in the 1830s and 1840s, for example, sought land where they could earn a decent living, while some heading west during the 1849 California Gold Rush hoped to get rich. Furthermore, the process of settling--or, in some cases, exploiting--this land involved many unsavory consequences, including conflicts with Native Americans, destruction of buffalo, and mistreatment of Chinese immigrants. While America was expanding west, it also was dividing between north and south. In the northern United States, where the economy was largely industrial, many Americans opposed slavery and tried to restrict its spread or even outlaw it entirely. The southern states, on the other hand, had a primarily agricultural economy and depended heavily on slave labor. Despite attempts at compromise, such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850, 11 southern states eventually seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. In the American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865, the Confederate Army of the south--seeking its independence--fought against the north's Union Army, which sought to preserve the Union. The war ended when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. The American culture of this period showed the same hunger, confidence, and sense of adventure that characterized the westward migration. While western pioneers were exploring and settling the land, other Americans broke ground in the scientific, social, and artistic realms. Major inventions included Eli Whitney's cotton gin in 1793, Samuel B. Morse's telegraph in 1844, and Elias Howe's "sewing jenny" in 1846. Between 1830, when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad became the first to operate in America, and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, American laborers laid more than 30,000 miles of track. Meanwhile, dramatic changes took place in American society, thanks to social reformers such as educators Horace Mann and Catharine Beecher, prison reformer Dorothea Dix, women's advocate Lucretia Mott, and abolitionists Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and William Lloyd Garrison. This was also the age of temperance societies and utopian communities, including New Harmony and Brook Farm. Finally, Americans were reading more than they ever had and were witnessing important developments in the field of art. Literate Americans could choose from numerous magazines and newspapers, including 47 newspapers in New York alone in 1830. New Yorkers packed a free gallery operated by the American Art-Union, an association of artists and patrons who sought to promote American art, and the world saw the emergence of several important American artists, including Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, and Hiram Powers. American literature also developed in dramatic ways during this period. The bulk of important American literature was being produced in the North, where Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a host of other writers were writing nonfiction, poetry, and fiction that rivaled the great literature of Europe. Much of this literature, in fact, resembled European literature—especially the literature of Romanticism, a movement that emphasized emotions, the individual, and escape from reality. The South, meanwhile, was somewhat lacking in the entities that nurtured literary production in the north: magazines, leading universities, and large, metropolitan cities. One thing the South did not lack, however, was genius. In the antebellum period, its greatest literary genius was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). Born in Boston, Poe became a Southerner when his mother died, and he was taken into the home of a well-to-do tobacco merchant and his wife in Richmond, Virginia. Poe--author of the "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," vituperative critic, and troubled man--is one of the world's most famous and controversial writers. For works such as "The Raven," which has been called the best-known poem in the Western Hemisphere, he has assumed a place among the popular imagination alongside William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and others. Responses to him have been more ambivalent in literary circles, however. French writers, particularly Charles Baudelaire, have hailed Poe as a superior genius, and his British and American admirers include George Bernard Shaw, Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, and Willa Cather. Somewhat less favorable reactions have come from the American novelist Henry James, who sniped: "An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection" (Clarke 209), and British writer Aldous Huxley, who said: "To the most sensitive and high-souled man in the world we should find it hard to forgive, shall we say, the wearing of a diamond ring on every finger. Poe does the equivalent of this in his poetry; we notice the solecism and shudder" (Clarke 251). Among the general public, Poe is known primarily for his mastery of the Gothic genre. Made popular in the 18th century and early 19th century by British writers such as Horace Walpole and Mary Shelley, Gothic literature has a number of conventions, including evocations of horror, suggestions of the supernatural, and dark, exotic locales such as castles and crumbling mansions. "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Ligeia" are both classic examples of the genre. Many of these stories showcase an interest in death, particularly the death of women--a subject that has been studied by the biographers Kenneth Silverman and Marie Bonaparte, as well as others. Poe also was a master of a literary form known as the short story, a brief work of fiction often centering on a particular event. Many of his most famous short stories appeared in a book called Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). Perhaps Poe's most enduring contribution to popular culture has been his invention of the detective story. His chief detective, C. Auguste