Text: Clark Griffith, “Poe and the Gothic,” Papers on Poe, 1972, pp. 21-27

[page 21, unnumbered:]

Clark Griffith

UNIVERSITY OF OREGON

 

Poe and the Gothic

 

DESPITE THE emphasis in his criticism upon a need for novelty, Poe's tales of terror are clearly indebted to some literary fore bears. From Gothic fiction of the English eighteenth century, Poe took the imagery of terror: the blighted, oppressive countryside; the machinery of the Inquisition; in particular, the haunted castle, swaddled in its own atmosphere of morbidity and decay. From the nineteenth-century Gothicized tales in Blackwood's Magazine, which he both ridiculed and admired, he took the form of terror: a first-person narrator, lingering typically over a single, frightening episode, and bringing matters to a climax in which he has grown deaf to every sound except the noise of his unique sensations. So close are the resemblances that one passes from Anne Radcliffe's architecture to the effusions of a Blackwood's speaker, convinced that Poe's effects often result from his combining the murky details of the one with the inveterate, un interrupted talkativeness of the other. Yet I wish to argue that even as Poe borrowed, he also made a significant contribution. Imperfectly at first, but then with greater assurance, he was concerned with shifting what I shall call the locus of the terrifying. This change in stance is one measure of his originality as a practicioner in the Gothic mode. And to watch him make it is to find special meaning in his famous declaration that the terror of which he wrote came not from Germany but from the soul. [page 22:]

As the basis for contrast, let us glance briefly at Emily St. Aubert, before the Castle of Udolpho. Confronting it for the first time, she can only see the castle as a real and utterly objective fact. For Emily is a true child of the Essay Concerning the Human Understanding. It would please her to suppose that she has somehow been trans ported into “one of those frightful fictions in which the wild genius of the poet delights.” But aware that there is nothing in the mind not first in the senses, she recognizes that she has no grounds for distrusting her perceptions; hence she must scorn as “delusion” and “superstition” the notion that the source of her agitation is anywhere except in the world around her. In Emily's case, therefore (as throughout Mrs. Radcliffe and the eighteenth-century Gothic generally), the direction of the horrifying is from without to within: from setting to self. Terror comes in consequence of what no less an authority than Horace Walpole had called the “extraordinary position,” as it impinges upon “mere men and women” to alarm and dismay them.(1)

The situation seems identical in the early portions of “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833). The storm at sea, which overtakes Poe's narrator, or the engulfing waves that “surpass ...anything [he] had imagined possible”: both appear to be examples of the received, physical or deal, such as Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe had devised. Halfway through “MS.,” however, a change in emphasis occurs. Now, for the first time, the narrator speaks of strange “conceptions” which are arising from inside his mind. They consist of “feelings” and “sensations” to which no name can be given; nevertheless, they cause him to spell out the word “Discovery” as he beholds — in any case, apparently beholds — an entire new order of experience. At this point, I suggest, Poe has commenced to modify the traditional Gothic relationship. If terror is to be the effect of inner conceptions, it is no longer necessary to regard his narrator as a “mere man,” beset and beleaguered by appalling circumstances. Instead, one can as readily think of him as Creative Man, and of the circumstances themselves as the products of his terrible creativity. At least potentially, the locus of the terrifying has passed from the spectacle into the spectator.

Admittedly, though, the change remains no more than implied and potential in “MS. Found in a Bottle.” It breaks down ultimately, because the scenery in the tale still seems too much founded upon the eighteenth-century convention of the “outer wonder.” What Poe needed, if he intended to psychologize the Gothic, was nothing so spacious or openly exotic as the South Indian Ocean. He required the [page 23:] smaller, less public mise-en-scéne, one which could more plausibly be transfigured by his narrators, and, above all, one which would dramatize the processes of transfiguration in action. He is best off, in short, when he returns to the dark, secluded interiors of eighteenth century fiction, but portrays them in such a way that the interiors are made suggestive of the human mind itself. And this of course is the technique he has perfected two years later, with the publication in 1835 of “Berenice,” his first example of a genuinely new Gothic.

