See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/349028938

EDGAR ALLAN POE’S “HIDEOUS DRAMA OF REVIVIFICATION”:

RESURRECTING HIS MOTHER IN FEMALE VAMPIRES

Article · January 2021

CITATIONS READS

0 37

1 author:

Ufuk Gundogan
Dokuz Eylul University
3 PUBLICATIONS   0 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

research on female malady in literary works View project

research on Edgar Allan Poe View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Ufuk Gundogan on 04 February 2021.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 EDGAR ALLAN POE’S “HIDEOUS DRAMA OF REVIVIFICATION”:

RESURRECTING HIS MOTHER IN FEMALE VAMPIRES

Edgar Allan Poe’da “Yeniden Canlandırmanın Korkunç Dramı”:

Dişi Vampirlerde Anneyi Canlandırma

Ufuk GÜNDOĞAN*

ABSTRACT: This paper endeavors to analyze Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction and poems from a
psychoanalytic perspective. The Romantic writer’s short tragic life was governed by his Oedipus
complex and a strong death drive as the result of his traumatic experiences at an early age. He
witnessed his mother’s battle with tuberculosis followed by her death. His entire life he has searched
for a mother figure. In his works, Poe revives his mother in his portrayals of female characters in
the forms of vampires. These characters and all their experiences in his writings appear as uncanny
reflections from his unconscious, which he had a strong grasp on long before Sigmund Freud
researched and theorized these terms. Resulting from a strong death wish, Poe’s narrators, who are
mere reflections of himself, create dark, tomb-like settings where they isolate themselves from
reality or consciousness, focusing on the female vampire figures who they admire. However, these
figures also horrify Poe as they are the embodiments of death itself. In creating these undead women,
Poe expresses his strong desire to reunite with his dead mother and endeavors to uncover the link
between life and death, a secret that the female holds. This research focuses on Poe’s short stories
“Berenice,” “Ligeia,” “Morella,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in addition to various of his
poems.

Keywords: American Literature, Romanticism, Edgar Allan Poe, psychoanalysis, vampires

ÖZ: Bu çalışmada Edgar Allan Poe’nun kısa öyküleri ve şiirleri psikanalitik edebiyat kuramı
vasıtasıyla incelenmiştir. Romantik yazarın kısa ve trajik hayatına Sigmund Freud’un tanımladığı
Oedipus Kompleksi ve güçlü ölüm istenci hâkim olmuştur. Bunun en büyük sebebi yazarın yaşadığı
travmalar olmuştur. Bu travmalardan yazarda en derin iz bırakanı, annesinin verem ile uzun
mücadelesine tanık olduktan sonra onu küçük yaşta kaybetmesi olmuştur. Poe ömrü boyunca bir
anne figürü aramış ve eserlerinde, ölü annesini dişi vampir figürleri aracılığıyla canlandırmıştır.
Bütün bu figürler ve bu figürlerin tasvir edildiği anlatımlar, bilinçdışının “tekinsiz” (“uncanny”)
yansımaları olarak ortaya çıkmaktadır. Bu da Freud’un çalışmalarından uzun bir zaman önce,
Poe’nun eserlerinde bilinçdışının derinliklerindeki karanlık yerleri kavradığını göstermektedir.
Yazarın kendisinin yansımaları olan anlatıcıları, kendileri için tabuta benzer karanlık alanlar yaratır.

*Dr. Öğr. Üyesi, Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi, Edebiyat Fakültesi, Karşılaştırmalı Edebiyat Bölümü,
Tınaztepe Kampüsü, Buca / İzmir, ufuk.gundogan@deu.edu.tr, ORCID: 0000-0002-2673-2504
Söz konusu imgeler Poe’nun güçlü ölüm arzusundan kaynaklanmaktadır. Poe’nun erkek
karakterleri, kendilerini reel yaşamdan, başka bir deyişle bilinçten, izole edip dişi vampirlere
odaklanmaktadırlar. Erkek karakterlerin, dişi vampir figürlerine karşı büyük bir hayranlık
beslemeleri, yazarın kavuşmak istediği annesini simgelemektedir. Aynı zamanda bu figürler ölümü
temsil eder ve bundan dolayı, varlıkları Poe’yu dehşete düşürür. Dolayısıyla, yazarın yarattığı
ölümsüz kadınlar, aslında Poe’nun ölü annesi ile bir araya gelme arzusunu dışa vurmaktadır. Yazarın
nihai amacı ise, ölüm ile yaşam arasındaki bağı keşfetmektir ve anlamaktır. Bu çalışma, Poe’daki
bu teknikleri göstermek için yazarın şiirlerine ve ayrıca, “Berenice,” “Ligeia,” “Morella,” ve “Usher
Evi’nin Düşüşü” gibi kısa öykülerine odaklanmıştır.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Amerikan Edebiyatı, Romantizm, Edgar Allan Poe, Psikanalitik Kuram,
vampirler

Introduction
“How poignant, then, must have been the grief”
“as a child groping benighted” (Poe 1966c: 389)

