Poe's Obsession With Death

Olivia Withers

            Edgar Allen Poe’s life was filled with death from the very beginning. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was very young, his foster parents John and Frances Allen died, his older brother died of tuberculosis, and also his young wife died of the same disease. It seemed that everyone that was around him was plagued by death and Poe took note of that. He became obsessed with all things death and Poe’s short stories directly correlate with the themes of death, darkness, guilt and horror. All emotions he would have gone through because of the many deaths in his life. Poe also plays on how other people feel when they are consumed by death by the development of his characters. The short stories that illustrate Poe’s fixation with death in all aspects are, “The Black Cat”, “The Masque of the Red Death”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Premature Burial”, and “Bernice”.

            “The Black Cat” is a short story of Poe’s that revolves around death. The narrator of the story has a cat that he loves to the point of obsession. However, the narrator is affected by alcoholism and drunken one night he gouges the eye out of his beloved cat Pluto who he believes is ignoring him. Pluto begins to avoid him and eventually the drunken narrator hangs the cat from a tree outside to kill him. Pluto is an allusion to death because his name comes from the Greek god of the Underworld. Also, Pluto’s death also foreshadows another death in the story. “I aimed the blow at the animal, which of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife” (Poe, “The Black Cat”). The animal the narrator was trying to kill was not Pluto, but another cat that resembled Pluto very closely even in the way that it lacked one of its eyes. Poe was trying to symbolize death in a way that seems that death cannot leave a person. The grief or in this case guilt can live forever. For the narrator Pluto was death along with the grief and guilt. The narrator kills his wife and hides her in the walls, and when she is entombed he notices that the cat is gone. A few days later the police come to inspect his home and once they get down to the basement they hear a loud shriek and open up the walls. There the police find the dead wife with the cat perched on top of her. This again displays how death does not leave, and it always finds itself reoccurring in life again and again as it did in Poe’s. Death is also symbolized in another of Poe’s short stories.

            In “The Masque of the Red Death” death is portrayed in many aspects of the story. The disease itself that was being alluded to, called the Black Plague, killed thousands in Europe. The wealthy Prince Prospero invited all his close, rich friends to live inside of his palace to essentially escape the disease that was right outside the doors. Little did they know that the disease was lurking right around the corner.

The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. (Poe, “Masque of Red Death”)

 This quote describes the masked figure that is roaming around the palace. The people think it is terrible that he is dressed up like a victim of the plague. However, they do not know that he in fact, is the plague and death itself. Another example of death in this story is the tall ebony clock. Clocks mark the passing of time and with each hour death comes closer and closer. Poe was always aware that death was around him and coming closer each day of his life, which is like the sense of paranoia felt by Roderick in “The Fall of the House of Usher”.

            The setting in the “Fall of the House of Usher” is very gloomy and dark, death like in a way.  The story foreshadows to death for both Ushers because they are ill and in Poe’s mind illness lead to death, based on the multiple people in his life that died of tuberculosis. Roderick Usher was a very anxious hypochondriac, and he was also hypersensitive to sounds, smells, and light. The narrator received a letter from Roderick which told the narrator that Roderick wanted to see him desperately. Roderick’s sister, Madeline, was also plagued by a disease. “The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skills of her physicians” (Poe, “House of Usher”). She falls into cataleptic trances where she could be mistaken for dead. The narrator and Roderick knew this trait about her and when she was in a trance, they locked her in a coffin because they presumed that she was dead. The narrator even notes that her cheeks were rosy. Their ignorance sparked the deaths within this story. They knew she could have been in a death like trance, yet they still buried her. When she broke out of the coffin and came to Roderick’s room she collapsed on him and they both died instantly. The narrator flees quickly because the house begins to crumble. The crashing down of the house symbolizes the death of the last two Ushers. The fear of being buried alive was very prominent in Poe’s time and he also wrote another short story that was similar to “The Fall of The House of Usher” in the way that the main character was also buried alive and had the same disease as Madeline.

            “The Premature Burial” is a story about the fear of being buried alive. Lots of cases of being buried alive occurred in the time of Poe and he decided to exploit the appeal of it. The whole theme of a story like this one is death. The ideas that get into the reader’s brain can be very frightening. No one should even want to think about the suffocation or other horrible aspects of being buried alive, let alone write about them. However, Poe was enthralled by the idea. “The unendurable oppression of the lungs—the stifling fumes from the damp earth—the clinging to the death garments—the rigid embrace of the narrow house—the blackness of the absolute Night—the silence like a sea that overwhelms” (Poe, “The Premature Burial”). The reader can sense the paranoia of being buried alive by Poe’s great use of imagery. This story feels claustrophobic, and the narrator’s madness is palpable. When the climax is reached and the narrator thinks his worst fear of being mistakenly buried alive comes true, death seems certain. However, the narrator later comes to the realization that he is on a boat and his “coffin” was actually just his sleeping chamber. The reoccurring themes of insanity and being buried alive due to catalepsy reoccur in another of Poe’s works, “Berenice”.

            “Berenice” is a story filled with horror. The narrator suffers from a disease, like in other works by Poe, but his disease is very obsessive, a monomania that causes him to obsess on certain objects, which then causes him to go into trances for days at a time. Berenice was also diseased, like many of the women in Poe’s life; she had times of catalepsy and a vague degenerative disorder.  The illness made her once beautiful body become lifeless and emaciated, the only thing that stayed the same as when she was healthy were her teeth. “Not a speck on their surface—not a shade on their enamel—not an indenture in their edges—but what that period of her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my memory” (Poe, “Berenice”). This quote marks the point of the narrator’s obsession with her teeth. He was fixated on them, and when she died he had to have them, which is similar to the way people want to hold on to a memory or object of a dead loved ones to remember them by. However, the narrator, in a trance of obsession, went to the extent of going to her grave, and surgically removing all thirty-two of her teeth, while she was alive! She had been mispronounced dead due to her catalepsy. Poe used being buried alive multiple times in his works as a symbol for death and he displays the terror of death itself in his short stories, which was surely felt by Poe or else he would not have obsessed over it.

            Given the examples, Poe’s obsession with death is clearly portrayed through his writing of short stories. Through the elements of gothic literature, and events within the stories, death was the main theme throughout. The striking symbols that Poe used to display death, like the ebony clock in “The Masque of the Red Death” and the gloomy, dark settings and themes in almost all of his pieces made his work excel over others of his time because it was different and horrifying. Death had been touched on in other pieces of literature before Poe’s time, but he brought new intense feelings to the table, like paranoia and fixation. He also was very descriptive in the deaths themselves; the reader could just imagine the gore. An underlying theme in almost all of Poe’s short stories was death because the themes in his own life were the emotions that death brought him.

           

           

           

Bibliography

Poe, Edgar Allen. "Berenice." Poestories.com. Web. 13 Mar. 2012. <http://poestories.com/read/berenice>.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Black Cat." Poestories.com. Web. 12 Mar. 2012. <http://poestories.com/read/blackcat>.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher." Poestories.com. Web. 12 Mar. 2012. <http://poestories.com/read/houseofusher>.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Masque of the Red Death." Poestories.com. Web. 12 Mar. 2012. <http://poestories.com/read/masque>.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Premature Burial." Poestories.com. Web. 12 Mar. 2012. <http://poestories.com/read/premature>.

"Poe’s Short Stories." SparkNotes. SparkNotes. Web. 15 Mar. 2012. <http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/poestories/context.html>.