2.1. The Role of Newspapers: The Accusation of
Medicine:
Poe chooses to deal with taphephobia not from a perspective of a
pure psychological dimension, but rather as a historical phenomenon that has
its causes. He deals with the primary cause of the public phobia which is the
recurrent occurrence of premature burial accidents, for several reasons, across
the nation. Each tale reflects one cause behind the frequency of premature
burial in an attempt to mirror and emphasize the trepidation that predominates
the American psychology, and to unveil the illnesses of the American
society.
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"Ligeia", "Morella" and "Berenice" share the same explanation of
premature burial. The three cases are a result of a mistaken medical diagnosis
or the responsibility of the wrong, unqualified person to announce death. In
"Ligeia", Poe emphasizes the fact that she resists for life and that her hasty
burial was not based upon a doctor's diagnosis but rather out of her husband's
will who "saw that she must die" (CTP 98). Despite the fact that
"Ligeia" presents a debatable tale because of its unreliable, addicted
narrator, who is under a constant effect of opium, Poe tries to give hints
about the circumstances of Ligeia's death, stressing that the narrator's
intensive regret may be out of his guilty conscience by taking over his wife's
premature death and entombment. Besides, the return of Ligeia, killing the new
bride, Lady Rowena, is a proof that she was oppressed by her husband, who took
the responsibility of announcing her death and prematurely buried her, and that
her return is for the sake of revenge. Poe uses this particular tale as an
example of horror and romance, in which he tries to study the direct source of
taphephobia, the occurrence of premature burial, reflecting its direct reason,
the occurrence of medical mistakes, that participate in reinforcing the mass
panic of the Americans during 19th C.
Poe follows the same pattern in his tale "Morella" in which the
female protagonist is proclaimed dead while she was giving birth to her
daughter. Critics usually refer to this particular tale as a perfect example of
the classical stories of the incarnation or transmission of souls since Morella
the daughter bears a perfect resemblance to her mother. However, the fact that
the narrator finds no trace of the corpse rises the question of the possibility
of burying the mother Morella alive. In addition, by the end of the tale, the
narrator shows signs of madness by laughing "with a long and bitter laugh"
(217) as he realized that his wife could be interred alive by mistake and
survived that near death experience. The narrator's claim that Morella is dead,
is based upon his few observations, noticing the absence of her voice preceded
by "a slight tremor covering her limbs" (216). However, He did not mention any
other signs of
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death like the absence of pulse or the change in the body's
color. But it was rather a hasty decision out of the narrator's panic and
shock.
Poe continues to show the errors that lead to premature
internment and rise the prevalent taphephobia in his tale "Berenice". In this
particular tale, Poe studies one of the common reasons behind the frequent
occurrence of premature burial that causes taphephobia. The narrator shocks the
reader with Berenice's death without any description of the circumstances. He
just mentioned that she suffered from an epileptic trance led to her death.
However, the signs of epilepsy like rigidity in limbs and low pulses can be
mistaken for death and she can be buried alive. Poe presents two images of
Berenice: an image of a young beautiful and dynamic girl and an image of lady,
consumed by epilepsy. He uses the word "destroyer" (CTP 166) to refer
to the mysterious thing that killed the old, charming Berenice. The choice of
the word destroyer with the emphasis on the anonymity of this radical change
opens the horizon to the reader to decode its nature. This destroyer can be
physically manifested in form of epilepsy as a neurological illness that
consumes the patient physically with the recurrence of seizures. However, the
word "destroyer" can refer to the psychological agony and the constant fear,
experienced by patients and turning their lives to an endless nightmare. Thus,
with the choice of some vocabulary like the example mentioned above, Poe
succeeds to convey his descriptive strategy, based upon the rise of suspense
and the reflection of the reader's psychology. Berenice's death was not
described enough and it was not announced or verified by specialized doctors,
which reflects a common error in the era. Throughout the tales, Poe did not
mention any presence of doctors or a death certificate, in an attempt to
describe one aspect of the obsessive fear that pervaded the American mind in
19th C, accusing medicine and the public ignorance to be the hidden causes
behind taphephobia.