Sitting within his ancestral mansion, Poe's Egaeus turns out to be both projector and voice, the source of a strange predicament as well as its spokesman. He has spent a lifetime gazing for “long unwearied hours” at objects which he half-suspects are trivial and without purpose — and watching while, gradually and inexplicably, they acquire some momentous significance. The story makes it clear, however, that the details present this heightened aspect only to Egaeus's “mind's eye”; whatever the meaning they come to possess, it is due solely to his fierce concentration upon them. Obviously, then, there has ceased to be any distance, or difference, between the terror and the terrified. Egaeus's realities are the realities of his own making; his world resembles a mirror in a madhouse, wherein distortions and phantasms appear, but only as the reflections of a particular sort of observer. And nowhere is this fact more evident than in his obsession with the teeth of Berenice:

At first glance, we are likely to be struck by the sheer, intense physicalness of these dreadful molars. Superficially, in fact, they may well seem of a kind with the highly tangible horrors which The Monk presents. Yet they function in quite another way. M. G. Lewis's ghoulish occurrences were rooted in a thoroughly Lockean landscape. The putrefying head, in the convent vaults at St. Clare, had to exist independently of Agnes de Medina, first to accost Agnes's senses and then to register on her appalled sensibility. By contrast, the teeth in Poe have no meaningful existence outside a sensibility; as Egaeus ac knowledges, “tous ses dients étaient des idées.” What the teeth might be like apart from Egaeus, or whether, for that matter, they even have an identity except in his vision of them: these are issues of no real moment. So successfully has Poe internalized the Gothic that [page 24:] the old “outer wonders” of the eighteenth century now disappear into the stream of consciousness. They have become the conditions and consequences (if one likes, the “objective correlatives”) of a psychic state.

The strategy of “Berenice” is one that with the slightest variations Poe would continue to utilize for the rest of his life. Barring the allegorical “Masque of the Red Death” and the fact-bound Pym (with its return to a glamorous out-of-doors), I know of none of the horror tales in which the perceiving mind does not seem much more nearly the originator of the terrifying than it is a mere passive witness. Moreover, I am convinced that to read them as though they were notes composed from within is often to clarify and enrich the stories. For example, the real key to the somewhat baffling “Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) appears to me to lie in the way it opens by re-enacting an episode out of Mrs. Radcliffe, but repeats the event for a totally different purpose.

Like Emily St. Aubert, Poe's speaker also rides up, at the end of a long day's journey, before an apparently haunted castle. He too feels it to be a massive and brooding presence in the foreground. And then, in an effort to dispell the alarm with which it quickly envelopes him, he decides to examine the place from a different perspective. But when he reins in his horse and proceeds to the new location, nothing happens. Where Emily could always look forward to being physically delivered from peril, the physical change in Poe only means that his narrator seems menaced anew. The “ghastly tree stems” and “vacant eyelike windows” continue to glare back at him with the same old ominousness.

Of course nothing happens. The truth about the speaker in “Usher” is that he has all along been engaged in a kind of symbolic homecoming. When at length he crosses the causeway and goes indoors, he finds himself among rooms and furnishings that are oddly familiar, because he has arrived at nothing less than the depths of his own being. Thereafter, it is not his talkativeness — his descriptive abilities, in the usual sense — that summon up Roderick and Madeline. The Ushers are products of the narrator's psyche; for they and their behavior become the embodiments of his trance, or they appear as the personae in his dream vision, or perhaps their incestuous relationship is a working out of his own, dark, tabooed, and otherwise inexpressible desires. Thus every subsequent event in “Usher” is prepared for by an opening tableau in which the power to terrorize could not be [page 25:] blotted from the landscape, because it had actually been brought into the landscape by the mind of the narrator. The organic unity, of which Poe makes so much, is a unity between the single creating self at the center of the story, and those shapes and forms which radiate outward as the marks of his continuous creative act. To me at least, no other interpretation of the tale can justify the amount of attention paid its narrator, or is so true to the form and manner of his narration.(2)

 

Poe's tinkerings with tradition are probably less eccentric and ultra-personal than, at first look, they appear to be. Behind them, after all, one discerns nothing more remarkable than a particular manifestation of the Romantic Movement. If the terrors of the eighteenth century were accountable in terms of Locke's Essay, then what is terror for Poe except an adjunct to the thirteenth chapter of the Biographia Literaria? That is, the horrifying now looms up out of a world in which the imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate” and wherein imaginative tendencies are “essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”

Granted that they represent extreme cases, Poe's narrators have to be understood as figures who are deeply involved in just the activity that Coleridge describes. Until their inner lives impinge upon the outer, the outer, if it is consequential at all, remains a dull and prosaic affair. It gains its extraordinary qualities, as we have seen, through the trans forming and the transfiguring capacities of an imaginative self. To cite a last example, we are told by the speaker in “Ligeia” (1838) of how the décor in Lady Rowena's bedchamber “partook of the true character of the Arabesque only when regarded from a single point of view.” As we read, however, it is to find that the single point of view has nothing to do with physical positioning. Rather, it seems expressive of the narrator's personality, an extension of his inward state. One concludes therefore that it is akin to Coleridge's “secondary imagination.” In Poe's hands this faculty has become more nearly an instrument of the appalling than it is a strictly aesthetic principle. Nevertheless, it still operates as the means of discovering relevance, pattern, even a certain sort of beauty and ideality in objects which, left to themselves; would be “essentially fixed and dead.”

