Text: Kevin McCarthy, “Unity and Personal Identity in Eureka,” Poe as Literary Cosmologer (1975), pp. 22-26 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 22, continued:]

The concepts of unity and personal identity, which have occupied the thoughts of philosophers and theologians for many centuries, are especially evident in Poe's Eureka. While it may be seen as a work of scientific merit,(1) or as a satirical comment on much of the scientific writing available at that time,(2) or as a work of aestheticism,(3) parts of it may spell out an important theme in several tales, namely the unity of body and soul and its relation to personal identity, the principium individuationis of a person. These ideas, which are traceable back to John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding,(4) appear in a number of Poe's tales (“Ligeia,” “Morella,” “Berenice,” “William Wilson,” “The Oval Portrait,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”), each treating of unity and personal identity, but from different angles. My purpose is to show how Eureka employs the points about unity and personal identity used in these tales and how Poe borrowed them from Locke.

The unity that many philosophers and scientists see in the world is not at all self-evident; in fact, a real discrepancy seems to exist in the unity of a first cause or a first particle and the world we see around [page 23:] us. Poe wrote that “he who from the top of Aetna casts his eyes leisurely around, is affected chiefly by the extent and diversity of the scene. Only by a rapid whirling on his heel could he hope to comprehend the panorama in the sublimity of its oneness. But as, on the summit of Aetna, no man has thought of whirling on his heel, so no man has ever taken into his brain the full uniqueness of the prospect; and so, again, whatever considerations lie involved in this uniqueness, have as yet no practical existence for mankind.(5) And later, we need so rapid a revolution of all things about the central point of sight that, while the minutiae vanish altogether, even the more conspicuous objects become blended into one” (XVI, 187). He seems to be saying that the unity of the world is illusory or at least that it is not immediately evident to the casual observer. Significantly, only in death does this unity become clear since only then do the many different particles of matter return to the original unity from which they have evolved. Death, then, whether it be a metaphor of the sexual act or the physical end of life, is the ultimate unity, a point that Poe makes at the end of Eureka and throughout many of his stories.(6)

Although unity in the world, according to Eureka, existed at the beginning of time, as the world evolved, more and more atoms were formed and eventually became dispersed through time, forming many different bodies. As Poe writes: “Unity being their source, and difference from Unity the character of the design manifested in their diffusion, we are warranted in supposing this character to be at least generally preserved throughout the design, and to form a portion of the design itself:-that is to say, we shall be warranted in conceiving continual differences at all points from the uniquity and simplicity of the origin” (XVI, 208).

An important question is raised-what does “the character of the design” consist of? It could be the soul, the immortal part of man. Although Poe's ideas about the soul would probably not admit this,(7) both “Ligeia” and “Morella” deal with the Pythagorean idea of transmigration: that the soul lives on under different appearances. Something in a person then, some “character,” remains the same despite the many physical changes his material body goes through. This idea of personal identity Poe seems to have borrowed from Locke-that though the body will have many changes from its original form, something in it preserves its essence. Differences exist, however, between animate and inanimate objects. If you add to or take away from, a pile of books, or replace several of the books with others of the same size and weight, the pile is no longer the same: its identity is changed. The principle is not true of living creatures, in whom the physical make-up of the atoms is less important for establishing or maintaining the same identity. As Locke wrote: “In the state of living creatures, their identity depends not on a mass of the same particles, but on something else. For in them the variation of great parcels of matter alters not the identity; an oak growing from a plant to a great tree, and then lopped, is still the same oak; and a colt grown up to a horse, sometimes fat, sometimes lean, is all the while the same horse: though, in both these cases, there may be a manifest change of the parts; so that truly they are not either of them the same masses of matter, though they be truly one of them the same oak, and the other the same horse. The reason whereof is, that, in these two cases — a mass of matter and a living body — identity is not applied to the same thing.”(8) Exactly what makes this identity seems, then, to be associated here less with the material than with the spiritual part of the living body and could be the principium individuationis, that which makes each person to be particular and no one else.

Several of Poe's stories deal with these ideas. “Ligeia” is about a man whose first wife (Ligeia) dies of an illness and whose second (Rowena) also seems to die; on her deathbed Rowena rises up to walk and, in dropping her bandages, appears to be Ligeia. The spirit of the man's first wife seems to have taken over Rowena's body in a great exertion of will, whether it was the will-power of the dead Ligeia or that of the husband. “Morella” has a variation on this theme of personal identity, being about a man whose wife (Morella) dies while giving birth to a baby girl who grows to resemble her mother more and more until finally, when her father names her after her mother, she dies; when he buries her with her mother, there is no trace of the mother. The bodies of the two women seemed to resemble each other more and more as the man discovered “new points of resemblance in the child to her mother” — so close in fact that he “shuddered at its too perfect identity” (II, 32). Here is an image of two bodies and two spirits becoming completely merged until they are identical. In “William Wilson” Poe deals with similar identity. The two men have a number of identical traits too unusual to be coincidental: the same first and last names, the same birthday, the same matriculation day, the same height and general outline of features, the same clothes, walk, and manner of speaking. They leave school on the same day and travel to the same cities. When the narrator eventually stabs his namesake to get rid of him, he notes that his clothes and face are identical with his own. Again, as in the other short stories, Poe seems to be dealing with the problem of personal identity, but from different angles. [page 24:]

Eureka ends with this problem: “Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness-that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah” (XVI, 314-315). This identification was mentioned by Ligeia when she said to God: “‘Are we not part and parcel in Thee?”’ (II, 257). This final union would seem to be a spiritual merging since feeling, which is associated with the body, is lost in merging with Jehovah; man is, then, in fact, “ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man.”