George Bernard Shaw’s character John Tanner in Man and Superman (1903)
claims that among all the battles for humans, “there is none so treacherous and
remorseless” as the one “between the artist man and the mother woman. Which
shall use up the other?” (Shaw 1975: 558). Poe’s relation with his mother did use
him up, while it also inspired him to create his unforgettable and uniquely
haunting female characters. Poe’s continuing search for a maternal figure
compelled him to revive her in many of his stories and poems. This, ironically,
both empowered him to construct his masterpieces and created a strong death wish
that threw him into a severe depression. Despite the morbid and tragic aspects of
his life, one can only admire him as an innovative artist. Poe led the way to new
literary genres, such as the detective fiction; however, more awe-inspiring is his
insight into the human unconscious long before psychoanalysis was established
as a valid science. Poe’s preoccupation with the hidden darker segments of the
mind stems from the most prominent attribute in his works: his obsession with the
dying beautiful woman – a topic numerous studies have treated and researched.
Yet this subject never loses its poignancy as it retains its allure and mystery, and
it is always worthy of re-examination. Compared to various other writers who
showed a wild fascination for death and the nature of the dying body, Poe holds a
unique place. This study will take a closer look at the Romantic writer’s female
vampire figures in “Berenice,” “Morella,” “Ligeia,” and “The Fall of the House
of Usher,” along with various of his poems, that illustrate Poe’s recognition that
the female, life, and death are intertwined.
Poe’s discernments in his works can be strongly connected to his personal
traumas. He led a very troubled short life, in which he endeavored to untangle the
mystery of death, and the exact nature of the decomposing body. Samantha
Stobert details the apprehension of death in the Victorian Era, where
“sentimentalized grieving ultimately suppressed and romanticized the physical
process of death” (Stobert 2001: 284). However, Poe emphasized the horrific
aspect of this inevitable process. Unable to comprehend the suffering and
disappearance of his mother at a very young age, Poe in later life continued to
deny her demise. Thus, she became, in a sense, the “archetype” of all the ensuing
women in his works – the undead figures who both horrified and attracted him.
James Twitchell claims that, among many other interpretations, the vampire figure
may be “used to personify the forces of maternal attraction/ repulsion” as well as
incest (Twitchell 1986: 5). As many studies on Poe’s fiction have shown, the
melancholy Gothic writer’s most poetical subject, “the death of the beautiful
woman,” (Poe 1966f, 179) originates from his own experiences and trauma
surrounding death. In her book on Poe’s life and work, Dawn Sova relates how
Edgar Poe and his siblings “were found huddling close” (Sova 2001: 3) to the
dead body of their mother Elizabeth Arnold Poe, who had succumbed to
tuberculosis at age twenty-four. Afterwards, Poe lost his foster mother Frances
Allan, with whom he had a close relationship. I claim that throughout his life,
Edgar Poe continuously searched for a mother-figure and constantly felt the strong
urge to reunite with her. Later, his wife Virginia’s emaciated condition for several
years brought up the memories of his own mother’s transformation, which
compelled Poe to recreate them in his works. When Virginia died, he broke down,
though he felt relieved in a way from “horrible neverending oscillation between
hope and despair” as he wrote in one of his letters (Kennedy 1996: 543). Poe
suffered from a more severe depression which continued until his own death in
1949.
As an avant-garde writer in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Poe
unleashed riveting insight into the unconscious workings of the psyche, decades
before Sigmund Freud’s research. T.E. Apter points out that psychoanalysis, “in
regard to its emphasis on beliefs and desires inadmissible to consciousness … can
be viewed as an outgrowth of the Romantic glorification of emotion and impulse”
(Apter 1982: 5). One of the most apparent descriptions of Poe reaching into the
depths of his psyche can be found in his short story “Berenice” (1835). Poe's
narrator claims that, “the realities of the world affected me as visions… only,
while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became … that existence utterly and
solely in itself” (Poe 1966b: 46). Freud, in Interpretation of Dreams, writes: “In
the best interpreted dreams we often have to leave one passage in obscurity
because we observe during the interpretation that we have here a tangle of dream-
thoughts which cannot be unravelled” and that is “the point at which it ascends
into the unknown” (Freud 1997: 265). It is exactly that “unravelled” tangle Poe
endeavors desperately and relentlessly to untangle.
Poe’s writings emanate from his unconscious which stores everything that is
repressed, according to Freud. The Romantic writer is uniquely talented in
creating dream-like, or rather, “nightmarish” atmospheres, which are essentially
dreams he struggled to decipher, and the readers need to solve. For instance, water
is regarded as a symbol for the unconscious and several of his poems use imagery
of lakes and seas. Aside from his most popular dead beloved Annabel Lee (1849)
who is entombed in a “kingdom by the sea,” (Poe 1966a: 43), another poem is
called “Dreamland” (1844), imagining the bottomless pit of the unconscious and
its dark mysteries, “obscure and lonely,” a dreamland where “Night/ On a black
throne reigns upright” (Poe 1966i: 234). In this world, there is no sense of
“SPACE” or “TIME,” and it is composed of “boundless floods, / And chasms,
and caves” and Poe claims “no man can discover” this place because “Never its
mysteries are exposed / To the weak human eye unclosed.” Its visual imagery
creates a watery region, “For the tears that drip all over; / Into seas without a shore
/ Where dwell the Ghouls,- / … In each nook most melancholy- / There the
traveller meets … / Sheeted Memories of the Past” (Poe 1966i: 234). Furthermore,
in his poem called “To the Lake” (1827), the persona describes a wild lake he
visited when he was very young, and he faced the “terror” of that watery setting.