Small wonder, consequently, that Poe's fiction is better unified but, at the same time, darker and much gloomier than the eighteenth-century [page 26:] Gothic had been. With their stress upon horror as an objective phenomenon, the earlier Gothic writers could introduce a whole range of tones and effects. As they evoked terror from the outside, so they were likewise free to suspend and withdraw it from without. Having opened what amounted to a trapdoor onto the world of men ace, they found it possible to snap the door shut again, and so to con duct their characters back into a world of happy endings: of order, security and (typically) the celebration of marriage vows. The waking nightmare succeeded by the nuptials! It is the regular drift of events from The Castle of Otranto to The Monk and on into Blackwood's.(3)

But Poe possessed no such latitude. Since the stimulus for terror comes from within, there can, in the tale he tells, be no real survivors, no remissions of the terrible, no protagonists who, by pluck or by luck, either earn or are at least vouchsafed the right to turn backward through the trapdoor. Self-afflicted and self-victimized (so to speak, their own executioners), Poe's characters must perform a persistently downward journey, sinking further and further into voluble wonderment at themselves, until they arrive at one of those shattering silences with which their narratives customarily end. And yet, even as they descend, they are granted a kind of glory which no hero of the earlier Gothic could ever have matched. We may feel that the next step for Poe's narrators will be the tomb or the lunatic asylum. During a single, transcendent moment, however, they have had the privilege of calling up out of their very beings a totally new order of reality. They are Romantic heroes without peer, for they have been the masters, because the creators, of all that they survey.

And small wonder, finally, that their creator was fascinated by what he called “the power of words.” Once he had got hold of his true theme, it was never enough for Poe simply to set a scene, describe an action, use words to provoke a shudder or two; that was the business of those attuned to the terrors of Germany. The test of language in his work lay in its ability to delve deeply within and bring to light the most hidden crannies of a suffering, yet oddly prolific self. Thus the descriptive devices of his Gothic predecessors re-emerge as Poe's metaphors of mind; their rhetorical flourishes are turned by him into a rhetoric of revelation. Out of the magic of words, Poe brings forth the symbolic countryside, self-contained and self-sustaining, utterly devoid of connections with the world as it is, yet recognizable still in the terms of its own special topography. And behind the countryside, he shows us the figure of the owner. This is the soul of [page 27:] man, cloaked in the works which it has made, and rendered thereby into a visible and articulate entity.

[page 27, continued:]

NOTES

1 Walpole's formula appears in his preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto. It was still being echoed, forty years later, by an anonymous contributor to Blackwood's, who asserted that the occasions for horror come “from the cases ... or circumstances of life.” Before Poe, the real issue among Gothic writers was not whether fear was externally motivated (that was taken for granted), but whether “outer wonders” had to be natural and plausible (as in Mrs. Radcliffe) or could legitimately be supernatural visitations (as in Walpole and, sometimes, M. G. Lewis).

2 Though the opening of “Usher” seems closest to The Mysteries of Udolpho, it will also bear comparison with the preface to The Castle of Otranto. In a striking reversal of Walpole's formula, Poe's speaker transfers the quality of mereness away from himself and attaches it to the landscape. The prospect “out there,” he feels, is a “mere” house, a domain with “simple features”; it ought not to alarm as it does. My position is, of course, that he is quite right: seen apart from the narrator's purview, the landscape might very well be “mere” and “simple”; without at all knowing it, he is an exceedingly complex fellow. And more and more of late, he is being restored to what seems to me his proper place in the story. See Richard Wilbur's “Introduction” to Poe: Complete Poems (New York, 1959) and James M. Cox, “Edgar Poe: Style as Pose,” VQR, XLIV (Winter 1968), 67-89.

3 If the lurid high point of The Monk is Ambrosio's transformation from saint to devil, we should not miss another major movement in the book. In our last glimpse of Agnes and Raymond, they are a wedded couple, to whom all future vicissitudes will “seem as zephyrs which breathe over summer seas.” Presumably, Raymond has earned this bliss by securing a decent Christian burial for the Bleeding Nun, while Agnes's entitlement to happiness derives from her simply having endured the outrages of the past.