Pallavi 1

Pallavi Kapoor
Prof. Themeem T
American Literature
21/10/2018

​Poe’s Tales
Helpless maiden, Intelligent woman & Dark Ladies

In ​The Philosophy of Composition​, Poe’s famous 1846 essay, he wrote that ​“the death
then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and
equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved
lover”.

Edgar Allan Poe, an American writer, poet and critic. ​His stories mark him as one of the
originators of both horror and detective fiction. Many anthologies credit him as the
“architect” of the modern short story. ​Most of Poe’s works have a central male character
who is morally or mentally flawed with either no or a slight mention of a woman as a
subordinate character but on the flip side, in some cases, women are depicted as morally
and spiritually superior to men. As Emily Baccam summarises, “​Overall, Poe portrays
either an extreme feminine ideal, praising subservience, obedience, beauty, and fragility,
or the opposite side of the spectrum: a loss of the prescribed sense of socially sanctioned
female identity and the horrors that accompany it.” ​Floyd Stovall in his article women in
poe’s tales says, “ ​No other great American poet has been so consistent as Edgar Allan
Poe in his use of women as the subject of poetry.” ​Some aspects of Poe’s life, like his
literature, is shrouded in mystery, and the lines between fact and fiction have been
blurred substantially since his death. One cannot deny the constant inspiration of the
women in his life evident in his works.

A life in turmoil was his. Death was a common theme, both, in his life and his works.
Having lost his parents at a mere age of 3, he wrote of a mother he had never met, “I
myself never knew her...the want of parental affection has been the heaviest of my trials.”
He parted with his foster parents over debts incurred due to gambling and the
consequential inability to pay for his studies. He dropped out and asserted his firm wish
to be a poet and writer when he first released his anonymous collection of poems. The
further series of events in his life involved death of his every lover that became subjects
of his poems. The dread of relationships and death had planted a seed that soon bloomed
into the frightful stories and haunting poetry we know today.

In his book, ​Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996)​, Michael Kimmel claims,
“[women] were not only domestic, they were domesticators, expected to turn their sons
into virtuous Christian gentlemen – dutiful, well-mannered, and feminized” and at the
 Pallavi 2

same time he states that the “repudiation of the feminine” was an important part of the
manhood in the nineteenth century.

The Victorian gender rules demanded a strict divide between the private sphere and
public sphere, belonging to women and men respectively.
For a woman to belong in society at the time, she basically had to be the equivalent of a
porcelain doll: fragile and lovely, like “the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena
Trevanion, of Tremain in the short story “Ligeia”. A woman’s purpose was simply to
entertain, create a domestic oasis for her husband to come home to, care for her children,
and do all of this silently, without asking any questions or having any opinions to call her
own. The nineteenth century was a revolutionary time for American women with the
Woman Movement coming into picture and the society starting to gradually change from
one that was imprisoning women at home as a part of the Ideal of True Womanhood, to
the Ideal of New Womanhood that allowed women to attend the same universities as men
did, or to choose jobs of the women’s interests. Even though the society was not
completely ready to accept the new society features, the Woman Movement was a
grounding point for the emancipation of women.

Elien Marten explains that, “Even though the poems may have women’s names as titles
and they may be directed at women using “To…” titles, it is actually always about the
“I”, the male poetic voice.” The rare poems where the woman is actually superior and a
shield to the “I” are the poems dedicated to her mother and then, her foster mother;

“She covered me warm,

And she prayed to the angels
To keep me from harm –
To the queen of the angels To shield me from harm.” (Poe 87)

In the other “mother poem”, “Sonnet – To My Mother” – written in honour of Maria

Clemm, Virginia’s mother – the woman is again primarily characterised as a mother
whose main function it is to love and care. She is identified as “mother to the one I loved
so dearly”(Poe 89) and is said to be “dearer than the mother I knew” (89)but that is all we
truly know about her.

The remarkable intellectual capabilities seem threatening to the male ego who are also
attracted to women because of their physical attributes. The lesser known tale of Three
Sundays in a week where Kate and the one she wants to marry outwit her father through a
clever answer. it is in some of these comical tales that we can find the exceptions or
lesser-known variations to Poe’s “rule” of the beautiful, dead woman. Stovall argues that
Poe’s “names are usually unfamiliar and always beautiful, especially because of their
musical quality” and adds that “[t]his quality he secured chiefly by the use of long
vowels, liquids and nasals”. Berenice, Ligeia and Morella correspond to these qualities
mentioned by Stovall and can indeed hardly be called everyday names. Kate’s name,
however, is a name that seems extraordinarily common in comparison to the names of
Berenice, Ligeia and Morella. The male narrator not only values Kate’s opinion but also
 Pallavi 3

places it above his and doesn’t negate her own will and choice. To conclude, Kate seems
to represent a common girl with a common name but it is fascinating to see that in this
story, it is the girl who is the cleverest of all and who is able to find the solution to the
problem represented, as opposed to the Dupin tales, where it is always a man who solves
the mystery.

Poe’s women are doomed from the start; the life of a beautiful maiden is fatal and final.
Critics note that Poe had a tendency to idealise female vulnerability.

In Poe’s biography, Kenneth Silverman underlines that ​“throughout his work runs a vein
of melancholy, sometimes despair, and . . . women who through death abandon their
loved ones”.​ Poe was abandoned and rejected all his life, and his anxieties and the
emptiness left by the women he loved, were turned into the haunting poems and stories
that are now so familiar. Sick, dying women, some of them buried alive or returning from
their graves are the centrepieces of his stories, and it is no surprise that Poe is known as a
master of macabre.

