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Feared, reviled, murdered, violated, betrayed, prematurely entombed – just a few of the fates awaiting female characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. These horrific endings have led many critics to question Poe’s relationships with and opinions of women: did he love them? Hate them? Obsess over them? View them as subordinates, equals, or betters to himself? Karen Weekes presents an interpretation of Poe’s poems and tales in her article “Poe’s Feminine Ideal” that concludes Poe saw women “as [an] emotional catalyst” for men (148). Weekes goes on to offer the argument that “[t]he woman must die in order to enlarge the experience of the narrator,” thereby painting quite an unflattering portrait of Poe (whom she equates with the narrator) as “viewer” of dead and dying women (148). In the context of Poe’s life, however, her assertion rings too obvious due to the deaths of Poe’s most loved female figures. With this biographical factor, it is no surprise that many of Poe’s female characters are deceased by the end of their tales. While Weekes correctly observes Poe’s fascination with female death, she ignores a more complex explanation for his preoccupation with dead and dying women who seek revenge on their male narrators. If one explores the oft-overlooked inquiry into how Poe’s works reflect his relationships with men, specifically his father figures, the deeper, ignored explanation begins to take shape. Further, Kenneth Silverman’s assertion in his Introduction to New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales that Poe suffered from unresolved “childhood bereavement” that manifested in “a desire [. . .] to merge with the dead” (20), adds to an exploration of Poe’s biography to create a more comprehensive analysis of Poe’s treatment of deceased female characters. By viewing Poe’s “Ligeia” (1838), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1840), and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) through biographical and chronological lenses, the reader sees Poe as an avenger who utilizes his stories to exact fictional revenge against the men that he blamed for abandoning or betraying both the women he loved and himself. He does so by first creating a strong female character based on his beloved mother figure in “Ligeia” and providing her with a story of successful revenge. He then merges a weaker male character with a powerful female character in “The Fall of the House of Usher” to symbolize his own unification with the dominant spirit of his deceased mother figure. Finally, the convergence of Poe with a stronger female allows him to seek personal revenge on his foster father in “The Cask of Amontillado.”
When analyzing Poe’s life, critics often neglect his fraught relationships with his two father figures. For example, in his introduction to New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales, Kenneth Silverman mentions Poe’s relationships with his biological father, David Poe, Jr., and his foster father, John Allan, in only five paragraphs out of the sixteen paragraphs dedicated to Poe’s biographical information. On the other hand, Poe’s relationships with women are mentioned in twice as many paragraphs (ten out of sixteen). Yet the brief mentions of Poe’s father and foster father paint a picture of Poe as a man deeply embittered by injustices, both real and imagined, at the hands of the father figures in his life. To begin with, Silverman describes Poe’s biological father, David Poe, Jr., as “an incompetent failure who deserted the family when Edgar was about two years old” (1). No further mention of David is made in the introduction other than to identify the extended family with whom Edgar Poe found refuge in his early twenties (2). It is only natural that a young child would make a negative connection between his father abandoning the family and the subsequent death of his mother, Eliza Poe, and his separation from his siblings. Such a child would also naturally be distrustful of successive father figures, just as Poe was of his foster father, John Allan.
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Silverman describes Allan as the opposite of David Poe, Jr.: “A prospering Scots Merchant, John Allan [. . .] was absorbed in business” (1). His professional success allowed Allan to provide Poe with an excellent education in which Poe demonstrated his aptitude in language arts (2). While Allan’s material provisions and Poe’s excellence in his studies would seem to lay the foundation for an amicable relationship, Silverman makes it clear that the two men constantly fought “heatedly” and “bitterly” (2). In fact, the only area in which Poe and Allan agreed was their love for Allan’s wife, Fanny. Their shared heartbreak upon her death in 1829 was the one time that Silverman noted a “reconciliation” between the two men (2). However, John Allan’s later abandonment of his foster son and his wife’s memory would prove to be the catalyst for Poe’s first attempts at fictional revenge against his foster father. Poe’s endeavors culminated in “Ligeia,” a story depicting the spirit of a dead woman successfully seeking revenge against her unfaithful husband.