He claims that this feeling of terror “was … / But a tremulous delight” (Poe 1966h:
698). The dreadful, for Poe, is pleasure as well, as his vampires represent both the
irresistible mother and appalling death, which he calls a “poisonous wave” as his
soul is able to change a dim lake into “Eden” (Poe 1966h: 698). As it is evident in
this latter poem, the intertwined existence of love and death run throughout all of
Poe’s works.
 His obsession with dying further suggests that Poe himself harbored a strong
“death wish,” mostly apparent in his melancholy state. Poe’s isolated narrators
suffer from mental disorders, whether it be monomania, schizophrenia, psychosis,
or depression. These gloomy and restless male characters reflect the melancholy
writer himself. Charles Baudelaire, whom Mario Praz calls Poe’s “brother-in-art”
(Praz 1946: 144), claims that Poe’s personal life and his fiction bore the
“indefinable stamp of melancholy” (Baudelaire 1837: 13). This emotion is overtly
present in narrators and male characters who show, what Freud termed, a strong
“death drive” or death wish (Todestrieb) in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).
Freud described this desire as “the instinct to return to the inanimate state” (Freud
1920: 32) in which the organism is free of tension, fear, or anxiety. In Poe, the
death drive was stronger than the pleasure principle, or the life instinct, which led
him to repeat self-destructive habits, such as alcoholism and his urge for conflicts
with fellow-writers and critics. As a result, fueled by his fascination with death,
he reflects this side of himself in his works. As Baudelaire writes it so poetically:
“[Poe] could not resist the desire of finding again those visions, marvelous or
awful … they were old acquaintances which imperatively attracted him”
(Baudelaire 1837: 19). The French writer also claims that Poe’s works were “the
cause of this death” (Baudelaire 1837: 19). Poe’s self-destructive strain resurfaces
frequently in his works, specifically in his grasp on the intertwined concepts of
love and death. As he admits in his poem “Romance”: "I could not love except
where Death / Was mingling his with Beauty's breath” (Poe 1969: 157).
According to biographer Silverman, Poe’s artistry “may be understood as a sort
of prolonged mourning” (Silverman 1991: 78). In “The Philosophy of
Composition,” Poe sympathetically describes this emotion as “the human thirst
for self-torture” (Poe 1966f: 182). It may be argued that Poe’s unresolved
mourning led to his self-destructive addictions. “Poe had the alcoholic's tendency
to deny reality,” Jeffrey Meyers asserts in Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy
(Meyers 2000: 145). Meyers further claims that Poe’s addictions resulted from his
need to punish himself, leading out of “some deep-rooted guilt,” as he believed to
be accountable for the demise of his beloved women (Meyers 2000: 91).
Poe’s strong death drive is obvious in the following quotation from a letter he
wrote in 1835, when, Kennedy claims, “he slid into suicidal despair in Richmond
in 1835 … Apologizing for his ‘incoherency,’ he wrote … : ‘I am suffering under
a depression of spirits such as I never felt before. I have struggled in vain against
the influence of this melancholy ... I am wretched, and know not why’” (Kennedy
1996: 547). In this “wretched” state of mind and his wish to perish, Poe envisions
himself entombed alive in his various eerie and gloomy settings. Camille Paglia
claims that Poe’s characters are interred alive “because he sees nature as a hostile
womb from which humanity can never be fully born … His stories are Late
Romantic tholoi fusing the trauma of birth and death” (Paglia 1990: 577-578). In
his works, Poe buries himself in the unconscious realm, which resembles the
“artificial night” (I.1.149) that Montague refers to as Romeo’s death wish in
William Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare 2003 :74).
Houses, abbeys, or chambers – every environment is damp, decaying, and dark.
For instance, Montresor in “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) walks down
through the caverns and tunnels underground his palazzo, into his unconscious,
where he builds a wall around his double Fortunado who is buried alive. These
tomb-like settings, like the “dark and intricate passages” in “The Fall of the House
of Usher” (Poe 1966e: 645), represent the deep caverns of the mind. In this story,
where both Roderick Usher and the narrator are Poe’s personas, Roderick
foreshadows his death, while disclosing his life-long desire to comprehend the
unknown. Roderick expresses a strong belief that he will “perish in this deplorable
folly” and claims he “must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle
with the grim phantasm, FEAR!” (Poe 1966e: 646).
This fear results from the unknown, which he ardently aspires to understand.
In The Uncanny, Freud claims that this feeling “belongs to the realm of the
frightening, of what evokes fear and dread” (Freud 2003: 159). From the German
word “Unheimlich,” the closest translation in English would be “uncanny” and
“eerie” and etymologically “unhomely” (Apter 1982: 41). Poe’s intoxicated
narrators create a “dream state” and delve into the unconscious which, according
to Freud, reveals what one either dreads or desires. Regarding psychoanalytic
studies on Poe’s works, Clive Bloom asserts that “Poe conceives of a world which
is a mirror image of Freud's own … in which the conditions which allowed Freud
to find a discourse of 'fact' allowed Poe to form … a certain type of fiction”
(Bloom 1988: 8). Freud further theorizes that the uncanny originates from
frightening phenomena that reside in the familiar (Freud 2003: 160). As
Baudelaire noted, the fantastic element in Poe's tales is grounded in “exceptions
in human life and in nature . . . hallucinations . . . hysteria usurping the place of
the will, contradiction set up between the nerves and the mind” (Baudelaire 1837:
20). Poe’s imaginary world is inspired by his unconscious in which his uncanny
women reside.
 Poe’s female vampire figures are “indescribable,” whether resulting from his
opium addiction, mental disorders, or failing memory. Something inhibits him in
his depictions because he has discovered the uncanny. Freud posits that the