Women’s deaths, a mainstay in Poe’s works, are the result of a fatal illness in his tales of
terror, or of murder in the case of his detective stories. These deceased female characters
include, on the one hand, Marie Roget, Madame L’Epanaye, and her daughter, who are
all murdered, and on the other, Berenice and Ligeia, who eventually die after suffering
the disfiguring effects of a strange illness.

For example “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” has become so popular, the women in
these tales have helped in creating the image of the helpless and dead or dying maiden
that is seen as stereotypical of Poe’s works. Indeed, the most important women in this
tale, Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter Mademoiselle Camille L’Espanaye, are
identified only by their helpless shrieks and deformed corpses. The meaningful rational
conversation lay within the realm of men while the women were reduced to shreiks.
Stovall recognized that they “are usually not described, and [...] exist for no other purpose
than to satisfy the exigencies of the plot”

Joseph Church in his article about misogyny in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
stresses upon the fact that the people who perpetrated the crime were “strangely
unpunished”, he also goes on to say that Dupin and the narrator felt a misogynistic relief
in the deaths of the mother and daughter owing to them not needing a women in their life
and Dupin wanting to establish “his mental superiority over other men”. Church claims
that “[t]he tale thus mocks and punishes the women for aspiring to be men when they
should be sexually subservient”.

Another of Poe’s tales that come under the Dupin tales, “The Purloined Letter” illustrates
this image of helpless maiden as well. The whole plot is about a woman who is powerless
as a man steals a letter from her, even though she knows his identity. The woman has
been seen as inferior to man owing to her absence throughout the tale till the end where
she is potrayed as the helpless maiden who needs to rely on a man to solve her problem.
 Pallavi 4

Poe’s so-called “Dark Ladies” are probably the most famous and most written about
women of his entire oeuvre. Both the Dark Ladies and the intelligent women (Kate from
Three Sundays in a week) offer a positive alternative to the image of the helpless maiden
that is typical for the genre of Gothic fiction and for Poe’s detective stories.

Laura Hardt in her essay ​Female Resurrection in Poe’s Tales​ explains that it is not until
each has passed away that they become truly noticed, with each finding “through
resurrection the chance to gain control and a strong position within the narrative.” It is
when Ligeia finds life for a second time that her story truly fall to her character – the
narratives become their own, as they shape not only their own destinies, but also the
destinies of the male figures that exerted control and authority over them for so long. All
these tales have the woman’s name as the title which is an indicator of how important
they are in moving the plot along. It is through Ligeia’s demise that the action of the story
is set in motion. Her death spurs the narrator in a manner that her life had been unable to
as well – a fact that seems to have wounded him deeply. Ligeia is an example of a
beautiful, educated and independent woman, the most elaborative from the rest of the
tales. Suggesting that Ligeia may not be real is only an attempt to devalue the power she
possesses that is viewed as contrary to the rules of how a woman ought to behave.
Overall, Edgar Allan Poe himself called “Ligeia” to be the best of his stories which
proves his “feminist thinking”, and hence Ligeia’s credibility.

There are exceptions to Poe’s rule of “dead,beautiful woman” which haven’t been given
much attention. These lesser known show women in a positive light where their free will
and intellectual capabilities are emphasised. O​n October 7, 1849, at age 40, Poe died
alone after collapsing at a tavern in Baltimore, without ever achieving an ongoing, loving
connection with a woman; just as the married narrators of his tales never are able to attain
lasting relationships with their brides.
 Pallavi 5

​Bibliography

● Stovall, Floyd. “THE WOMEN OF POE'S POEMS AND TALES.” ​Studies in

English,​ no. 5, 1925, pp. 197–209.
● Baccam, Emily. “Portrayals of Women in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe.” ​A
Woman of a Few (Million) Words,​ 2 Aug. 2017,
emilymwhitley.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/portrayals-of-women-in-the-works-of-
edgar-allan-poe/.
● Martens, Elien. “The Representation of Women in the Works of Edgar Allan
Poe.” ​Ghent University Library,​ 2013., 1 Jan. 1970,
lib.ugent.be/en/catalog/rug01:002060296.
● Hardt (Class of 2014), Laura, "Female Resurrection in Poe's Tales" (2013).
English Undergraduate Publications. Paper 3.
http://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/eng_stu/3
● Zelinkova, Monika. “Emancipating Poe's Women: Female Agency in Three Poe
Stories.” ​Theses​, Masarykova Univerzita, 1 Jan. 1970, theses.cz/id/c6dnuk/.
● Silverman, Kenneth. ​Edgar A. Poe: a Biography: Mournful and Never-Ending
Remembrance​. HarperPerennial, 2009.
● Kimmel, Michael S.. ​Manhood in America: a Cultural History.​ Oxford University
Press., 2018.
● Katyal, Akhil, and Anannya Dasgupta. ​This Unsettling Place: Readings in
American Literature: a Critical Anthology.​ Worldview Publications, an Imprint of
Book Land Publishing Co., 2014.
● 9) Church, Joseph. ""To Make Venus Vanish": Misogyny as Motive in Poe's
"Murders in the Rue Morgue"." ATQ 20.2 (2006): 407-18. Print