Shortly after Fanny Allan’s death, John Allan married a significantly younger woman and cut off all contact with Poe, effectively betraying both his first wife and his foster son (Silverman 2). Poe’s unresolved childhood trauma stemming from his biological father’s abandonment of the family and Eliza Poe’s subsequent death, combined with Poe’s disdain for his foster father’s lack of loyalty to both his first wife and Poe, created an author who, like his characters, “remain[s] mournfully tied to the past” (Silverman 18). Since Poe could do little to seek actual vengeance upon John Allan for disrespecting Fanny Allan’s memory and throwing Poe aside in favor of his new family, he possibly viewed fiction as the only way to enact retribution. Poe’s close relationships with Eliza and Fanny, and his anger at their treatment by their husbands, might have inspired him to utilize a female vessel for his revenge plots. In the eight years following John Allan’s remarriage and betrayal, Poe wrote several stories featuring deceased women returning from the dead to enact their revenge upon the men who wronged them. In her article “Poe’s Feminine Ideal,” Karen Weekes notes how little individual characterization exists for both the female leads in these stories and the men who narrate them (150-151). She asserts that the women in these stories become “a receptacle,” “a mirror,” “an “object,” and a “lifeless pasteboard prop” (150) while the narrators are “weak-willed, fearful narcissist[s]” (158). Weekes uses these descriptions as an indictment of Poe, whom she interprets to be one with the narrators of these tales. However, given Poe’s life experience, a better interpretation views his two father figures, David Poe, Jr. and John Allan, as the narrators while Poe identifies himself with his mother and Fanny Allan in the characters of reanimated, vengeful women.
While “Ligeia” (published in 1838) was not Poe’s first story to feature a reanimated woman seeking revenge, it is the version in which both the reanimation and the revenge is most successful. Weekes points out that Ligeia “is the only female in Poe’s tales or poems to triumph both over death and, more significantly, over her narrator” (158). While Weekes views Poe as the narrator in this story (154-155), a better interpretation based on Poe’s biography views John Allan as the forgetful and unfaithful narrator. Ligeia’s representation of Poe’s beloved, dead foster mother, Fanny Allan, supports this interpretation. Poe cannot help infusing his description of Ligeia with his memories of Fanny as a mother figure, even if he views John Allan as the narrator, which explains the “conflation of the maternal with the romantic” that so troubles Karen Weekes (153). The blending of Poe’s view of Fanny Allan as a mother into a story told by a husband explains the narrator’s assertion that he had “child-like confidence” in his wife and that “[w]ithout Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted” (“Ligeia” 115); while the story may be from the perspective of a lover, Poe’s filial respect for his mother figure causes him, at times, to place her on a maternal pedestal. Poe’s disdain for John Allan and high esteem for Fanny also appears in his description of Ligeia as better than the narrator in every respect: Ligeia’s “infinite supremacy” means the narrator must “resign” to her superiority (115). However, despite the narrator’s inferiority, Ligeia adores him, a fact that the narrator, and Poe, questions: “How had I [the narrator] deserved to be so blessed by such confessions?” (116). Fanny Allan, as represented by Ligeia in Poe’s mind, was far superior in every respect to her husband, who did not deserve her adoration. Poe further stresses the narrator’s, and by extension Allan’s, unworthiness of his first bride through the “moment of mental alienation” that led to his remarriage (119). Rather than spend the rest of his days mourning the loss of his “one only and supremely beloved” (123), the narrator betrays the memory of Ligeia by marrying another, an action that critics often equate with Poe’s dependence on women (Kennedy 114-118), but which should be viewed as representing John Allan’s remarriage after Fanny Allan’s death.
