MASTER II

EDGAR ALLAN POE’S SHORT STORIES AND THE VISUAL

ARTS

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most important and influential American writers of
the 19th century. He was the first author to try to make a professional living as a
writer. When he published “The Tell Tale Heart”, the United States was entering a
period of great internal conflicts that would culminate a few decades later with the
Civil War. His writings reflect the qualities of the literary period called Dark
Romanticism, a movement that reached America in 1820, some twenty years after the
Lake Poets had revolutionized English poetry by writing Lyrical Ballads.
Industry bloomed as the 19th century began with many technological innovations
coming to fruition. There was also an abundance of historical events, starting with the
War of 1812 between the United States and the Great Britain; the White House was
burned; in 1831 was a huge slave rebellion.
At that time, tuberculosis was a leading cause of death. Idealist championed human
rights, especially the abolition of the slavery. For a while, the economy seemed to
born, until in 1837 when the recession set in and it meant lean times for many
Americans, while in cities poverty, crime and wage slavery skyrocketed.
Edgar Allan Poe brought the Ghotic literature in America, which explored the dark
side of the human experience, such as, death, alienation, nightmares, ghosts and
haunted landscapes. His characters are afflicted with various forms of insanity.
He is most identified with stories of horror and fear, there is an unrecognized and
even forgotten side of the writer. He was a self-declared lover of beauty, who “From
childhood’s hour…(had) not seen/As others saw.” Poe and the Visual Arts is the
comprehensive study of how the author’s work relates to the visual culture of his
time, reprising Poe’s “deep worship of all beauty,” which resounds in his earliest
writing and never entirely fades, despite the demands of his commercial writing
career.
Poe integrated the visual art as he knew into sketches, tales, and literary criticism,
paying close attention to the sculptures and paintings he saw in books, magazines,
and museums. His sensitivity to the visual media gives his writing a distinctive
“graphicality”.
Edgar Allan Poe’s grotesque depicts the beautiful and the sublime, pleasure and pain,
without fully representing one overriding value. He conveys the power of creation to
touch something supernatural, universal, a space that lives beyond death. Many of his
tales are literally about life after death, but the grotesque allows him to create art that
is constantly varied in its effects because it is never overdetermined by didacticism.
The author’s body of work is elliptical. While contemporaries like Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Herman Melville pointed towards a moral type of American
storytelling, complex yet purposeful, Poe’s work emphasizes philosophical
sensationalism, a fictive form that elicits a metaphysical yearning.
Edgar Allan Poe’s art is concerned with the act of creation. His protagonists are
visionaries and artists who funnel personal loss and obsession into a creation that
troubles the thread of what it means to exist.
While Poe is most often identified as a Gothic writer, his relationship with many
different forms of writing—fom criticism, poetry, genres of his own inventions such
as detective fiction—is centered on exemplifying the concepts of beauty and sublime.
Poe’s tales often have no moral impulse. His stories offer very little explication of
events as didactic revelations, but rather leave the reader with a sensation of
indeterminacy, mingling fear with many other sensations, such as humor, absurdity,
the beauty of the artifact of the story, and intellectual curiosity at how the mechanism
of the narrative has created this moment of elliptical dread.
Poe creates stories built on binaries, the past versus the present, the rational versus
the irrational. Through these binaries he creates a kaleidoscope of effects, giving the
resulting fiction many conflicts.
While the Gothic tradition may be the box in which Poe places his dark gifts, these
confines are never definitive and the effects created in these strange tales are diffuse
and elusive.