This idea of identity provided the theme of “Morella,” ‘Ligeia,” and “Berenice.” In “Morella” Poe mentions his source by name: “That Identity which is not improperly called Personal, I think Mr. Locke truly defines to consist in the sameness of a rational being.”(9) Compare: “In this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being” (Essay, II, 27, 9). Strangely enough, most editors of “Morella” have changed the word sameness, which both Poe and Locke used, to the word saneness and thus made the idea of the story psychological. However, the sameness of something, what Poe in Eureka called “the character of the design,” is what is so important in determining the identity of a person. Although one's material appearance can change quickly and greatly in time, as happened in “Morella” when the little girl grew to resemble her mother, despite these physical changes, the spiritual essence, “the character of the design,” can remain the same. “Berenice” presents a different idea, that physical change is in fact linked closely with personal identity, for here “more startling changes [are] wrought in the physical frame of Berenice — in the singular and most appalling distortion of her personal identity” (II, 21). They were so great that “not one vestige of the former being . . . lurked in any single line of the contour” (II, 23), emphasizing herein that the body and soul, the material and spiritual, were closely interlinked. Poe's emphasis on physical changes being directly responsible for changing personal identity again seems to explore possibilities of this idea of personal identity. “Berenice” examines some of these when the narrator seems unable to remember that he opened his cousin's tomb and extracted her teeth. Since he was under the influence of opium at the time, are there two people, the one who did the crime and the one who cannot remember doing it but who clearly did it? Locke asked this same question when he wrote: “Is not a man drunk and sober the same person? Why else is he punished for the fact he commits when drunk, though he be never afterwards conscious of it? Just as much the same person as a man that walks, and does other things in his sleep, is the same person, and is answerable for any mischief he shall do in it” (Essay, II, 27, 22).

One corollary to Poe's theory could be that there is one soul in the world, with many different bodies partaking of its powers, all of which “has been effected by forcing the originally and therefore normally One into the abnormal condition of Many” (XVI, 207) — a possible aspect of Poe's satire on the Transcendentalism that he opposed.(10) Another might be that one particular soul could be present in different bodies or, as Locke wrote, “the same person preserved under the change of various substances” (Essay, II, 27, 25). So Morella the mother might be preserved in her daughter. Although the material appearance of things changes, something within the person remains the same and provides identity. A slight variation occurs in “Eleonora” when the woman is reincarnated in Ermengarde. The idea of one soul being shared by more than one person is found in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” not only by the similar-looking Usher twins but also by the house, so that the death of one of them is the death of all three.

Locke further wrote: “There can, from the nature of things, be no absurdity at all to suppose that the same soul may at different times be united to different bodies, and with them make up for that time one man” (Essay, II, 27, 27). Poe states in Eureka that “no two bodies are absolutely alike” (XVI, 213), clearly referring here to the material, not the spiritual part of the person — a point he stresses in “Ligeia” and “Morella.” The former presents two different bodies, Ligeia and Rowena, but they seem to blend into one another at the end when the soul of Ligeia takes possession. “Morella” presents a daughter who physically resembles the body from which she came and spiritually seems to share the same soul. Both stories deal with what Poe in Eureka calls the development of One into Many, that is, of one soul into more than one body. Eureka also illustrates that “a diffusion from Unity, under the conditions, involves a tendency to return into Unity — a tendency ineradicable until satisfied” (XVI, 207). Exemplified in “Morella” by the return of the daughter's soul into the mother's and in “Ligeia” by the return of the body of Rowena into that of Ligeia, the return to unity in both cases is brought about by death, “. . . the necessitous apocalypse in which all divided creation hurtles toward instantaneous reunion in the oneness from which it had been sundered.”(11) This reunion is mentioned in Ligeia's poem about the concentralization of all objects to their original unity “through a circle that ever retumeth in / To the self-same spot” (II, 257), an idea expressed in Eureka as “the degree of the drawing together as we come back toward the centre from an outward position” (XVI, 226). [page 25:]

A person is not soul alone, but rather a union of body and soul, of matter and spirit. This gravitation or attraction that is joined to electricity or repulsion is the basis of every object. As Poe says, “the former is the body; the latter the soul: the one is the material; the other the spiritual, principle of the Universe” (XVI, 213-214). The identity of a disembodied person is a problem in “Ligeia” when the husband sees a shadow glide across the room and possibly put several drops of poison into Rowena's goblet. Was the bodies less shadow really Ligeia? Where was Morella the mother after she died and while her daughter was growing up?

