Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Edgar Allan Poe Read Free Book Online Page B

more cheerful poem like “To Helen,” dazzling light obscures the onlooker’s visual abilities. Such tropes in Poe’s works form perfect metaphors for rapidly shifting sensations in unstable minds, or strange actions and speeches that often represent those emotional traumas. The convoluted prose that typifies Poe’s tales, and that some readers have found objectionable, may be a subtly realized expression of mental distortions and the attempts of Poe’s characters to express such feelings. Often Poe’s writings unfold intricate issues in gender, of masculinity and femininity, and the reiterated interiority in his creative works fittingly symbolizes the human mind and self.
    “William Wilson” exemplifies such psychological foregrounding. The tale at first seems to be just one among many similar nineteenth-century literary works in which twins struggle to the death, whether that be actual organic death or emotional death-in-life. Poe manages to have both types of death come into play. Narrator William Wilson stabs the “other” William Wilson (his twin, double, conscience), only to learn that he has “murdered” the good part of what should be his integrated self, thereby furthering the triumph of the evil within. The repetition of the word “will,” the resemblances between the two Wilsons, the claustrophobic settings of the main episodes—all are foundations for successful psychological fiction. The other William Wilson’s voice is symbolically husky and muted because the narrator William Wilson doesn’t want to hear its actual sounds or its counsel.
    That horrors in Poe’s works often occur without supernatural help makes them all the more significant, and more frightening. Most of the tales in which women are prominent revolve around this theme. The early “Berenice” and “Morella” struck some of Poe’s contemporaries as mere exercises in horror, but they overlooked artistic modifications of Gothic conventions that we see today as foreshadowing sophisticated psychological developments in literary creations throughout the world. The narrator in “Berenice,” Egaeus, has nearly the same name as the father in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—Egeus, who fails to comprehend the truly irrational nature of love. That Poe’s character was born in a library—thus he’s unreal—may carry more psychological substance than what informs many other mere thrillers. On two counts—a literary name and an inability to cope with physical realities, except in odd, even sadistic responses—Egaeus likely causes debility in Berenice. By showing her scant love he thereby manages to drive her toward an early grave; his fixation on her teeth squelches any mutuality in their relationship. The story is open-ended: Possibly Egaeus pulled the teeth of a corpse, an activity already gruesome enough, or maybe Berenice was not actually dead, but only in a cataleptic state approximating death, so his violation of her grave might involve even worse emotional warpings in his character. Inability to love makes him static, with only an occasional pendulum swing toward sadism.
    The narrator-husband in “Morella” appears to be more passive than his wife (the title character), although such passivity may mask emotional savagery, which ultimately kills. Like Egaeus, this man manifests no healthy passion or love. Morella’s spirit returns, however, and takes over the body of their daughter, also named Morella, but named only at the moment when she is baptized—an event that represents irrepressibility of will. Perhaps the narrator’s refrain-like or near-rhyming repetition of “Morella” forms an incantation or spell that conjures the elder Morella’s spirit.
    A variation on this theme of the will’s supremacy makes “Ligeia” one of Poe’s most compelling tales. If, as has been hypothesized, Poe originally intended to satirize German and British Romanticism—respectively symbolized in the dark,