strongest example of the uncanny is “represented by anything to do with death,
dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts” (Freud 2003: 183). Poe’s vampires
arise with the slightest memory of his deceased beloved. Freud describes this as
thus: “the primitive fear of the dead is still so potent in us and ready to manifest
itself if given any encouragement” (Freud 2003: 184). Poe’s female undead
figures are inspired by, “an uncanny effect” that “often arises when the boundary
between fantasy and reality is blurred” (Freud 2003: 185). Commenting on the
importance of fiction on his own work, Freud also remarks that “The uncanny that
we find in fiction … is … much richer” and that “it embraces something that is
wanting in real life” (Freud 2003: 190). Both frightening and attractive
phenomena at the root of his necrophilia comprise Poe’s ardent desire to
understand death. As Paglia posit: “woman is literally the occult, which means
‘the hidden’. These uncanny meanings cannot be changed, only suppressed, until
they break into cultural consciousness again” (Paglia 1990: 23). His wish to be
buried alive, as it were, springs from his compulsive wish for his mother, who
represents both death and life. In his mind, his undead female figures hold the
secret to this connection.
Vampires in literature are depictions of the femme fatale who appears in
various shapes – animalistic, grotesque figures, both alluring and revolting. In his
groundbreaking work Evil Sisters (1996), Bram Dijkstra points out the emergence
of female vampires in the cultural view of women as either conservative angels or
deadly sexual beings as sirens, whores, or sphinx. The destructive evil woman –
the “malefactors of the female sex” (Bade 1979: 6), harboring the powers to
destroy her male victims, were profusely present in art, literature, and operas. Nina
Auerbach’s study on Victorian womanhood outlines the myths surrounding
women’s images as sirens. “Intellectual and volatile as well as dangerously
beautiful, these divine-demonic women possess absolute power” (36) as they
symbolize the eternal cyclical nature. Furthermore, in nineteenth-century art,
eroticism and sexuality have always been connected to agony and death. Bade
posits that artists portrayed “a masochistic conception of sex roles in which the
woman was dominant” (Bade 1979: 6). According to Paglia, however, “the femme
fatale was produced by the mystique of the connection between mother and child
… Family romance operates at all times” (Paglia 1990: 14). Furthermore,
Baudelaire contends that Poe’s fiction lacks love, which refers to eroticism, which
Poe’s vampires do not exude as they represent Poe’s yearning for a mother’s
unconditional love.
His obsession for his mother created a fixation with the decaying body -
specifically linked to consumption. The dying female body takes on the physical
features of all of Poe’s fictional women; they are emaciated, pale, with prominent
eyes, withered lips exposing the teeth, a low soft voice, and shadow-like
movements mustered with the remaining energy they possess. Poe shaped the
figure of the female vampire in his own unique manner, as he delved into the
depths and caverns of his own unconscious, following the Late Romantic strain
which was later embraced by the French Symbolists. However, Poe’s lethal
women expose Poe’s Oedipus complex, which is at the root of his works. Incest
is a highly Romantic motif, as Paglia emphasizes: “Incest, erotic solipsism, is
everywhere in Romantic poetry” (Paglia 1990: 41). Leslie Fiedler points out that
in Poe’s works, the incest motif derives from “the private world of his own
tortured psyche” (Fiedler 1960: 398). The “succubus-brides”, according to
Fiedler, are “dark projection[s] of his psyche” (Fiedler 1960: 398). This complex
results in his fixation on incestuous relationships, which later leads to Poe
marrying his young cousin, thirteen-year-old Virginia Eliza Clemm (1822-1847).
Sova quotes from Poe’s letters and points out how he addresses Virginia as “My
love, my own sweet Sissy, my darling little wifey” (Sova 2001: 7), disclosing his
continuing search for an incestuous connection. After their marriage, he lived in
familial bliss with his aunt/ mother-in-law, his “Muddy”, the final mother-figure
who supported his career. Four months before he died, Poe published his poem
“To My Mother” (1849), which merges the wife and mother figures: “by that dear
name I long have called you — / You who are more than mother unto me,/ And
fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you / In setting my Virginia's spirit
free. / …you / Are mother to the one I loved so dearly, / And thus are dearer than
the mother I knew” (Poe 1966g: 1024).
Poe’s lifelong search for his mother, in addition to his preoccupation with
death, led him to the uncanny realization that the unknown is woman. Both his
mother and Virginia, inevitably transformed into emaciated women, became the
inspiration for his fictive vampires. They embody death and decay, with their dark
hair, black eyes and their mystically terrifying presence and expressions. By
“resurrecting” her, Poe keeps reliving the trauma of watching his mother pine
away due to a mysterious reason. In this pursuit, Poe’s narrators focus on their
objects with an intrinsic analytic mind, which shows itself in their detached and
cold tone. D.H. Lawrence, who claimed love relationships prove that there is a
thin line between love and death, notes that Poe’s narrators appear like scientific
personas who observe and analyze these female figures as they undergo severe
physical transformation. Lawrence claims that Ligeia, “is the passive body who is
explored and analysed into death” (Lawrence 2003: 71-72).
One such analytic depiction of one these spectacular female vampires occurs
in his short story “Berenice” (1835). The eeriness of the narration results from the
fact that we, as readers, are witnessing Poe’s apprehensions from his unconscious,
thus the events should not be regarded as reality. Freud brings light to this
phenomenon:
“Where the uncanny stems from childhood complexes, the question of material reality
does not arise, its place being taken by psychical reality. Here we are dealing with the
actual repression of a particular content and the return of what has been repressed, not
with the suspension of belief in its reality” (Freud 2003: 190).

