1.1. Representation of Female Characters: A Glimpse
into Poe's Biography and
Era:
Poe's fascination with the motif of death of a beautiful woman is
not restricted to the tales under study. It is rather a common recurrent motif
throughout the different writings of Poe, either in poetry (for example, "The
Raven" and "Annabel Lee") or fiction. However, the particularity of these tales
lies in the presentation of female characters in a midway state between death
and life, reduced in the act of premature burial. Ligeia, Morella, Berenice
and
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Madeline Usher present all different faces of the same story and
the same fate. All of them share the image of a typical young and beautiful
lady, being a victim of a sudden, mysterious illness that leads to her apparent
death and hence to her premature burial. This recurrent presentation of female
characters presents a revisited true story, related to Poe's biography.
In the process of describing female characters' last moments in
their deathbed, and notably in the case of Ligeia and Morella, Poe did not
present the death scene as a moment of peaceful, sad farewell, he rather
stresses on the agonizing moments and their ceaseless conflict to defeat death.
This particular detailed depiction may be related to Poe's personal experience
with death. Poe uses the "I" narrator as a strategic choice to revive his
personal experience with the mysterious death of his young wife Virginia Clemm,
who was like Ligeia and Morella, kidnapped by the angel of death in an early
age. Hence, the fictional stories of Ligeia and Morella, in particular, goes in
parallel with Poe's biography. Poe attempts to ponder the last image of his
dying wife, engraved in his tormented memory. Yet, the return of the female
characters from death and their successful survival from the grave presents his
subconscious wish to see his wife again, succeeding to overcome illness and
death. Thus, the fictional stories presents for Poe an outlet for his deep
repressed sadness.
Female representation in Poe's tales is not related solely to his
own biography, it is also related to a whole culture that characterized the
United States during the 19th C. Throughout the six tales, Poe portrayed his
female characters in relation to their male counterpart so that the analysis of
one of them necessitates the presence of the other. Poe's female characters are
presented as both classical and unorthodox. Berenice and Madeline Usher present
examples of classical women who embody the characteristics of an "Angel in the
House". Portraying Berenice, Poe stresses her beauty and innocence, following
the same classical portrayal. The powerlessness and submissiveness of Berenice
and Madeline are
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further accentuated through the act of premature burial, which
can be explained as an execution of male power within the world of American
patriarchy.
However, Poe presents another side of female representation
through the characters of Ligeia and Morella. Portraying these two characters,
Poe starts with the same classical image of women as weak and fragile.
According to Leland S. Person, in his essay "Poe and Nineteenth Century Gender
Construction", the female characters are classical at the level of being
trapped in the domestic sphere that is controlled mainly by the male figure
(134). However, the same image is used to subvert the classical notion of
womanhood since Ligeia and Morella do not embody the submissiveness of the 19th
C American women who were reduced to objects to be controlled and means to
fulfill the male's desires. They are rather highly intellectual women who were
empowered by their knowledge of mystical and forbidden sciences. The deathbed
scenes of both Ligeia and Morella present very symbolic scenes of the
female/male relationship. The female characters in both scenes present the
dominant figures who control the dialogue and try to find solace, while the
male characters act passively. This shift on the gender roles of both
characters show how the relationship between them becomes a constant battle for
dominance and authority. Hence, the act of premature burial can be explained as
an act of championing the traditional patriarchal view or as Sandra Gilbert and
Suzan Gubar state in their book The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer
and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (1979) " a paradigmatic
[...] of the plight of the woman in patriarchal culture" (94).
Poe's choice of taphephobia presents a planned choice that serves
his perception of gothic literature and notably his re-defined concept of the
sublime, a concept created by Longinus and developed by Edmund Burke.
Poe revisited the same concept trying to adjust the term according to his
revolutionary vision of the horror, which consists of a psychological horror
originated from the human subconscious and a new definition of the beauty as a
major
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component of the sublime. Thus, he deconstructs the mythical
Romantic image of the beautiful female characters as the source of love,
delicacy and courtship. Poe builds a revolutionary image of both female and
male characters, showing that women in 19th C can be highly intellectual and
competitive. By portraying female characters as a threat to the patriarchal
dominance, Poe shows that the act of premature burial that presents the worst
nightmare of the 19th C Americans is a manifestation of male's schizophrenic
character, being apparently gentleman, but in their deep personality, they are
fierce people who aim to assuage the hunger of their manhood by repressing the
female body. Poe's presentation of the motif is also in a unique form, within a
world of intermingled disciplines of literature, medicine, history and
religion.
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