Text: Leonard W. Engel, “Edgar Allan Poe's Use of the Enclosure Device in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Studies in Poe's Pym (1975), pp. 35-44 (This material is protected by copyright)

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Although much critical attention has been given to Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, very little analysis has been devoted to his extensive use of enclosures and enclosure images in the novella. For Poe, the enclosure, whether it be an actual physical enclosure or an enclosure alluded to on the level of image and metaphor, is a crucial artistic device: it helps to focus the action, it assists in plot development, and it has a profound impact on the character of Pym, causing personality changes that influence his identity. Throughout the story at critical moments of his 1ife, Pym is confined in a variety of enclosures, and although they terrify him at the time, they also provide his means of salvation from a far more treacherous fate. A close examination of these moments in Pym's life will reveal Poe's highly skillful use of the enclosure and its effect on Pym's character.

Enclosure imagery is used early in the book when Arthur Gordon Pym and his friend Augustus are taking a midnight sail in the Ariel in a fairly rough sea. Poe describes the boat moving rapidly through the water with her bows running “completely under the foam,” and Pym notes that “whenever we rose from a plunge forward, the sea fell combing over our counter, and deluged us with water.”(1) Poe's language is significant here, especially the phrases “completely under the foam” and “deluged ... with water,” because it foreshadows the first major crisis in Pym's series of ordeals when the Ariel, moments later, is obliterated by the whaler Penguin.

The following images describe this action, and Poe's diction is crucial; he does not say “crashed” or “run into”; rather, “We had been run down by the whaling-ship ... [which] ... rode ... over us,” and our “frail bark ... was swallowed up” (III, 11). Clearly, Poe depicts the Ariel as not merely smashed by the larger ship but submerged by it.

After the impact, Pym passes under the ship, is caught on one of the timber-bolts protruding from the keel, and remains there until “disengaged” by the crew of the whaler. If he had not become fastened to the bolt, the ship would have passed, and it is unlikely the rescuers would have found him. Likewise, Augustus, who has been tied to the deck of the Ariel is buoyed up as the deck floats to the surface, and, as Pym remarks, no doubt escapes a “terrible death.”

Thus, Poe depicts each boy's crisis in terms of an enclosure that eventually saves him. [page 36:] In Pym's words, they were “swallowed up” by the whaler, but, ironically, they are saved by its crew and revived in its enclosed cabin. Hence a pattern emerges that Poe will establish more firmly with the subsequent events in the tale: crisis, terror, near death, enclosure, salvation, rebirth, and, finally a new life (which in some cases includes a new identity).

Shortly after this adventure, Pym's taste for the sea and further adventure leads him, against his family's strong objections, to leave home and stow away on the whaler Grampus. The boys decide to secrete Arthur in a box in the hold — a small enclosure within a larger one — reached through a series of narrow passage-ways, which Poe describes in the following:

In this coffin-1ike box, Pym will remain until it is safe to emerge without fear of the brig returning him to his family. He passes the next three days in this enclosure awaiting the ship's departure.

Sometime before it embarks, however, Pym hears the trap door open, and Augustus’ voice asking if there is anything he needs. “I suppose you can’t tell how long you have been buried — only three days — this is the twentieth” (III, 25). Here, as earlier, Poe's language and imagery are curious. For the past three days, Pym has been “buried” in an “ironbound box,” which resembles a coffin and is used for packing “fine earthenware.” Poe is suggesting more than mere stowing away, for Pym, while in the enclosure, experiences the terrors of death, but emerges to encounter a completely different life. Burial and resurrection, death and rebirth, are the strong implications.

As soon as the Grampus sets sail, Pym falls into a sound, lengthy sleep. When he awakens, he feels “strangely confused in mind,” his “limbs were greatly cramped,” and he has a “ravenous appetite.” But to his astonishment his meat has turned into “a state of absolute putrefaction!” He begins to think that he has “slept for an inordinately long period of time,” for the water in his jug is reduced to a half pint. His “head ached excessively”; and he fancies that he draws “every breath with difficulty; and ...[is] oppressed with a multitude of gloomy feelings.” He remarks, “The close atmosphere of the hold might have had something to do with this, and might, in the end, be productive of the most serious results” (III, 26).

They are serious results as Poe will demonstrate shortly, for while Pym lies buried in the hold, not only has his food putrefied and his water evaporated, but his old 1ife — his old self-Edgar Allan Poe's Use of the Enclosure Device [page 37:] has begun to disintegrate.

