THE CAMBRIDGE INTRODUCTION TO EDGAR ALLAN POE (excerpts from

pages 48-87)
The fiction: tales
Poes tales are his chief contribution to the literature of the world.
Poe quickly learned how to write artistic brief tales, eventually turning out almost
seventy, of varied characteristics and qualities, a spectrum ranging from ghastly
horrors in The Pit and the Pendulum or The Murders in the Rue Morgue to light
comedy in Three Sundays in a Week, or from the serious, but not terrifying,
landscape visions in The Island of the Fay and The Domain of Arnheim to the
extravagantly satiric mode in Loss of Breath. Poe wrote and published fiction in
hopes of financial gain, and although he is best remembered as a writer of Gothic
horror his stories are actually not of just one type but reveal greater variety, as might
be expected from a journalist eager to write what would sell.
The years (183133) when Poe turned to the writing of fiction remain just about the
most obscure period in his life, but we may justifiably surmise that he undertook a
study of Gothicism that resembles an academic independent study course on todays
campuses. Poe studied the nature of and experimented with creating effective short
fiction.
Poe had published some of his finest tales, e.g. MS. Found in a Bottle, The
Assignation, King Pest, Silence A Fable, Shadow A Parable, Ligeia, The
Fall of the House of Usher, William Wilson, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and
The Masque of the Red Death. He had collected the tales that originally circulated
in periodicals into two volumes entitled Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840
[1839]).
Not only did he not invent lurid sensational fiction, but when his tales began to
appear during the 1830s many reviewers deplored what they saw as a promising
young writers waste of time and talent in publishing German (for which read
Gothic) fiction, which, of course, according to certain critical schools of thought,
could not be first-rate literature.
Evidence exists to reveal that he planned, and nurtured for several years, a book
that, had it seen publication, might testify to his being one of Americas great
humorists instead of a purveyor of sensational writings, usually, but not exclusively,
with supernatural underpinnings.
Poe must quickly have realized that he must really dispense with the externals of
alcohol and any other intoxicant, much less gluttony, in creating characters who
speak with the same incoherence and act from a bewilderment similar to what we
encounter in the gluttons and alcoholics in the Folio Club or like the drug addicts who
often appeared in popular fiction of the day, and from whom Poe may have derived

several of his characters, e.g. the narrators in Ligeia (1838) and in the original
version of The Oval Portrait (Life in Death [1842]) or those who think about drug
addiction, e.g. the narrator in The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). Poe would
also continue to employ trappings and themes of antecedent Gothicism decaying
architecture or bleak landscapes and the stereotypical plot of vicious pursuit of
innocence for purposes of lust, money or power, often related to family identity
involving physically or emotionally debilitated characters, gender issues, sexuality,
and perhaps, as some recent critics argue, even racial issues.
Sometimes we encounter genuine supernaturalism, for example in Metzengerstein,
sometimes what only seems to be supernatural, as in The Premature Burial (1844).
Such themes Poe would craft to suit his own intents and techniques in composing
what in How To Write a Blackwood Article (1838) are called tales of sensations or,
in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), mystery [or] romance. Any of these
terms, or German, are synonyms for what has long been called Gothic. The shifts
away from literary and intoxicant motifs are apparent in many of Poes later tales,
and not just those that seem to be perennial favorites among anthologists. Whatever
the particular features of Gothicism Poe may have employed in a given work, the
development of disorder or the creation of a frisson is not necessarily the actual aim,
but is instead a means to demonstrate that terrors originating within an individuals
mind, unassisted by supernaturalism and intoxicants, are as frightening, or more,
than those circulated by writers of sleazy tales intended merely to stimulate a
tightened gut or cold chills in readers. Poe perceived that he had to write for two
audiences. The first, larger group would read his works at face value, relishing what
they interpreted as unquestionable supernaturalism. A second, far smaller, more
discerning readership would realize that Poe had manipulated conventions of
supernatural literature to create subtle psychological fiction (and poetry).
Some readers have attempted to distinguish Poes detective or, as he preferred,
ratiocinative tales fromhis other fiction, contending that the five, tales of detection,
perhaps six if one includes TheMan of the Crowd (1840), show a strong departure
in method from the other fiction he published, particularly since the ratiocinative tales
offer a realism that is lacking in most of Poes other stories. That is a mistaken idea
(and amistaken conception of realism) because the first detective tale, TheMurders
in the RueMorgue (1841), demonstrates how Poe transformed the Gothic story, with
its hints of supernatural causes for the deaths of the LEspanaye women, into the
modern detective story.
The way he takes his less perceptive companion, the unnamed narrator in Murders,
through a series of illuminations about the atrocities committed in the LEspanaye
house prompts the narrator to conclude that a madman or a supernatural creature is
the murderer. Folklore attributes more than ordinary human strength to the insane,
and if no human perpetrated these horrifying murders, why, then, a supernatural
being must be the culprit. For Dupin, however, a reasonable solution emerges, which
he must explain to his companion. Other touches of ironic humor in Murders

