Poe

Edgar Allen Poe was born in Boston in January of 1809. His mother died when he was two, and because she had separated from Edgar’s father, he went to live with his grandparents. He was brought up well and went to school where he exceeded in Latin and French. In 1825, Edgar began school at the University of Virginia where he started drinking heavily and racking up large debts. He quit school less than a year later. With nowhere else to turn he joined the U.S. Army in 1827 and later entered West Point. John Allen, his father, refused to pay for it, and Poe soon left. He went to New York to try to get some of his short stories published. Poe bounced around to different newspapers and he published his first volume of short stories, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." He married his cousin Virginia, when she was 14 and he was 27. Even with the numerous jobs, Poe always seemed to be in financial distress. The death of his wife in 1847 caused Poe to collapse from stress. Mystery surrounds his death. On October 3 Poe was found at an auction house, and by the 7th he had died. There are many myths and speculations about what he died from. Some think it may have been alcoholism, others say he died from rabies. We may never know for sure because no autopsy was ever done.





The Raven:

"But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered- not a feather then he fluttered-
Till I scarcely more than muttered, "other friends have flown before-
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."
Then the bird said, "Nevermore."

The raven is a symbol of death and it came after Lenore, this man’s love, died. The Raven only knows one word – nevermore, and after learning that it can talk, starts asking it questions to which the raven always answers nevermore.

The Tell Tale Heart:

In the Tell Tale Heart, the speaker claims he is not insane. He plots the murder of an old man that lives in his house. He doesn’t want to murder the old man, just his “evil eye.” "I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever." He claims he isn’t insane because he premeditates the murder. He waits until the man’s eye opens and kills him. He hides him underneath the floor boards in his room and just in time because the cops have been called because a neighbor heard the scream of the old man. At first he acts like nothing is wrong, but the longer they stay the more paranoid he gets and confesses to the murder. He says that he can still hear the man’s heart beating underneath the floor boards.

Black Cat:

The narrator in this short story claims he is sane just as the one in the Tell Tale Heart. He is violent to everyone except his cat, Pluto. In a fit of rage one night, the narrator takes out a knife and stabs out Pluto’s eye, and hangs him from a limb of his tree. Months later, he finds another cat that looks like Pluto and takes him home but soon finds that he hates this cat as much as he hated Pluto. He tries to kill him with an axe in a fit of rage, but his wife defends the cat and gets the axe in her own head. He hides her body in the wall of his basement. Just as in the Tell Tale Heart, the police come, and find the body in the wall.
In class, we discussed how Poe’s stories discuss in some way or another dismemberment or losing body parts such as eyes or a heart. I thought it was an interesting point that someone made that our eyes is very vulnerable. They are part of our identity and if we lose them it is like we are losing part of our identity. We also discussed how we give human qualities or characteristics to some of our body parts such as our eyes and heart so it makes it even more horrific when someone loses a body part like that.

Ligeia:
This story revolves around love. The narrator discusses a love of his named Ligeia. The only problem is that he has a memory problem and cannot remember anything about his love except for her eyes. “I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligei.” Her eyes become his obsession and a fetish for him. Ligeia becomes mysteriously ill and was a topic of discussion in class. “Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.” Ligeia was not a weak woman. Her symptoms that the narrator described were emaciated, with pale fingers, blazing eyes and her veins stuck out in her forehead. The idea was brought up that she starved herself and allowed herself to die. One of the reasons for her killing herself was that the narrator was obsessed with her.

One of our many class discussions was about love. A question we looked at was can we still love and be self-reliant? Or does love mean co-dependence? I think that you can be self-reliant and be in a relationship. I am married and feel that I am independent, have my own kind of life and friends. I am able to experience things on my own and although I love him, I don’t feel like I need him to be fulfilled. Some think that love is a co-dependent relationship where they feed off each other. I know about people in relationships like that and think that it is kind of pathetic. I feel like people in those kinds of relationships lose their identity and just become what the other wants them to be. It is sad because in my friend’s case, they are not like the person that I grew up with and knew, they are very different.

Love is dynamic, not static and therefore will change and grow over time. People expect their romantic relationships to be the same as when they first met, and I don’t believe that its possible for it to be like that. If you think that you will stay in that honeymoon stage your entire life, then you may end up jumping from one person to another and nothing will last long-term. Poe’s stories are invested in the idea of soul mates that sometimes have unreasonable expectations. For example, one of his narrators believes that his lover will come back from the dead.

Why do we search for love when it’s not a fairy tale kind of love?


I remember reading this story in high school and thinking how bizarre it was. I really am not into any scary movies or this type of writing. I find his writing interesting and strange. I also think that all of his writing is very similar story lines. If I had to pick a favorite out of all of his, I would choose the Tell Tale Heart. I know that people are pulled into the perverseness of Poe’s writing and the ideas of death and dismemberment, but I don’t really enjoy those things. A lot of people really enjoy watching perverse, scary things that we wouldn't even dream of thinking about. That is why there are so many scary movies and why these movies make more movies. The Saw movies were famous and they continue to make them, I believe that is 5 now. This movie shows people making crazy decisions in order to save their own lives. It also shows contraptions that people wouldn't even dream of normally.

Questions:

Why are people strangely attracted to the scary and perverse stories of Poe and other writers like him?