In his realm of dreams, Egaeus relates how he suffers from monomania, as nearly
all his narrators are agonized by mental disorders. The complete story takes places
in the library, his death chamber, in which he was born and, he adds, his mother
died (Poe 1966b: 45). The setting is symbolically the source of both life and death.
After mentioning his mother, he continues to recount his experiences with his
cousin.
Concerning the vampire figure of Berenice, the narrator, Poe’s alter ego,
admits that “during the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I
had never loved her … my passions always were of the mind” and describes
Berenice as “a thing … to analyze” (Poe 1966b: 47). In his endeavor to grasp the
meaning behind her appearance, Poe takes on a more analytic stance toward her
during her physical transformation. He recounts how, as Berenice falls victim to
a mysterious illness that emaciates her and makes her very pale, he feels terror
induced by her “lifeless” eyes. Next, he focuses on the thin and pale lips that
uncover her teeth (Poe 1966b: 47). As he obsesses over her teeth, he feels horror
as Berenice’s shadow-like presence creeps up to him in the tomb-like chamber.
She utterly terrifies him, and more specifically, he becomes rigid with fright when
he beholds “the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth” (Poe 1966b: 48). In his
obsession, he finds himself coveting them. Furthermore, Berenice’s illness causes
her to fall into “trances” and the last epileptic paralysis is the reason for her burial,
after which the narrator opens her grave and pulls out her teeth. However, he has
allegedly no memory of this as he feels like he had just woken up from a “confused
and excited dream” and appears to describe the uncanny feeling that still lingers:
“of that dreary period … I had no … definite comprehension. Yet its memory was
replete with horror” and intensified because of its vagueness and ambiguity, which
is rooted in the repressed sections of his unconscious (Poe 1966b: 49).
This image of the sharp teeth behind the pale lips stands for the vampire’s
menacing weapon and the “vagina dentata” at the root of the castration fear in the
male. Paglia asserts that “Mothers can be fatal to their sons … She is Medusa, in
whom Freud sees the castrating and castrated female pubes” (Paglia 1990: 14).
The paralyzing fear in Poe, appears to originate from female sexuality; however,
he claims that the fires burning his soul “were not of Eros” as he states in
“Morella” (Poe 1966d: 469). The image of the vagina also stands for the entrance
of the uterus, where life is conceived. Striving to unravel the connection between
life and death, he believes he can achieve it only by gaining possession of those
mysterious teeth. However, in the last line of the story, as he tries to grab the box
that holds the teeth, he cannot open it, try as he may. Finally, it falls to the ground
and breaks into pieces, as “thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances”
are scattered on the floor (Poe 1966b: 50). Ultimately, this scene symbolizes his
inability to grasp the mystery he desperately wants to understand.
Yet another one of Poe’s stories that originates from his unconscious is
“Ligeia” (1838), narrated again by a persona who struggles with his memory. The
female vampire’s name is inspired by one of the mythical sirens, whose melodious
voices put men under a spell. The short story begins, in Dorothea Von Mücke’s
words, “with the narrator’s narcissistic enjoyment of his lament” (Mücke 2006:
151). Describing his struggles to remember, the narrator says: “in our endeavors
to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the
very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember” (Poe
1966c: 387). The gaps in his story make him one of Poe’s “unreliable” narrators,
as he does not remember where or when he met Ligeia. This may suggest the
mother-child relationship after birth, when infants cling to their mother in the first
years of their lives as they form one individual. Naturally, the child does not have
any recollection of meeting the mother figure. In this incestuous relationship, Poe
portrays himself as a child under the “infinite supremacy” (Poe 1966c: 388) of
Ligeia. Furthermore, he states that after her demise, he was “but as a child groping
benighted” (Poe 1966c: 389). Ligeia is the perfect idea of the erudite, superior
mother figure, as Poe speaks of her “immense” learning. Like Berenice, she has
marble skin, a low voice, and “came and departed like a shadow” (Poe 1966c:
386).
Despite the gaps in his memory, he distinctly remembers “the person of
Ligeia” (Poe 1966c: 386). This comprises the “strangeness” of her beauty, and
specifically her large eyes, “far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race”
(Poe 1966c: 387). More than anything, it is specifically the appearance of those
Medusa eyes,” which he struggles to understand as he “was possessed with a
passion to discover” (Poe 1966c: 387). After her death, Poe ventures to describe
the uncanniness of her eyes: “a sentiment … aroused within” him by her “large
and luminous orbs” (Poe 1966c: 388). He exclaims that he cannot define nor
analyze that feeling. The uncanny, as Freud points out, originates from what we
fear, which in this case, is something Poe also desires to know – the mystery of
life and death. As Ligeia battles with death, the narrator is in awe of her passion
for life, as “she wrestled with the Shadow” (Poe 1966c: 389). In her fierce wish
for life, the dying Ligeia foreshadows her return to life at the end of the story; like