Poe comments that “The Body and The Soul walk hand in hand.” And “the two Principles Proper, Attraction and Repulsion — the Material and the Spiritual — accompany each other, in the strictest fellowship, forever” (XVI, 244). Attraction and repulsion explain what happens to Rowena's body when she dies; her life seems to ebb and flow, and as the new body of Ligeia takes over, a violent stirring ensues between the forces of life and death. Poe stresses this distinction between body and soul, material and spiritual, in his differentiation between feeling and thinking, in the end seeming to indicate that the union of the two is the best course: “The Body and The Soul walk hand in hand.” Three of the main characters emphasize learning and thinking over feeling, with unfortunate consequences in that the three are sick much of the time. Morella's “erudition was profound” (II, 27), and Ligeia's learning “was immense — such as I have never known in woman” and even greater than most men's (II, 253-254); this knowledge in fact “defines her essential being.”(12) in “Berenice” the narrator, representing the intellect, mentions his birth, which took place in the library of his home; his youth, which he spent mostly in reading; and his passions, which were more of the mind than of the heart. Poe counteracts this emphasis on learning with his dedication of Eureka — “to those who feel rather than to those who think” and seems to break with Locke, who defined a person as “a thinking, intelligent being” (Essay, II, 27, 11).

The sickness of the two women, as well as Berenice, seems symptomatic of their general lifelessness. When the three die, if in fact they actually do, is difficult to determine since they are often described in terms of already being dead. Whereas “Berenice” may have a life-in-death theme (the beautiful woman being buried alive), “Ligeia” and “Morella” have one of death-in-life — in each story the woman being described in deathlike terms. Berenice, for example, is described as having a very pale forehead and eyes that were “lifeless, and lustreless, and seemingly pupil-less” and “not as a being of the earth” (II, 22-23). Morella, whose name may be based on the Latin mors, had a “pale forehead,” “melancholy eyes,” a “cold hand,” “wan fingers,” and a voice that had “unearthly tones” (II, 28-29). Ligeia had a “pale forehead, “”an airy and spirit-lifting vision, “marble-like hand, and “skin rivalling the purest ivory” (II, 249-250); her beauty was that “of being above or apart from the earth-the beauty of the fabulous Houri of the Turk” — especially significant since the word Houri in Arabic means ‘black-eyed woman’ (Ligeia had black eyes) and is the name of the beautiful virgin allotted to those who attain Paradise after life. Ligeia, on entering her husband's study, “came and departed as a shadow” — “outwardly calm” and “ever-placid.”

Eureka then is a compendium of ideas Poe borrowed from Locke concerning unity and personal identity — used in different ways in short stories published before Eureka. “Berenice” was about one woman and one soul. “Ligeia” describes two women and two souls, with the body of one of the women blending into that of the other. Whereas “William Wilson” had two persons with identical features and possibly one soul, “Morella” had two similar-looking women and one soul. In “Eleanora” two persons shared one soul, and in “The Oval Portrait” one woman's “soul” left her to go into a portrait. And, finally, in “The Fall of the House of Usher” two similar-looking persons and a house shared one soul. In Eureka, then, Poe drew upon the ideas of Locke for his cosmology.

University of Florida

[[Footnotes]]

1. Carol H. Maddison, “Poe's Eureka,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2 (1960), 350-367.

2. Harriet Holman, “Hog, Bacon, Ram and Other ‘Savans’ in Eureka: Notes Toward Decoding Poe's Encyclopedic Satire,” Poe Newsletter, 2 (1969), 49-55; Harriet Holman, ‘'Splitting Poe's ‘Epicurean Atoms’: Further Speculations on the Literary Satire of Eureka,” Poe Studies, 5 (1972), 33-37.

3. Charles W. Schaefer, “Poe's Eureka: The Macrocosmic Analogue,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 29 (1971), 353-365.

4. S. Gerald Sandler, “Poe's Indebtedness to Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” Boston University Studies in English, 5 (1961), 107-121; Margaret Alterton, Origins of Poe's Critical Theory (N.Y.: Russell & Russell, 1965). [page 26:]

5. Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (N.Y.: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902), XVI, 186. All citations of Poe's Works in the text are to this edition.

6. Joseph J. Moldenhauer, “Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections Between Poe's Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision,” PMLA, 83 (1968), 284-297^.

7. Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (N. Y.: Doubleday, 1972), p. 288.

8. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon, 1894), Vol. I, Bk. II, Chap. 27, par. 9. All references to Locke's Essay in the text are to this edition.

9. Although Harrison has “saneness” (II, 29), Poe actually wrote “sameness” when he first published the story in the Southern Literary Messenger (April, 1835, p. 449) and ten years later when he reprinted the story in the Broadway Journal (21 June, 1845, p. 388).

10. Maddison, p. 366.

11. Hoffman, p. 263.

12. James Schroeter, “A Misreading of Poe's ‘Ligeia,’” PMLA, 76 (1961), p. 399.