In the sleep, or “stupor,” that follows, Pym's dreams are vivid and horrifying: “Every ion, species of calamity and horror befell me. Among other miseries, I was smothered to death between huge pillows, by demons of the most ghastly and ferocious aspect. Immense serpents held me in their embrace, and looked earnestly in my face with their fearfully shining eyes. Then deserts, limitless, and of the most forlorn and awe-inspiring character, spread themselves out before me. ... The scene changed; and I stood, naked and alone, amid the burning sand plains of Zahara” (III, 28). The enclosure images in these dreams reinforce the idea that Pym's old identity is disintegrating. He is “smothered to death between huge pillows,” indicating that his air supply, his breath, his self, so to speak, is extinguished. Then he suddenly finds himself on “deserts, limitless,” “naked and alone.” Poe juxtaposes limited space and limitless space in Pym's dream to foreshadow that Pym himself will have to undergo the extremes of experience before he is through with this voyage.

Thus, in a small, ironbound box in the dark, densely crowded hold of a ship whose crew, he finds out later, has mutinied and turned the captain's rule into chaos, Arthur Gordon Pym dreams of death by smothering, of being alone on a desert plain, and finally of being stalked by a ferocious beast, which turns out to be his Newfoundland dog. Poe's imagery is unforgettable, and Pym's dreams suggest the emergence of a new self “naked and alone,” stripped of the old.

The irony of the situation is also clear. If Pym had not been confined in the hold during this time, he probably would have been killed by the mutineers. Therefore, while the enclosure seems to destroy his old identity, it also insures his survival from the impending death above deck. To this point of Pym's confinement, David Halliburton writes “space is circumscriptive, nonvolitional, a space of impending victimization. The ship is less a vessel than a chamber: in the hold where Augustus secretes him, Pym experiences premature burial.”(2)

Although this “non-volitional” “premature burial” saves Pym from the mutineers, his troubles us below deck are not over when he awakens from the dream and realizes the identity of his dog. He finds and with extreme difficulty follows the string that will presumably lead him to the safety in of the trap door, but upon reaching the door, he is unable to raise it and believes his fate is id sealed: “My sensations were those of extreme horror and dismay. In vain I attempted to reason on the probable cause of my being thus entombed. I ... sinking to the floor, gave way, unresistingly to the most gloomy imaginings, in which the dreadful deaths of thirst, famine, suffocation, and premature interment, crowded upon me as the prominent disasters to be encountered” (III, 33). So, Pym's life below deck lingers on, and after he makes his way back to the box, he passes in and out of dreamlike states, losing all sense of time. [page 38:]

His adventure in the hold is climaxed by an unexpected occurrence His dog, which he discovered after one of his nightmares and which provided him with companionship for a while, now turns against him. Upon awakening from one of his fitful sleeps, Pym finds the dog blocking his how exit from the box and set to attack at any moment. In his subsequent struggle with the beast, which takes place within the box, Pym feels “the sharp teeth pressing vigorously upon the woolen which enveloped” his neck, but, fortunately, the dog's teeth do not penetrate the folds of the material, and Poe depicts another image of enclosure, the woolen, which saves Pym from certain death. Pym is then able to gather the loose blankets, throw them over the dog, and, before it can extricate itself, escape through the door of the box, closing “it effectually against ... [the Pym dog's] pursuit” (III, 44).

Pym's experience in the hold has been filled with horrors, both real and unreal, and Poe so effectively blurred the distinctions between Pym's dreams and reality, that, like the main the character in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Pym is unsure when he is sleeping or when he is awake. What Pym leaves behind, confined in the box, I believe, symbolizes his old life, his old identity, re: for shortly after he escapes, he is baptized into a new life. Augustus finds him and gives him water. “Those ... who have been suddenly redeemed from the jaws of the tomb,” Pym utters, “or who have known the insufferable torments of thirst under circumstances as aggravated as those of which encompassed me in my dreary prison, can form any idea of the unutterable transports which he that one long draught of the richest of all physical luxuries afforded” (III, 46). Water and enclosures are the key elements in this passage: water provides Pym with “unutterable transports” from the circumstances which “encompassed” him in his “dreary prison.”

