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Taphephobia in Edgar Allan Poe's collection of gothic tales: a new historicist study of 19th century america's most prevalent fear

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par Salma LAYOUNI
Université de Sousse - Master 2013
  

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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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