The examples of the female protagonists' hasty burials mirror an
image occurred in the history of the American society. It is a context of 18th
C and notably the context of the
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Yellow Fever epidemic in Philadelphia (1793) during which hasty
burials occurred. In his article "Burying Alive", the editor George R. Graham
states that
During the prevalence of the yellow fever in this city, in the
year 1793, we have every reason to believe, that many persons, suffering with
disease, were removed from their houses and interred before the vital spark had
fled. So general was this desolating scourge, that those who officiated as
undertakers, acted without any check or responsibility, and if in entering a
house, the door of which was marked with the fatal characters of the disease,
the dying were taken with the dead, to avoid the trouble of a second visit;
there was none to call them to account. (Graham's Illustrated Magazine of
Literature , Romance, Art, and Fashion 379)
This article shows the lack of medical responsibility as the
hasty burials occurred as a way to prevent contagion. This particular case may
show the general state of panic that occurred during the era of the epidemic.
The article was published forty one years after the epidemic and in particular
in 1834 in context of a growing fear of premature burial. Media and
particularly the iconic newspapers and journals play a significant role in the
phenomenal rising of the mass taphephobia by continuously offering different
horrific stories about people who experience premature burial like the example
of Graham's periodical. Newspapers like The New York Times
used attractive headlines and detailed description of the victim along
with acknowledging names of victims and their relatives, stressing the medical
wrong diagnosis and its inability to distinguish between apparent and real
death. Such details used by authentic newspapers can create panic among people
from different social classes and especially if these details are shared by
other newspapers from other countries, reporting similarly the same horror,
stressing the idea that the phenomenon is no longer a national
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problem. The following quotation presents an example of an
article published by The New York Times on February 9, 1884
DAYTON, Feb.8.-A sensation has been created here by the discovery
of the fact that Miss Hockwalt , a young lady of high social connections, who
was supposed to have died suddenly on Jan. 10, was buried alive. The terrible
truth was discovered a few days ago, and since then it has been the talk of the
city. The circumstance of Miss Hockwalt's death was peculiar. It occurred on
the morning of the marriage of her brother to Miss Emma Schwind at Emannel's
Church. Shortly before 6 o'clock the young lady was dressing for the nuptials
and had gone into the kitchen. A few moments afterward she was found sitting on
a chair with her head leaning against a wall and apparently lifeless. Medical
aid was summoned in, Dr. Jewett who, after examination, pronounced her dead.
Mass was being read at the time in Emannel's Church and it was thought best to
continue, and the marriage was performed in gloom. The examination showed that
Anna was of excitable temperament, nervous, and affected with sympathetic
palpitation of the heart. Dr. Jewett thought this was the cause of her supposed
death. On the following day, the lady was interred in the Woodland. The friends
of Miss Hockwalt were unable to forget the terrible impression and several
ladies observe that her eyes bore a remarkably natural color and could not
dispel an idea that she was not dead. They conveyed their opinion to Annie's
parents and the thought preyed upon them so that the body was taken from the
grave. It was stated that when the coffin was opened it was discovered that the
supposed inanimate body had turned upon its right side. The hair had been torn
out in handfuls and the flesh had been bitten from the fingers. The body was
reinterred and efforts made to suppress the facts, but
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there are those who state they saw the body and know the facts to
be as narrated.
In this example, the journalist uses concrete names and focuses
on details in order to convince the reader with the reliability of the
accident. Besides, he tries to describe in details the circumstances of the
death and the context of the marriage that turns to a mere sadness in an
attempt to gain the sympathy of readers, who will identify themselves with this
story. In order to highlight the atrocities of premature burial and to
intensify the public horror and phobia, the journalist stresses on the detailed
description of the corpse after a long period in a suffocating grave, giving
the reader the freedom to imagine the physical and the psychological agony that
the victim lived. The article of The New York Times presents one
example of the widespread articles that reflected the public panic and
obsessive fear and even intensified it through the sentimental dealing with the
phenomenon of premature burial, focusing on the psychological interaction and
sympathy of the reader rather than an objective, scientific report of the
event. Instances of people who find themselves by accident in a dusty, dark
vault, enable to breath or to scream, struggling for survival were the
cliché of the 19th C newspapers and magazines, fueled the fear of the
mass and created a general atmosphere of trepidation.