Richard Wilbur is correct when he speaks thus of Pym's experience in the hold: “so long as he remains in the brig's hold, Arthur is like a dead man; and ... while he sleeps in his provisioned box (to which a long cord is attached) he resembles an embryo as well. These two ideas ci together — death and birth — constitute the repeated rhythm of the whole narrative, and what is in Tr question is not physical dissolution or recovery but the death or recovery of the soul.”(3) Wilbur believes “the tale is covertly a dream of spiritual return,”(4) and I feel his interpretation has validity, especially when considered in the light of Poe's use of confinement.

While Pym is undergoing his unusual experience below deck, a mutiny is taking place above, and Poe uses the enclosure to describe the scene in which the mutineers take control of the ship and confine the men in the forecastle. Through deception, the mutineers persuade the sailors to return to the deck, and they ascend one by one to meet a horrible death. Thus, while Pym is experiencing a symbolic death and rebirth alone in his enclosure in the hold, secure from the mutiny, the crewmen encounter a literal death when they exchange the relative safety of the forecastle for [page 39:] the open deck, which is under the control of the mutineers.

Augustus’ adventures have also been marked by enclosures and confinements for he tells Arthur how he has been manacled to a berth in the forecastle, but has been able to squeeze his hands through the manacles and leave long enough to rescue Pym. They both return and devise a hiding place for Pym, which is, in effect, another enclosure, and remain there until they plan to regain control of the ship with the help of Dirk Peters, a mutineer who has had a falling out with the others.

Their plan is bold but successful, and the enclosure provides framework and focusses action. disguises himself as the corpse of a poisoned seaman named Rogers. Capitalizing on the close, stuffy atmosphere of the cabin in which the mutineers are sitting, the raging storm outside, the » has lantern swinging madly to and fro, and the weird stories Peters has been telling them to excite their imaginations, Pym enters at the moment when Peters suggests that someone dispatch the rotting corpse of Rogers, which, as far as everyone knew, was still lying on the deck. “There will be no ty, reason to wonder,” Pym relates, “that the deception had even more than the entire effect we had anticipated” (III, 93).

Pym, Peters, and Augustus are saved, subdue the mutineers, and subsequently become masters of the ship because Pym has assumed the identity of the sailor Peters. What is of prime importance here is that in assuming this new identity, Pym of necessity has adopted a temporary, not permanent, self, for the identity he assumes is that of a dead man, whose corpse has already been thrown overboard. Poe renders the entire scene within the constricting quarters of the crowded, swaying cabin, another enclosure.

A further example of the enclosure insuring survival occurs shortly after the preceding scene when the four, Pym, Peters, Augustus, and Parker, the only remaining mutineer whose life they decided to spare, are struggling to withstand the violent storm on the deck of the foundering Grampus. in They lash themselves to the fragments of the windlass and then lie as flat upon the deck as possible. Ironically, this self-imposed confinement is the only thing that keeps them from being washed over-board and meeting instant death. During this time Pym is reminded that the brig cannot sink owing ig to the nature of the cargo — the empty oil casks stowed in the hold. Again Poe uses enclosures, the casks, within a larger enclosure, the hold, and these casks keep the Grampus afloat and give the men further hope.

Not long after this scene, Pym remembers an axe he had put in the forecastle before they wrested control of the ship from the mutineers. He descends into the confined, water-filled compartment to retrieve it. “I plunged boldly in, feet foremost, made my way quickly to the berth, for and, at the very first attempt, brought up the axe.” With it, they cut through the deck over the [page 40:] storeroom, and Peters “descended, and soon returned, bringing up with him a small jar, which proved to be full of olives” (III, 130-131). On subsequent dives, he comes up with ham, some wine, and finally a large tortoise from which they acquire fresh water. Their next days are spent in relative ease.

Thus, Poe uses the forecastle as he did earlier the hold, as an enclosed area below the deck that means survival for Pym and his few remaining friends. In this case Pym's descent into the forecastle and Peters's descent into the storeroom suggest a similar rebirth. Both men are successful, and with the food, they are able to subsist for several days until the hulk of the ship heels over and they plunge into the sea.

With this newest submersion, Pym again resigns himself to die:

Instead of death, Pym and Peters are returned to the surface, and they climb onto the overturned hulk and live on barnacles until, unpredictably, they are rescued several days later by the trading ship Jane Guy. In each of these submersions, some sort of rebirth occurs, for their lives take a decided turn for the better. The joy they experience, for instance, when they first spot the Jane Guy's sail might be loosely equated with a higher perception or a beatific vision, “We hailed the glorious sight with a long, although feeble shout of rapture” (III, 146).

