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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Edgar Allan Poe

13:10 / 28.03.07

A sparse initial post (admittedly), but if one had to talk about Poe (his short stories) what would be your first starting point? Links or ideas welcome.

(Hopefully this will develop into a more thorough discussion/appreciation of Poe) (his poetry and prose)

17:47 / 28.03.07

I had to read a bit of Poe for my American Lit course (pre-20th cent) and the main thing we focussed on was Poe's position in the evolution of decent writing (which there was very little of in the beginning of American lit). I really liked his essay on writing, in which he explains how he concocted The Raven. The title of the essay escapes me... Ah yes, consulted my textbook and there it is, "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846). It's over-written, much like Poe's fiction, and rambles a little bit in the beginning, much like his fiction again. But the essay's a fascinating glimpse into the creation of a work.

I certainly think Poe is a much better writer than Washington Irving, who was puttering away in the same field, albeit less prolifically. I think I like Poe in the same way I like Stephen King: his fiction's decent, but his insights into the production of fiction is much more satisfying and intriguing.

01:29 / 29.03.07

I love thinking about him as a news hoaxer and presenter of fantastical "non-fiction" narratives. Balloon treks and Antarctic voyages. But I'm biased in that direction.

19:49 / 03.04.07

I've read "The Philosophy of Composition", but other than the insight into the construction of a fictional piece, what struck me most immediately was the statement which regarded the death of a beautiful woman as the ultimate in artistic literary expression. It'd be an odd statement, only, if it hadn't come from Poe. And, of course, Poe's texts are full of female corpses (those prematurely buried, those murdered, those that slowly waste away).

Of the tales I've read Morella, Ligeia, The Fall of the House of Usher, Berenice, and I realise it isn't an uncommon reading, I was lead to examine them psychoanalytically. The Nightmare logic present in Poe's tales are reason enough to employ a gauze like this, I suppose. The threat of Berenice's vagina-dentata is clear enough, Ligeia's lack of paternal name (and explicit mention of the narrator/protagonist's mentally dwarfed and childlike status in the wake of her prodigious knowledge in the text) lead me somewhat to thoughts of Kristeva (the corpse and the monsterous feminine), The House of Usher brought me to thoughts of the horrific resurfacing of a feminine repressed.
Yet again, I thought of the womb (or mindscape like) interiors favoured by Poe and the males uncomfortable relationship to them...

My question being, I suppose, how much of Poe's "horror" relies, if not all of it, upon a latent (or pretty blatant) construction of the feminine as monstrous? Is it all that centred on fear of the feminine (or have I missed something)?

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

19:54 / 03.04.07

Fear and longing, though, isn't it? I've always read him as having more of a longing for some Feminine Ideal as expressed through a woman lost to him - lost and consequently immaterial, not heir to the "problems" encountered in actually having a personality. But it's been a while since I last read any Poe, particularly "Ligeia."

02:33 / 04.04.07

FYI, I was reading the Stephen King entry on Wikipedia, and King calls Poe "The Great American Hack". Seems like too many current authors can fit that bill.

16:55 / 07.04.07

Fear and longing, though, isn't it? I've always read him as having more of a longing for some Feminine Ideal as expressed through a woman lost to him - lost and consequently immaterial, not heir to the "problems" encountered in actually having a personality. But it's been a while since I last read any Poe, particularly "Ligeia."

Mmmyeah.... there's a lot of suggestion of incestuous relationship.. thrown together with some castration anxiety too. I suppose it all has base in the loss of Poe's mother, an absented father, his child-bride's death under similar circumstances and Poe's constant struggle to impress his adoptive father,
There's an uncomfortable clash between the masculine and feminine though, longing yes, but the fear (as with much of Poe's fiction) is of fear itself the abstracted dealing with of the repressed (if that begins to make sense) the feminine (and all it represents: loss, castration, the unman, oedipal and incestuous thought)...

I dunno upon reading Poe all I could see was a relatively dressed up misogyny written as Freudian nightmare.

*shakes head*

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

16:24 / 08.04.07

Shrug...I've been pondering all week how I tend to have different rules for horror's subtexts - they're supposed to feel a bit cancerous regardless. I'll need to unpack that a bit later (familial obligations mean I have to run) but does that spark anything with regard to Poe? I mean in the sense that my friend once said she thought Dracula was the bible for horror, because it's all about everyone being afraid of everything, even when it was completely contradictory what the fears were.

13:41 / 15.04.07

I hate to beat the misogyny drum again but I've always thought Dracula had its basis in a fear of the feminine too. Dracula (as character) was almost surely based on the controlling and charismatic actor (Irving somethingorother) who Stoker ran the Lyceum theatre with and whom I believe he had a pretty questionable relationship with also (letters to Walt Whitman about being unmanned and a few unexplained hysterical episodes). Mina was always painted as a bit of a damp squib and the sexually voracious Lucy was put back in her box pretty quickly, also not to discount the numerous succubi. The Monster is always about a repressed in some way or another, I think. I understand the cancerousness of it, as the fear is self-perpetuating and, I suppose, evolves into a kind of paranoid terror?