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The narrator’s betrayal requires revenge for the superior and adoring Ligeia, just as John Allan’s remarriage begged for vengeance on behalf of the deceased Fanny. Since Poe lacked the means to seek real life retribution against his foster father for what he viewed as grotesque disrespect, he turned to a fictional revenge. After the narrator’s second wife, Rowena, sickens and dies, the narrator keeps watch over her body while descending into melancholy reminiscences on his first wife, Ligeia. Slowly, his memories become reality as Ligeia overtakes Rowena’s body (122-125). Poe’s description of Ligeia’s triumphant return reinstates her dominance over her husband; Karen Weekes notes that she “stands, regally, while he [the narrator] is at her feet,” a position that indicates Poe’s view of the couple’s proper power dynamic (158; emphasis added). Not only does the story end with Ligeia physically above her husband, but Poe also describes her as “[s]hrinking from [his] touch” while the narrator “shrieked aloud, ‘[C]an I never—can I never be mistaken—these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes—of my lost love—of the lady—of the LADY LIGEIA’” (125), descriptions that characterize Ligeia as the powerful tormentor and her narrator husband as the terrified tormented. Weekes interprets this power as “the true horror” for the narrator as the woman’s “powerful volition [. . .] renders him prostrate” (159). However, the horrified narrator is Poe’s point as he utilizes his fictional ability to ‘raise’ Fanny Allan from the dead to seek retribution against John Allan for his callous betrayal. And yet, while Ligeia’s revenge might provide Poe with vindication for the deceased Fanny, it does not punish John Allan for his betrayal of Poe himself. In physical description, Ligeia reflects both Poe’s identification with her character and his loving remembrance of Fanny Allan. But Poe’s admiration for Fanny as a mother figure might have hindered his fusion with Ligeia in her powerful, reincarnated state. Therefore, Ligeia’s revenge reflects Fanny Allan’s superiority over John Allan but cannot truly provide Poe with his own revenge. After vindicating his memory of beloved female figures through several stories featuring female driven revenge, it was time for Poe to find a way to merge with the women in his life and seek vengeance against his foster father for himself.
One year after publishing “Ligeia,” Poe published “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a story that explicitly features such a merging between two family members. A tale full of contradictions and confusions, “The Fall of the House of Usher” allows Poe to utilize the fusion of the twins Roderick and Madeline Usher as a means to combine himself with a female character representing the mother figures in his life. Karen Weekes characterizes Ligeia as “Poe’s ideal of himself. She is Poe’s own version of Madeline Usher: his haunting, beautiful twin” (160), a description that gains an interesting twist when considered alongside the actions of Roderick and Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Shortly after the unnamed narrator’s arrival at the twins’ ancestral home, Roderick laments that Madeline’s death “‘would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers’” (“The Fall of the House of Usher” 132). Such an emphasis on the shared familial name is reminiscent of Poe’s own middle name. Although never “formally adopted” (Silverman 1) by the Allans, Poe did receive their familial name as his middle name which he later regretted. Silverman notes that “[t]hroughout his career Poe struck the Allan name from his own, almost invariably signing himself ‘Edgar A. Poe’” (3). Interpreting Ligeia as representative of Fanny Allan, as asserted above, as well as representative of Poe’s ideal of himself, as asserted by Weekes, raises an interesting parallel. Since, as Silverman notes, John and Fanny Allan did not have any biological children (1), Fanny’s death would leave only Poe to inherit the Allan name. Given Poe’s fury regarding John Allan’s remarriage, which eventually resulted in two children (Silverman 3), it makes sense that Poe would view himself as the last of the true Allans in the same way that the fictional Roderick views himself as the last of the Ushers.
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In interpreting Roderick as a stand-in for Poe and Madeline as a stand-in for Ligeia and Fanny Allan, it is important to note Poe’s description of Roderick as “hopeless” and “frail” (132). Roderick, and by extension Poe, is not the powerful party in this tale, much as the narrator is not the powerful party in “Ligeia.” Instead, it is his twin sister Madeline who overcomes her brother’s attempts to bury her and completes the siblings’ integration at the end of the story. Silverman states that “painful memories of Poe’s characters fail to stay buried, but reappear despite conscious control” (18) in the same way that Madeline escapes from her coffin after Roderick and the narrator “‘put her living in the tomb’” (“The Fall of the House of Usher 143; emphasis original). Poe’s attempts to satisfy himself with writing revenge stories for the betrayed women in his life (such as “Morella,” “Berenice,” and “Ligeia”) leave him wishing for the ability to enact vengeance for his own perceived injustice at the hands of his father figure, John Allan. And yet, because Poe views himself as powerless and the women in his life as powerful, he requires a melding between his spirit and the spirit of his deceased mother figures. By refusing to stay buried, Madeline represents the spirit of Fanny Allan (and potentially also Eliza Poe) refusing to stay dormant in Poe’s memory. Just like Ligeia, the returned Madeline receives the title of ‘lady’ to represent her power. She then asserts her physical dominance over Roderick by “f[alling] heavily inward upon the person of her brother” (“The Fall of the House of Usher” 143). Poe’s description of her fall as “inward upon” rather than onto, atop of, or any other phrase insinuating separation of the two bodies indicates that Madeline and Roderick become one person at the end of the story (143). This finale also permits Poe’s convergence with his deceased, vengeful mother figure represented by Ligeia and Madeline Usher. Once Poe completes his fictional unification with a more powerful woman, he is finally capable of seeking personal revenge against John Allan.