Dupin, and stories such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" have inspired countless imitators, most notably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Much of Poe's popularity has grown out of a fascination with his peculiar, tortured life. Abandoned by his father while he was still an infant, he lost his mother to tuberculosis before he was three years old. Partially because of his own petulance, he frequently fought with his foster father, John Allan, who withdrew Poe from the University of Virginia before he had completed a year there. While in his mid-20s, he married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm and for the next several years maintained an unusual relationship with Virginia, whom he called "Sissy," and her mother, whom he sometimes treated as his own mother. For several years in the 1840s, he suffered through Virginia's bout with tuberculosis, finally losing her in 1847. Always poor, he continually ruined opportunities for success by embarrassing himself and antagonizing important figures. Several incidents, including a suicide attempt, suggest that Poe suffered from some kind of mental illness, and the modern researcher Kay Redfield Jamison has presented compelling evidence that he was manic-depressive. Even after death, misfortune haunted Poe. Rufus Griswold, an enemy whom Poe curiously had chosen to be his literary executor, wrote a condemnatory obituary, which begins: "Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltmore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it. The poet was well known personally or by reputation, in all this country; he had readers in England, and in several states of Continental Europe; but he had few or no friends and the regrets for his death will be suggested principally by the consideration that in him literary art lost one of its most brilliant, but erratic stars" (69). In another work, Griswold further tarnished Poe's reputation by misquoting his letters and overplaying Poe's drinking problem, which modern scholars attribute to a low tolerance for alcohol rather than habitual abuse. The physical and mental struggles of this life emerged in fictional form in Poe's highly autobiographical writings. Calling Poe "the hero of all his tales," the critic Roger Asselineau has written: "If Roderick Usher, Egaeus, Metzengerstein, and even Dupin are all alike, if Ligeia, Morella, and Eleonora look like sisters, it is because, whether he consciously wanted to or not, he always takes the story of his own life as a starting point, a rather empty story on the whole since he had mostly lived in his dreams, imprisoned by his neuroses and obsessed by the image of his dead mother" (60). To support this assertion, Asselineau cites Poe's own testimony: "The supposition that the book of the author is a thing apart from the author's Self is, I think, ill-founded" (Asselineau 52). While literary scholars have analyzed all of these aspects of Poe's work, they have studied many more, as well. Of particular interest is Poe's fascination with psychology. An outspoken admirer of phrenology, a pseudoscience based on the premise that various functions are controlled by specific regions of the brain, he tirelessly explored subjects such as self-destruction, madness, and imagination in works such as "The Imp of the Perverse," "William Wilson," and "Ulalume." If the mind was Poe's favorite place, it should come as no surprise that many of his tales are set there. Stories such as "Ligeia," "Landor's Cottage," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "MS Found in a Bottle," and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym all make more sense when read as journeys into and around the mind rather than accounts of the physical world. Specifically, I have argued in Poe in His Right Mind that Poe had an unusually potent right cerebral hemisphere--which many researchers believe plays an important part in visual imagery, music, emotions, reverie, and self-destructive urges--and tapped the resources of this psychological region to create his extraordinarily powerful works. Poe's literary criticism, which he produced in great volume as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger and other publications, also has attracted attention from scholars. Indeed, Poe is the only major antebellum American writer to excel in poetry, fiction, and criticism. In an era when writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier were using literature largely to pursue truth or inculcate morals, Poe argued in "The Poetic Principle" that truth is not the object of literature and condemned what he called "the heresy of The Didactic." Indeed, a close look at Poe's work reveals almost no extended attention to contemporary or even universal social issues, such as community, democracy, slavery, and national identity. Instead, he praised the "poem per se--the poem which is a poem and nothing more--this poem written solely for the poem's sake." "Beauty," he wrote in "The Philosophy of Composition," "is the sole legitimate province of the poem." In his regard for beauty, "effect," and form, Poe anticipated the critical principles of many later writers. Questions for Discussion1. Effect: Use Poe’s description of his method in “The Philosophy of Composition” to analyze “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 2. Explication: Using what you have learned about rhyme, rhythm, and other formal elements, explicate “Introduction,” “Israfel,” or “To Helen.” 3. Mind: How does Poe depict aspects of human psychology in “The Fall of the House of Usher”? 4. Gothicism: Identify and analyze the Gothic elements in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 5. Women: Choose two female figures in Poe’s work and characterize them. What does Poe’s portrayal of women suggest about his own attitudes in particular and Southern attitudes in general? ConclusionThings will get quite a bit brighter in our next lesson, as we look at some Old Southwestern humor. |