The effects of rebirth are reflected through their new 1ife aboard the Jane Guy, especially on Pym. He becomes for example, a dominant influence on the captain and begins to prod him to continue their southerly course. “I ... pressed upon him,” Pym relates, “the expediency of persevering, at least for a few days longer, in the direction we were holding” (III, 178). And Pym is successful. On the following day, he senses the captain's uneasiness with the ship's direction but is also aware of a weakness in his character which Pym capitalizes on, “He [Captain Guy] was exceedingly sensitive to ridicule ... and I finally succeeded in laughing him out of his apprehensions” (III, 179). Pym's observations here and his subsequent actions are not altogether consistent with his character prior to his rescue by the Jane Guy unless one accepts some kind of change wrought by his harrowing experiences.

In the earlier picture Poe draws of him, one would not expect Pym to be so perceptive of others or so decisive in action, but with each of these enclosures and subsequent escapes, he seems to have gained more knowledge and now seems to be not merely a reactor to situations but an initiator and, in a sense, a controller of the action. These enclosures, therefore, have a gradual, cumulative, and beneficial effect on him, and his character now has a strength and determination it did not have previously. In short, [page 41:] Pym has experienced some kind of identity change and is moving toward a more positive self image. vine, Pym, himself, is aware of this and at one point remarks about his relationship with Captain Guy, “in some way hardly known to myself, I had acquired much influence over him.”

Poe continues to use images of confinement on the journey southward when Pym relates their discovery of a large island encircled by a reef. Poe then foreshadows the outcome of the story by telling us Pym will be “encircled” by a “vast chain of apparent miracles” (III, 187).

The first of these “miracles” occurs while Pym and a number of crewmen land on the island and accompany the apparently friendly islanders to their village. While passing through a narrow ravine, Pym relates how his curiosity leads him to examine a species of filbert growing in a fissure in the side of the ravine. Peters and a man named Wilson Allen follow him into the fissure. Once in, however, they can not pass each other because of the narrowness of this unexpected enclosure, so Pym tells them to go back and he will give them some of his nuts. But before they reach the mouth of the fissure, they feel a sudden concussion:

“Living Inhumation” — that most terrifying, yet most fascinating, of all dangers to Poe once more threatens Pym. It signifies the obvious outcome of being entombed, and although Pym describes each confinement as terrifying, ne seems to be, on one level at least, seeking the isolation and anonymity He freely chooses each enclosure, except when he is thrown into the water as the hulk of the Grampus overturns, and, as I have emphasized, it is the enclosure that ultimately saves him from destruction each time. And Pym's escape from this entombment in the fissure is depicted in images that again suggest rebirth.

On the brink of despair, Pym and Peters fortuitously discover a long seam extending up the rock wall at a forty-five degree angle and then discern a glimmer of light at the top. They ascend the seam, reach a natural rock platform, and from there see “a patch of blue sky, at the extremity of a thickly-wooded ravine” (III, 207).

Upon reaching the top, they learn the truth of their situation — they are the only white men on the island. The islanders had planned a horrible death for the entire party, but the fissure had saved Peters and Pym and provided them with another rebirth. Even though they are by no means safe, some kind of psychological change, not unlike that seen after he boards the Jane Guy is again noticeable in Pym. Then, it will be remembered, he had a marked influence on the captain and was [page 42:] instrumental in determining the southward direction of the voyage. While in the fissure, he gives further evidence of independence and leadership. He saves Peters from being buried alive on the floor of the chasm, and he decides not to fire shots while still in the chasm for fear of attracting the attention of the natives of whom Pym has become suspicious. He also decides not to try to warn the men still on the ship of their impending danger from the natives; it would have done no good, he reasons, and it would have revealed to the natives the place of concealment of Pym and Peters.

These facts have been overlooked by many critics of the tale. Patrick Quinn, for example, argues that Pym is mainly a passive agent whose 1ife is governed, for the most part, by those men of action, Augustus and Peters. This may be true to an extent in the first half of the story, but not here. Quinn even overlooks the fact that it is Pym who saves Peters in the fissure and Pym who decides not to fire the shots. Had the shots been fired, the sounds, no doubt, would have resulted in the discovery and death of both men.(5) Thus, Pym appears to emerge from this latest confinement with more knowledge of himself and his situation than before, and with a noticeable sense of restraint.