reinforce the thought that Poe often enjoyed insinuating ironies into his fiction. That
the police chiefs major suspect is named Le Bon (The Good) heightens irony in
the tale. An even greater irony occurs because, despite all signs to the contrary,
Dupin alone realizes that a non-human committed the murders. That the murders
occur in the Rue Morgue is another irony: there has never been such a street in
Paris, and since Poe changed in manuscript the original Rue Trianon Bas to Rue
Morgue, or Street of the Mortuary, he must have been wholly conscious of the
irony.
An easy transition takes us to a cluster of tales inwhich an onlooker-narrator plays a
significant role. These tales begin with an air of scientific accuracy that moves on into
an increasingly weird conclusion, which seems to link with supernaturalism.
Mirror images are not exact reproductions of what they reflect, and so the off-center
image in the water may terrify him all the more because it reflects/exposes his own
chaotic mindset. Like many other Poe narrators, for example those in MS. Found in
a Bottle, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat or TheMurders in the RueMorgue,
this storyteller tries to convince us of the validity in his narrative, though like others,
too, he slips up every now and then, providing a key to his own unreliability. The
Usher siblings are by no means the only sick characters in this narrative; the
narrator seems similarly debilitated.
Berenice and the narrator, her cousin, are betrothed, but she falls ill from a
mysterious disease, presumably dies, and is buried. The narrator is fixated on her
teeth, and the more her physical beauty deteriorates, the more prominent they
become. He opens her grave, and pulls her teeth only to learn, after succumbing to
a trance state, that Berenice was actually alive when he pulled the teeth, but that she
died from the trauma of that violence. Not accidentally is this narrator named
Egaeus, the same name as Hermias father in Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights
Dream, a man who does not comprehend the nature of love, and whose spiritual
handicap almost causes tragedy. []He rapidly loses his love for Berenice because
her physical appearance seems increasingly to repel him. Whether her physical
features actually turn repulsive, or whether Egaeus falsifies (to rationalize his
avoidance of marrying and, presumably, engaging with what should be the emotional
and physical intimacy in marriage) is never made clear.
Bereft of Berenice, Egaeus himself deteriorates spiritually, thus prompting his
violation of her grave. Unlike several other women in Poes writings who sicken and
die, Berenice does not return to persecute this lover, whose own ego had apparently
killed any emotional bonding between them, though recollections of her haunt
Egaeus, as is evident throughout the tale. Emotionally disoriented, he disjointedly
describes the burial of Berenice, which torments him with a memory replete with
horror horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from
ambiguity. It was a fearful page in the record of my existence, written all over with
dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections (M 2: 21718). Aware that these

hazy memories are connected with a shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice (M
2: 218), Egaeus continues to grope for meaning in what he remembers, until a
servant enters to announce that Berenices grave has been desecrated. Egaeus then
discovers his own dishevelment, and knocks down a small box he has been
regarding uneasily. The suspense, which has been carefully built up, culminates
when the box smashes and Berenices teeth scatter over the floor.
The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart also stand as companion pieces in which
terrors well up in the mind(s) of the narrator(s). In the former, the narrators
insistence that his reactions to pets are implicated in his murder of his wife and
walling up her corpse in the cellar is suspect, to say the least. His thoughts and
actions have belied this rationalization, and the ultimate revelation of the truth
suggests that he himself has not really believed unquestionably in such would-be
justifications. Effects of alcohol may contribute no mean share to his murderous
impulses, making the tale one in which alcohol has no connection with comedy.
Because sharply divided attitudes toward alcohol consumption were timely issues in
Poes day, he may in part have calculated on appealing to temperance advocates
(i.e. people who were anti-alcohol). The narrators intense relationships with the cats
may exemplify a reversal of the usual animal-as-beastly/human-as-rational
paradigm. Ironically the cats seem to harbor far more genuine humaneness than
their master does, and in the end the narrators brutality and its results seem to
prompt him to spontaneous confession. The live burial motif may deepen the
narrators repressed emotions, but such repression cannot be long sustained without
leading to explosive reactions, precisely the case in The Black Cat. Since in folklore
black cats are unpredictable, but usually evil creatures, the discovery of the murder
because of the cats cries adds another irony to this tale.
Much more brief, The Tell-Tale Heart repeats the situation of foul murder, though
here we confront premeditated murder of an old man by the narrator, who may very
likely be his caregiver. As in The Black Cat, the more strenuously the narrator tries
to convince us of his sanity, the more he convinces us that he is deranged. Here is
another tale of cruelty to the living old man and brutality to his corpse. Foolishly, the
murderer buries the body parts under the steps, inviting the police, who arrive at
neighbors request, to position themselves near the burial place. All the while the
narrators guilty conscience, his heart, has seemed to throb relentlessly to him
alone, causing him finally to blurt out that he has murdered the old man. Along with
the storyteller in The Black Cat, this narrator is impelled to confession, all previous
bragging to the contrary going for naught. The greater brevity in The Tell-Tale Heart
is in perfect keeping with the mounting intensity of the narrators emotions, which
rapidly increase to the breaking point. In these two tales, as is so typical of Poes
characters, the protagonists murders may represent their killing, or attempting to
repress, key elements in what should be a balanced self. The imbalancings are
eventually self-destructive, and, it should be emphasized, such destruction often
requires no great time to take effect.