the ancient figure of the Ouroboros, she represents the eternal life cycle. Ligeia
“wills” herself back to life, as her eternal soul reminds us of H. Rider Haggard’s
enchanting queen Ayesha, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, who claims “that naught
dies. There is no such thing as Death, though there be a thing called Change”
(Haggard 1951: 91). Just as the sorceress Ayesha endeavors to revive her lost
lover through de Vincey’s body, we see that Ligeia “wills” herself back into the
mortal world.
Ligeia returns from the dead through the medium of the narrator’s second wife,
the Lady Rowena, whose presence is only required to this end. After their
marriage, the couple resides in a ghastly decorated setting: a wedding chamber
which also represents a death chamber. Grotesquely decorated, the room includes
tombs and tapestry which all create “a hideous and uneasy animation” (Poe 1966c:
392). Allegedly, the narrator’s memory fails him because of opium, as he does not
hear or see all those suspicious visions and sounds that Rowena claims are present.
He does however admit he notices the red droplets appear out of thin air and fall
into Rowena’s wine, after which she dies. The enshrouded body of Rowena
alternately revives and falls back into a rigid posture, “this hideous drama of
revivification was repeated … each terrific relapse was only into a sterner and
apparently more irredeemable death” (Poe 1966c: 395). This continues until the
body stands up and the narrator is “paralyzed … chilled … into stone” (Poe 1966c:
395). Finally, he realizes that he sees “the wild eyes … of the LADY LIGEIA”
(Poe 1966c: 395). Poe’s life-long wish is materialized in this phantasmagoria of
his revived mother.
Similar to Ligeia, his beloved in “Morella” (1835) is erudite and talented;
“her powers of mind were gigantic” (Poe 1966d: 469). They embody the
connection of mother and child: “She … shunned society, and, attaching herself
to me alone rendered me happy … it is a happiness to dream” (Poe 1966d: 469).
He specifically explains that the fires that transpired between them are not those
of Eros. Paglia contends that: “There is no sex instinct per se in Poe. His eroticism
is in the paroxysms of suffering, the ecstatic, self-inflaming surrender to tyrant
mothers” (Paglia 1990: 573). According to Mario Praz, Poe “was sexually
inhibited” (Praz 1960: 377). In “Morella,” Poe envisions “Oedipal family
romance,” as Paglia calls it (Paglia 1990: 41) – a world where they are isolated
from everything – as is the perception of a child clinging to the mother. He
presents a vampire in Morella, with her cold hands, the siren-like “music of her
voice” (Poe 1966d: 469). However, it is pure serene pleasure that suddenly turns
into horror: “there fell a shadow upon my soul, and I grew pale, and shuddered
inwardly at those too unearthly tones … joy suddenly faded into horror, and the
most beautiful became the most hideous” (Poe 1966d: 469). One witnesses the
strongest motif in Romanticism, the converging of beauty and death in a
performative scene. Morella’s eyes show him “a dreary and unfathomable abyss”
(Poe 1966d: 470) that sickens his soul. Life and death are intertwined as she, like
Ligeia, has no intention to disappear in death as she claims: “I am dying, yet shall
I live” (Poe 1966d: 470). Interestingly, the narrator and Morella herself keep
repeating her name, which has the root “mor” of the Latin word for “death.” With
her last breath, Morella gives life to a daughter who grows to be identical to the
mother. His daughter “remained nameless” until she must be named during her
baptism, when an inexplicable urge forces him to name her Morella, too. The
questions which ensue reveal his lack of grasp on his unconscious: “What demon
urged me … What fiend spoke from the recesses of my soul … What more than
fiend convulsed the features of my child” (Poe 1966d: 472). The moment she is
named “Morella,” his daughter dies, and the narrator claims he hears Morella
exclaiming: “I am here!” At the end, when he carries the child to Morella’s tomb,
he “laughed with a long and bitter laugh” (Poe 1966d: 472) when he realizes the
body of the mother is gone. The bitterness arises from the recognition that she is
the undying spirit – superior and relentless.
The same relentless vampire is once again present in his short story “The Fall
of the House of Usher” (1839). Roderick Usher’s physical appearance reminds
the reader of Poe’s vampire victims: he looks like a ghastly cadaver, with thin pale
lips, “his eyes were tortured by even a faint light” (Poe 1966e: 646). His condition
is described as an “acute bodily illness” in addition to an oppressive mental
disease (Poe 1966e: 644). Moreover, he lives in fear as he believes he will perish
soon. Enter the vampire figure: his twin sister Madeline, whose emaciating
disease her doctors cannot explain. She suffers from a “settled apathy, a gradual
wasting away of the person, and frequent … affections of a partially cataleptical
character” (Poe 1966e: 651). Poe portrays her as a shadowy figure that engenders
dread in him. On the day that the narrator arrives, Madeline “succumbed … to the
prostrating power of the destroyer” (Poe 1966e: 647). Oddly enough, Roderick
wishes to keep her in the coffin in a vault “for a fortnight” before the burial (Poe
1966e: 651). As they place Madeline in her coffin, the narrator notices a slight
color on her face, and “that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so
terrible in death” (Poe 1966e: 651). Days after her entombing, Roderick’s
