Introduction
In 1849, Poe passed away in a mysterious way that resembles, by
the irony of fate, to the mystifying death of his characters. Poe's short life,
poverty, depression and addiction did not prevent him to be one of the most
remarkable authors of the gothic literature. Poe's literary uniqueness lies in
his classical beginnings that respect the traditions of the gothic fiction to
deal with psychological issues that overwhelmed the American society during his
era. Poe's Gothic tales share some exclusive features that make his works and
style distinguished from the other gothic writers. The elements of death,
madness, and haunted houses present the omnipresent motifs that underline Poe's
gothic style. These elements are generally related , by critics, to Poe's
"gothic" life and especially to the mysterious illness and death of his young
bride and his addiction to opium and alcohol. Poe's vivid description of the
psychological agony of his characters and the complex depiction of the fine
line between life and death, reason and madness drives the critics to consider
Poe's tales as a semi autobiographical works in which he reflects his own
sadness after his wife's death and the mid way state between reason and
madness, summarized in his state of addiction. Poe's tales and poems (notably
"Annabel Lee" and "The Raven") share the gloomy description of the death of a
beautiful woman and the horror that leads to madness. The impact of Poe's
biography is also highlighted through his attempts to reflect his society and
era in his writings, showing the hidden side of the United States. In this
context, the study of taphephobia stands as a study of a historical and social
phenomenon that prevailed the American psyche during the 19th C.
The term taphephobia is coined by Enrico Morselli, an Italian
psychiatrist, in the mid-19th C to refer to the obsessive fear of premature
burial. He devoted his essay "Dysmorphophobia and Taphephobia: Two Hitherto
Undescribed Forms of Insanity with Fixed Ideas" to analyze the obsessive
behaviour of the taphephobic and the gradual development of the natural, innate
fear of death into an obsessive compulsive fear of being
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prematurely buried (107). As the title of his essay suggests,
Morselli focuses in his analysis on the idea that taphephobia is an obsession
that blocks the rationality of the human mind and fixes it upon one idea of the
possible danger of being entombed alive. This fixation turns one's life to an
earthly hell, trying to reshape his lifestyle according to his phobia. The
Italian psychiatrist examines also the different ways adapted by the
taphephobic to assure himself, considering wills as one of the common solutions
used in 19th C (109). He highlights the fact that taphephobia, as a form of
"psychopathology", causes an unbearable psychological pain that leads to
melancholy, caused by the illusion of being under a constant threat of
premature burial, leading the victims to act maniacally to reassure themselves
(108-109). Despite the fact that the term taphephobia is coined in the 19th C,
the psychological phenomenon is not a result of that era solely, it is rather
deeply rooted in the history. It dates back to ancient civilizations like the
Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire, Ancient China and the
Pre-Islamic Arabia where the premature burial was a frequent practice for
different reasons which intensify taphephobia.
Morselli's scientific analysis of taphephobia reflects Poe's
presentation of the same concept in the tales under study, which are "Berenice"
(1835), "Morella" (1835), "Ligeia" (1838), "The Fall of the House of Usher"
(1839), "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) and "The Premature Burial" (1850). The
choice of these tales is not arbitrary, but rather a result of a close
examination that these particular group of tales study the same motif, in
different ways, forming different pieces of one picture. Besides, these tales
were written approximately in the same period, which can be related to the
author's biography. This period presents a period of psychological crisis for
Poe, since his beloved bride Virginia Clemm suffered from tuberculosis and died
by 1847. This devastating event turns to be a source of inspiration since he
transforms his woe, melancholy and shock to masterpieces that dealt with one of
the controversial issues in 19th C United States. Poe chooses taphephobia as
one example of the
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ultimate horror that the human mind can face . He vividly depicts
the mixed feeling of horror and obsession, frustration and fear lived by the
taphephobic. However, the singularity of Poe's style lies in his multifaceted
presentation of the motif. Poe does not restrict himself to the psychological
analysis of the motif but he rather transcends it to reach a deeper level.
Within the process of the psychological presentation, Poe presents other social
dimensions of the motif, in an attempt to show the different ramification of
taphephobia.
This dissertation presents an attempt to study the recurrent
motif of taphephobia from a New Historicist perspective. New Historicism
presents a 20th Century theory based upon the study of text and context
simultaneously, considering the literary work as a result of cultural
interactions and interchangeability. Unlike most critics who used the Freudian
theory to analyze characters and their morbid phobia, relating it the
tripartite human psyche , this work sets forth to treat taphephobia as a
historical, social event rather than a purely psychological phenomenon. The
present dissertation is composed of three chapters. The first chapter is
entitled "New Historicism and Literature", in which there is a developed
definition of the theory used in the analysis and its main influences. The
second section of the chapter is devoted to present the major New Historicist
concepts, developed mainly by Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose, that will
be used in the following chapters.
The second chapter, under the title " Historicity of Edgar Allan
Poe's Tales", studies the different examples of intertextuality, one strategy
used by the author to study the motif of taphephobia. This chapter reveals the
literary, historical and religious roots of the phenomenon, showing the
parallelism between Poe's tales and other historical and literary documents.
The chapter unveils the different layers of the meaning of taphephobia, showing
how Poe intermingles between the different lexical fields of the concept.
Besides, this chapter sets forth the relationship between the characters'
representation (notably female characters) and the author's biography.
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The final chapter, entitled " Taphephobia in Edgar Allan Poe's
Gothic Tales : A Reflection of 19th Century United States' Worst Nightmares",
studies how taphephobia is presented not only as a private, psychological
status but rather as a national event that reshaped the American lifestyle and
interferes in the different fields. The chapter deals with the power of
taphephobia to unveil the different social and religious illnesses of the
American society in 19th C.
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Chapter 1: New Historicism and Literature
1. New Historicism: Definition and Origins:
Until the 1970s, literary criticism was marked by a text-based
approach, a general assumption characterized by a close reading of a text in
total isolation from its cultural and socio-political contexts. However, in the
1980s a revolutionary theory emerged as a reaction against the centrality of
the literary text that characterized many theories like Russian Formalism and
New Criticism. The American literary critic and scholar Stephen Greenblatt
coined the term "new historicism", transcending the aestheticism of literary
criticism by studying literature in a dialogic relationship with history.
New historicism starts mainly with a revision of the canonical
Renaissance texts (notably William Shakespeare's history plays), relocating
them in relation to non-literary sources of the same era. This re-situation
comes out of new historicist consideration that literature should be studied
within its cultural system, since, as Pierre Bourdieu expresses in his book
The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature
(1993), "to understand the practices of writers and artists and
not least their products, entails understanding that they are the result of the
meeting of two histories: the history of the positions they occupy and the
history of their disposition" (61). New historicists consider that literary
texts are a result of cultural negotiations and that culture is a product of
literature. In this context, Louis Montrose states, in his essay "Professing
the Renaissance" (1989), that history is reconstructed through literary texts
and that "our analyses and our understandings necessarily proceed from our own
historically, socially and institutionally shaped vantage points; that the
histories we reconstruct are the textual constructs of critics who are,
ourselves, historical subjects" (23). New historicism or, as Greenblatt names
it later "cultural poetics", is generally defined through its counterpart old
historicism, which is characterized by a factual
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description of history as a set of chronological events that
happened in one era, setting rigid boundaries between the literary and the
historical fields. Despite the fact that this theory arose as a reaction
against the text-based theorists, the reader can find the influence of many
philosophers and of other theorists namely Michel Foucault, the anthropologist
Clifford Geertz, and Marxists like Louis Althusser and Frederic Jameson.
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