The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [59]
For what really occurred, however, it is quite impossible that any human being could have been prepared.
As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of “dead! dead!” absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity.
Bereavements
Although Poe found poetic inspiration in a beautiful woman’s death, he tended in fiction to portray her passing as an unromantic agony. Indeed, the fiction tends to emphasize the recoil of a male narrator from a dying woman whose return from the grave sometimes savors of revenge. The tales of loss surely owe something to Poe’s own recurrent bereavements—the deaths of his mother, of the beloved Mrs. Stanard, and of Frances Allan—and weirdly anticipate the early demise of his wife. But unlike the poems, which underscore grief and longing, the tales typically reflect a complicated loathing of mortality itself.
The early tale “The Assignation” introduces a succession of fated young women in Poe’s fiction and unfolds from the viewpoint of an interested spectator. When the Marchesa Aphrodite dejectedly casts her baby into a Venetian canal, her paramour, a Byronic visionary, foils the infanticide and so wins a mysterious wager. Unable to escape her marriage to the cruel Mentoni, the woman honors her vow to the visionary in a manner that the narrator comprehends too late.
More provocatively Poe narrates “Berenice” from the twisted perspective of Egaeus, who traces the decline of his cousin by dwelling on revolting changes in her appearance and “personal identity.” Berenice figures mostly as a cadaverous abstraction, yet her dazzling teeth become, in the narrator’s alienated mind, obsessive emblems of her individuality. Reacting to her reported demise, Egaeus betrays his madness by performing a bizarre, unconscious outrage.
Identity figures again in “Morella,” where the unloving narrator marries his “friend” and joins her in metaphysical studies on the fate of “personal identity.” Her wasting illness so intensifies his antipathy toward her that she makes a dying vow: she will compel him to “adore” in death the one whom he abhorred in life. The daughter whom Morella delivers on her deathbed incarnates her appearance and identity so exactly that the horrifying outcome of the girl’s belated christening fulfills the curse and dooms her adoring father to endless melancholy.
“Ligeia” marks Poe’s most intriguing variation, however, on the bereavement plot. When Ligeia grows ill, her narrator-husband agonizes at her “pitiable” decline and marvels at her determination to resist death by force of will. In the “mental alienation” provoked by her loss, he marries blonde Rowena Trevanion but cannot hide his loathing for her or his longing for Ligeia’s return. In the ambiguous final scene, he witnesses the possible reincarnation of raven-haired Ligeia, yet the reviving woman shuns him, forever shrouding in ambiguity her actual identity.
Poe employs a spectatorial narrator to study the strange bond between brother and sister in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Attempting to help his childhood friend, the narrator rationalizes the terrors inspired in Roderick by the illness of Madeline. Fearing that her apparent death may be a trance, Roderick buries her beneath the house, but he perversely screws down the coffin lid. Whether by natural or supernatural means, Madeline returns from the tomb, falling upon her brother and frightening him to death as their ancestral home collapses upon itself.
The only bereavement tale with a happy ending, “Eleonora” evokes the bliss of the narrator and his cousin-wife prior to her fatal illness. Despite his vow that he will never remarry, the narrator later weds the “ethereal” Ermengarde