condition worsens into hysteria, and his physical changes deteriorate, while the
narrator also becomes gradually more and more restless. Finally, Roderick
exclaims: "And you have not seen it?" (Poe 1966e: 652), as he refers to Madeline
not as a person, but a terrifying phenomenon.
She has become the living dead, proving Roderick had valid reasons to feel
intense fear. He admits she was alive when they entombed her: “We have put her
living in the tomb! … I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the
hollow coffin … many, many days ago – yet … I dared not speak!” (Poe 1966e:
655) Madeline appears in the room, with her blood-stained white dress, the
vampire-bride, who finally has come to “usher” Roderick toward eternity with
her. Madeline, “with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of
her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor
a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated” (Poe 1966e: 655). Poe, as
Roderick, feels both horror and desire in this incestuous relationship. As much as
he fears these female vampires as they are Death, he also wishes to be with them,
as they hold the key to the unknown. He covets the vampire bite to become
undead. Poe struggles between his conscious and unconscious mind, which is
symbolized in the breaking down of the Usher house: “the fissure, which,
extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a
zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn” (Poe 1966e:
645).
Death pervades the hideous Usher house, which appears to be alive, while it
also represents Poe’s topography of death. The sight of the decaying, gothic
building sickens his heart as he asks at the beginning of the story: “what was it
that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?” (Poe 1966e:
643) Again, at the end, he strives to understand this uncanny feeling that
overcomes him as he gazes, under the blood moon, at the decaying house of death
that collapses into the waters of the tarn. It becomes a tomb where the brother and
sister – Poe and his mother – finally reunite. Ultimately, Poe portrays the
performative scene of what Paglia refers to as unavoidable in the individuation
process of men: “[the mother’s] centrality is a great obstacle to man, whose quest
for identity she blocks … Reunion with the mother is a siren call haunting our
imagination” (Paglia 1990: 9-10). Poe’s sole purpose of reuniting with his dead
mother pervades his personal life and works. He divulged that wish in “The
Raven” (1845), in which the persona is tortured by the bereavement of his Lenore,
incidentally also the title of one of the earliest vampire ballads in German
literature by Gottfried August Bürger (“Lenore” 1773). In his much-acclaimed
poem, he begs of the ominous bird to “Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within
the distant Aidenn, / It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name
Lenore” (Poe 1966i: 939). He intentionally chooses the verb “clasp,” as a young
infant clasps to the mother instinctually, for survival. Another one of his popular
poems in which Poe expresses his ardent desire to be with a beautiful dead woman
is “Annabel Lee” (1849), which he wrote a short period before his own demise.
Lamenting her death, he confesses he lies with her in her “tomb by the sounding
sea” (Poe 1966a: 44). Once more, the symbol of water, which may signify eternal
life, as well as death, illustrates he has delved into the dark caverns of his
unconscious.
Conclusion
After Virginia’s demise, in December 1847, Poe published “Ulalume,” a poem
which, according to Sova, “Poe made clear was a memorial to his late wife” (Sova
2001: 314). He describes he “roamed with Psyche, my Soul” and as they “stopped
… / By the door of a legended tomb; / And I said: ‘What is written, sweet sister’
/ She replied … ‘the vault of thy lost Ulalume!’” (Poe 1966k: 1029). In the final
stanza of the poem, prophesying the exact month of his own death, the persona
exclaims: “Then my heart it grew ashen and sober … And I cried: “It was surely
October / … Ah, what demon has tempted me here? / Well I know, now, this dim
lake of Auber – / … This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir” (Poe 1966k: 1029).
This uncanny place in the depths of his psyche, the “dank tarn” of his unconscious,
is swarming with his female ghouls he is inexplicably drawn to.
In his lifelong pursuit to understand the reasons that compelled him toward the
macabre and the morbid, Poe established himself as the ultimate Romantic writer.
In his works replete with incest, sadomasochism, and necrophilia, the recurrence
of female vampires demonstrates Poe’s compulsive need to reunite with his
beloved women. Unbearable losses inevitably led him into his own “descent into
the Maelström,” where he delved every so often. His suicidal disposition and
enduring bereavement drove him to self-entombment and unconscious denial of
the deaths in his life. His ardent desire to revive his mother figures and beloved
wife eventually led to the “return” of “repressed” urges in his unconscious. These
yearnings manifest themselves in the undead figures of Annabel Lee, Ligeia,
Morella, Madeline Usher, or Berenice, among many others. His reluctance to let
go of the dead impels Poe to examine the nature of death in its connection with
life and woman. Poe’s relentless obsession and fascination with the undead
beautiful woman forced him, inexplicably, to explore the unknown link between
death and love in the figures of his female vampires.
 REFERENCES