While “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” centered on deceased female characters ‘rising’ from the dead to seek their revenge, Poe’s fictional convergence with his dead mother figure’s spirit allows him to utilize a living, male character to pursue personal revenge. “The Cask of Amontillado,” published in 1846, features only two characters, both of whom are male. The narrator opens by saying, “[t]he thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge” (208). This first line perfectly represents Poe’s own feelings towards John Allan; despite butting heads repeatedly, Poe does not seek fictional revenge until Allan’s remarriage and disownment of Poe (Silverman 2-3). The narrator also asserts that “[a] wrong is unredressed [. . .] when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong,” a fact that Poe seeks to remedy through the catharsis of fictionally burying John Allan alive (“The Cask of Amontillado” 208). Fortunato is described as “a man to be respected and even feared” yet also “a quack” (208) indicating a mixture of respect and contempt similar to the sentiments Poe held for Allan. These feelings cause Poe as the narrator to briefly hesitate in the premature burial of Allan as Fortunato; “[f]or a brief moment I [the narrator] hesitated—I trembled” when faced with the obvious terror of his victim (213). The strength that Poe, and consequently the narrator, received from his merging with his powerful mother figure in “The Fall of the House of Usher” do not abandon him, however; in the end Poe as the narrator completes his task and wishes his victim to “[i]n pace requiescat” – rest in peace, showing nothing but catharsis after his calculated act of revenge (214; emphasis original).
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Criticisms of Poe’s work that focus on the deaths of Eliza Poe, Fanny Allan, and Virginia Clemm (Poe’s wife) as the only biographical factors to influence his fictions miss half the picture. While there is merit to Karen Weekes’ interpretation of Poe’s obsession with dead women as “demeaning,” (150) his obsession is also logical; with so many beloved women in his life dying, it is no wonder that Poe constantly portrayed his female characters as dead. However, Poe’s “traumatic” life (Silverman 1; Weekes 149) did not just revolve around the tragic deaths of his mother, mother figure, and wife. Poe’s father figures abandoned him, rejected him, betrayed the women that Poe loved, and forsook him. The women in his life welcomed him, cared for him, and provided him with the love that he craved. Poe’s identification with the female characters in his tales to the point of being eventually subsumed by them magnifies the traumas that truly occupied his mind. For Poe was a man who loved deeply, took offense easily, and never forgave, at least not while he could get revenge.
Works Cited[i]
Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Poe, ‘Ligeia,’ and the Problem of Dying Women.” New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales, Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 113–29.
Poe, Edgar A. “The Cask of Amontillado.” The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 208–14.
---. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 126–44.
---. “Ligeia.” The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 111–25.
Silverman, Kenneth. “Introduction.” New Essay’s on Poe’s Major Tales, Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 1–26.
Weekes, Karen. “Poe’s Feminine Ideal.” The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 148–62.
[i] I owe my peers in the Summer 2022 section of Harvard Extension School’s EXPO S-42a course special gratitude for their advice and editing recommendations on this essay. I am also indebted to Professor Patricia Bellanca for her comments and support while drafting, revising, and editing this essay. Special thanks to my parents, Dianne Lescault and Maurice Lescault, Jr., for their patient listening and advising throughout the entire process of creating this essay, from brainstorming to submission.