Text: Ruth Leigh Hudson, “Conclusion,” Poe's Craftsmanship in the Short Story, dissertation, 1935, pp. 629-633 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 629:]

A piece of literary research is seldom initiated under the happy circumstances of a perfectly open mind on the part of the investigator. More often than not he has in mind some particular theory which he wishes to establish and, all unconsciously, he is inclined to see facts in the light of it. Nor can I claim to have been the fortunate exception, among investigators, to this general state of mind. In order, therefore, to render judgment the fairer, I shall reaffirm my original articles of faith: I believed — and still believe — that the essential Poe can best be discovered by an examination of him and his literary backgrounds at the beginning of his career before the unhappy years as a literary figure threw an artificial veneer over both him and his original standards. Also, I believed — and still believe — that there is need for an examination of Poe as a normal literary personae apart from the discoloring atmosphere of autobiographical interpretation, psychoanalysis, and judgments based upon knowledge of his unfortunately abnormal life. [page 630:]

In compliance with this last theory, I purposed to avoid as much as possible a consideration of Poe the man. Naturally it has been difficult to achieve this point of view because the circumstances of his life were inextricably interwoven with of his creation. In so far, then, as the man in concerned, two facts about him in relation to his tales have fixed themselves in my own mind. First, circumstances made him a writer of short stories and largely directed the accidents of his creation and publication. Second, his own habit of mind, strengthened by his experience as a critic, was responsible for his seeking a clear formula for the creation of the short fiction — the new genre demanded by the magazine movement — and was equally responsible for the form which his credo of the short story ultimately assumed.

I should like myself to point out the obvious lack of proportion in the treatment of sources and in the examination of certain tales. “In some cases, I have given what probably appears to be undue space to some of the minor tales their parallels. This is especially true in my examination of the tales of diablerie. It has been my purpose to clear up whenever [page 631:] possible some of the minor mysteries that may have arisen in regard to Poe's subject-matter and in regard to his intent in certain of his tales.

If the preceding study merits a degree of faith in its conclusions, then:

It has established. In more detail the general statements frequently made regarding Poe, that in subject-matter he was both the product of the older Gothicized Romanticism of his time and of the newer warfare of wit and raillery in the contemporary magazine literature; and, in form, of the magazine movement which created a demand for the short fiction.

It has suggested sufficient parallels of Poe's own work to justify the conclusions that he could claim little originality in subject-matter, that he did not create his strange “fantasy-pieces” out of his own life, and that one must be wary in attaching autobiographical significance to the subject-matter of his tales.

It has suggested a number of hitherto unnoted sources of Poe's materials, some of which, it is hoped, can be accepted with a degree of certainty.

It has shown that during the years he made no marked change in his subject-matter but only in his manner of treating it so that it tended toward the exact, the rational, the scientific. [page 632:]

A piece of work of this scope would, I think, have been wrought very nearly in vein if it came to a conclusion with a sense of completeness, of full accomplishment. Fortunately, this study ends satisfactorily in that it has opened up to me a vista of “the little done, the undone vast” in the matter of Poe's backgrounds. In particular, I have realized the need of a more intensive study of the magazine movement itself. The periodicals of the 1840's, especially in America, I have examined only in a superficial way, and they must be studied with care; French periodicals, into which I have dipped but lightly, and yet tantalizingly, must be fully considered. When studied in relation to Poe, certain minor English literary figures will, I think, throw a good dea1 of light upon Poe's origins. I have but pointed the way to this kind of investigation in my brief consideration of Robert Macnish, Dalton, and Bulwer. Bulwer, for example, offers a promising field for further study in relation to Poe. He has been commonly regarded as only a fashionable and popular novelist; he was, on the contrary, deeply in earnest about his art and seriously concerned with philosophical problems, and he had much to say critically [page 633:] which might have greatly influenced his American admirer. Finally, I feel constantly as I studied Poe that I should like to pause and take stock of a possibly growing taste in America for the scientific during the time that Poe showed distinct signs of a tendency in the direction of a scientific treatment of his materials.

Full justice to Poe cannot be done until some of the striking parallels to his own stories have been collected and made generally available, not, as it might seem, in order to minimize his accomplishments, but in order perhaps to exonerate him from the charge of a peculiar predilection for the morbid, the masochistic, and in order to show the full measure of his attainment in the shaping of his materials.