APTER, T.E. (1982), Fantasy Literature: An Approach to Reality, Macmillan Press,

London.

AUERBACH, Nina (1982), Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth,
Harvard U.P., Cambridge.

BADE, Patrick (1979), Femme Fatale: Images of Evil and Fascinating Women.
Mayflower Books, New York.

BAUDELAIRE, Charles (1837), Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Works, Trans. H.
CURWEN, John Camden Hotten, London.

BLOOM, Clive (1988), Reading Poe, Reading Freud: The Romantic Imagination in
Crisis, Macmillan Press, London.

BONAPARTE, Marie (1949), The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho Analytic
Interpretation, Trans. J. RODKER, Imago, London.

DIJKSTRA, Bram (1996), Evil Sisters. The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of
Manhood, Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

FIEDLER, Leslie A. (1960), Love and Death in the American Novel, Criterion Books,
New York.

FREUD, Sigmund (1959), Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Trans. James STRACHEY,
Norton, London.

FREUD, Sigmund (1997), The Interpretation of Dreams, Trans. A.A. BRILL,

Wordsworth Ed. Ltd, London.

FREUD, Sigmund (2003), The Uncanny, Trans. David MCLINTOCK, Penguin Books,
London.

HAGGARD, H. Rider (1951), She: A History of Adventure, Dover Publications, New

York.

KENNEDY, Gerald J. (1996), “The Violence of Melancholy: Poe against Himself”,

American Literary History, 8.3, 533-551.
LAWRENCE, D.H. (2003), Studies in Classic American Literature, Ed. Ezra
GREENSPAN vd., Cambridge UP., Cambridge.

MEYERS, Jeffrey (2000), Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, Cooper Square Press,
New York.

PAGLIA, Camille (1990), Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily
Dickinson, Vintage Books, New York.

POE, Edgar Allan (1966a), “Annabel Lee”, Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan
Poe, Doubleday, New York, 43-44.

POE, Edgar Allan (1966b), “Berenice”, Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe,
Doubleday, New York, 45-50.

POE, Edgar Allan (1966c), “Ligeia”, Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe,
Doubleday, New York, 386-395.

POE, Edgar Allan (1966d), “Morella”, Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe,
Doubleday, New York, 469-472.

POE, Edgar Allan (1966e), “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Complete Stories and Poems
of Edgar Allan Poe, Doubleday, New York, 643-656.

POE, Edgar Allan (1966f), “The Philosophy of Composition”, Complete Stories and
Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Doubleday, New York, 175-183.

POE, Edgar Allan (1966g), “To My Mother”, Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan
Poe, Doubleday, New York, 1024.

POE, Edgar Allan (1966h), “To the Lake”, Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan
Poe, Doubleday, New York, 698.

POE, Edgar Allan (1966i), “The Raven”, Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan
Poe, Doubleday, New York, 937-940.

POE, Edgar Allan (1966j), “Dreamland”, Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan
Poe, Doubleday, New York, 233-234.
View publication stats

POE, Edgar Allan (1966k), “Ulalume”, Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe,
Doubleday, New York, 1027-1029.

POE, Edgar Allan (1969), “Romance", Ed. T.O. MABBOT, The Collected Works of
Edgar Allan Poe, Belknap Press of Harvard UP, Cambridge, 156-157.

PRAZ, Mario (1956), The Romantic Agony, Trans. Angus DAVIDSON, Oxford UP,
Oxford.

PRAZ, Mario (1960), “Poe and Psychoanalysis”, The Sewanee Review: Italian
Criticism of American Literature: An Anthology, 68.3, 375-389.

SHAKESPEARE, William (2003), Romeo and Juliet, Ed. G. Blakemore Evans,

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

SHAW, George Bernard (1975), Complete Plays with their Prefaces. Dodd, Mead &
Company, New York.

SILVERMAN, Kenneth (1991), Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending

Remembrance, Harper Collins, New York.

STOBERT, Samantha (2001), “‘Misery is Manifold’: Bereavement in the Tales of Edgar

Allan Poe”, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 11.2, 282-293.

SOVA, Dawn B. (2001), Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe: A Literary Reference
to His Life and Work, Facts on File Inc., New York.

TWITCHELL, James (1986), The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic
Literature, Duke University Press, Durham.

VON MÜCKE, Dorothea E. (2006), “Ligeia: ‘Her Large and Luminous Orbs’”, Ed.
Harold BLOOM, Edgar Allan Poe, Chelsea House, New York,149-167.