Throughout the six tales, Poe did never refer to the presence of
specialized doctors to announce the death of character. All characters were
claimed dead by their relatives or husbands, based upon non-scientific,
unreliable criteria. This choice is far from being arbitrary. Poe's aim from
stressing the absence of doctors in these tales is to reflect one aspect of the
American society during the 19thC. As it is reflected throughout the six tales,
death and burial were considered as a private family event, in which
unqualified family members announce death and take care of everything related
to the funeral. Besides, the concept of death is reduced into a basic, abstract
definition of absence of breath and pulse. However, as
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the return of characters from their graves shows, this definition
of death is not always medically proved for the simple reason that it can be a
result of a severe trance. The recurrence of these medical mistakes and the
inability to have well defined criteria to distinguish between real and
apparent death despite the scientific progress of the era, created a growing
obsessive fear of being prematurely buried and living a horrible state between
life and death. Leslie Whetstine expresses, in her essay "The History of the
Definition(s) of Death: From 18thC to 20th C", that the American 19th C society
associates death with the absence of pulse and dysfunction of lungs (65).
However, there are some medical cases like catalepsy or coma, where these
syndromes are rules and not exceptions. In his attempt to historicize his
fictional tales, by recording the dark aspects of the American society, Poe
uses a lengthy medical explanation of catalepsy, which was the narrator's
illness in "The Premature Burial", emphasizing the fact that the patient enters
a state of near death, in which all vital organs become extremely weak and
unnoticeable and the whole body becomes rigid but with "traces of warmth"
(CTP 256).
This kind of illness was considered as mysterious and mistaken
with the state of absolute death. It was even associated with folklore,
relating the illness with the world of spiritualism and supernatural, which
raises the possibility of burying them alive and thus increases the mass phobia
that invaded the American mind during the 19th C. There was a common belief
that vampires are originally cataleptic people who were mistakenly interred.
This particular explanation is mainly related to the in-between state of
vampires since they are originally dead but resurrected, to live once again in
the world of living. This idea is further illustrated by Elizabeth Miller in
her essay "Getting to Know the Undead: Bram Stocker, Vampires, and Dracula", in
which she provides the Irish novelist Abraham Stocker's answer to the question
about the origins of Dracula as a character. He states that "[...] A person may
have fallen in a death like trance and been buried before the time. Afterwards
the body may
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have been dug and found alive, and from this a horror seized upon
the people, and in their ignorance they imagine that a vampire was about" (4).
This particular reference to the nature of vampires is reflected in Poe's tale
"Ligeia" in which the description of the Ligeia is a vampire-like appearance in
which there are ghostly movements that poured poison on the dying Rowena's
goblet. Poe was inspired by the national folklore of his era, trying to present
an unconventional image of vampires in a form of a lady who survived her
premature death and came to take her revenge from her husband. By using a
folkloric explanation of catalepsy and of premature burial, Poe once again
succeeds to report faithfully and vividly the American mind, concretizing its
worst fears and anxieties.
Poe reflects the other side of the modernized America as the land
of medical development in 19th C, unable to have well defined criteria to
announce death, causing several cases of premature burials which leads to an
uncontrolled mass horror from such a fate. Poe follows the same path as
newspapers by creating fictional tales that characterized by an apparent
verisimilitude created out of Poe's descriptive strategy at the level of
narration, characters and setting. He reports characters' physical and
psychological agony in an attempt to reflect the mass horror that pervaded the
American psyche during his era. Thus, Poe's tales transcend the boundaries of
aestheticism and become historical documents that record one phase and one
social phenomenon in the American history. However, far from being the result
of the 19th C solely, taphephobia is intensified by some religious causes and
at the same time presents a declaration of the collapse of the nation's
religious dogma related to the concept of life and death.
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