In a later scene, Poe draws a parallel between Pym's fascination with enclosures, despite the horror they hold for him, and the experience he has while descending a precipice, which apparently is the only means of escaping death and starvation in the mountains. Suddenly, during the descent Pym envisions a “dusky, fiendish, and filmy figure” standing beneath him, and he has an “irrepressible desire” to plunge “within its arms.” “I had swooned,” he relates, “and Peters had caught me as I fell. ... On recovery, my trepidation had entirely vanished; I felt a new being, and, with some 1ittle further aid from my companion, reached the bottom also in safety” (III, 224-330). From this frightful dream, Pym recovers and becomes “a new being” who will follow a new life as he and Peters make their escape from the island and journey southward.

In the final pages of the novella, Poe's language and imagery of confinement are dominant. The image, for instance, of the tiny canoe containing Peters, Pym, and Nu-Nu, their captive, on the limitless sea rushing, being drawn, toward the huge, white curtain with the chasm beyond is remarkable. There is an air of mystery surrounding their flight south for Poe does not directly reveal why they are pursuing this course. They had other options: they could have headed north and braved the polar winter, for example, or they could have landed on one of the islands they passed, but as Pym, himself, remarks, “upon neither of these had we any intention to venture” (III, 236).

As their movement southward toward the whiteness increases, their mental and physical activity decreases. They are powerless to change their course. The images of “the gigantic curtain” along the southern wall, the “sullen darkness” hovering over them, and the “whiteashy shower,” which “nearly overwhelmed” them, seem to increase their listlessness (III, 241-242). [page 43:]

Poe does not give the details of their escape nor does he indicate their state of mind, but he the image of the large “shrouded human figure,” which apparently saves them, in the final scene is consistent with his use of enclosure throughout the story. At every crisis in Pym's life, he experiences some kind of confinement which horrifies him yet, ironically, guarantees his safety, and he emerges from it with an illuminating awareness of himself and the world that he did not have before.

In this respect; I do not accept Victor Vitanza's argument that “Poe has Pym, as the Imp of the Perverse and a symbol for a Perverse ‘mode of consciousness,’ voyage into the internal abyss but of his mind to explore Perverseness, the impulse for self-destruction. The narrative becomes m who an anatomy of Perverseness.”(6) More in line with my interpretation is Richard Wilbur's reading of the story as “a dream of spiritual return, [where] the figure at the end stands for the coming reunion of the voyager's soul with God or — what is the same thing — with the divinity in a himself.”(7)

The numerous enclosures and confinements Poe uses throughout the story, I believe, support the such an interpretation, and the image of the “shrouded” figure is entirely consistent with these devices. Literally, the figure has enclosed Pym and Peters, saved them from the cataract, and then cent returned them safely home. Symbolically, it is the final image in a pattern Poe has carefully established — burial and resurrection, death and rebirth. Perhaps Pym's concern with enclosures is really a desire to be done with this world, while at the same time having a great fear of death. And the character enacts his own death by symbolically burying himself and, subsequently, experiences resurrection to a new life. At the outset of the novella, it will be recalled, in addition to his lust for adventure, Pym does reveal a certain world-weariness, a sense of ennui, and a distinct desire to leave family and home. In effect, Pym wishes to eliminate all ties with his previous self and his past.

Poe's dramatization of Pym's seeking enclosures thus metaphorically suggests death to an old self, one that is neurotic and misanthropic, and rebirth of a new, one in which the thought of death will have been eliminated and where a certain amount of psychic freedom will prevail. In short, Poe's use of the enclosure device in this enigmatic story provides it with a thematic unity and an artistic integrity it would not otherwise have.

Quinnipiac College

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Notes

1 Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1965), III, 9. Hereafter cited in text.

2 David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 257.

3 Richard Wilbur, “Introduction,” Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Boston: David R. Godine, 1973), p. xx.

4 Wilbur, p. xxiv.

5 Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), pp. 196-97.

6 Victor Vitanza, Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative Arthur Gordon Pym: An Anatomy of Perverseness,” EA, 27 (March 1974), 37.

7 “Wilbur, “Introduction,” p. xxiv.