1. Taphephobia: : The Essence of Poe's Definition of
Sublime:
Poe's aesthetic theory of gothic literature was not separated
from the iconic gothic works. He rather refashions the basic elements of the
18th Century stories, using the same concepts of gloom, darkness, decay and
exaggerated emotions. He revisited the concepts of horror and
terror that form the basis of his gothic tales. The two concepts
present a source of confusion among writers and critics. But, Ann Radcliffe
presents the first writer to distinguish between the two concepts in her essay
"On the Supernatural in Poetry", in which she refers to Edmund Burke's concept
of Sublime and uses Shakespearian plays as examples. She defines the
two concepts as "Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands
the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other
contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them [...]" (6). Radcliffe compares
between her literary style and the one of Mathew Lewis, to stress on the idea
that the distinction between terror and horror is a
differentiation between a gothic style that depends on the power of imagination
and other that focuses mainly on the atrocities of the actual physical contact
with the source of fear. Hence, terror presents the primary cause and the
secret ingredient behind the realization of sublime since it creates
the mysterious, abstract atmosphere of awe and suspense. Relying on Radcliffe's
distinction between the two concepts, Poe's tales can be categorized into two
groups: tales of terror and tales of horror. Poe relies on both schools and
uses the analytic
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description of the horrors of the act of premature burial like in
his tale "Berenice", concentrating primarily on the physical mutilation of
Berenice's body through the act of taking off her teeth. However, in the other
tales like "Morella", "Ligeia", "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Cask
of Amontillado", Poe creates suspense, depending on the concept of terror
by describing all the necessary circumstances that drive the reader to
anticipate the coming horror of act of premature burial, enhancing the power of
imagination that activates the morbid fear. Yet, "The Premature Burial"
presents a mixture of both terror and horror since Poe
describes in details the psychological horror experienced by the narrator, but
the fact that the narrator discovers that the whole experience is just a
nightmare suggests that Poe relies on the power of imagination of the reader to
create a context of suspense and trepidation. Thus, taphephobia may be referred
to as an example of terror, a result of tormented psyche and an uncontrollable
threat created by the human imagination, while the genuine act of premature
burial, described in details throughout the six tales, may be defined as
horror, or the concrete, physical shape of the threat.
The originality of Poe's style lies in his stress on the
psychology of characters, showing that the real terror comes from inside the
character and not from external factors. Hence, Poe provides a new type of
terror originated from neurotic cases of megalomania, paranoia, monomania,
delusions and inexplicable obsessions. The choice of taphephobia presents a
result of what Poe believes to be the sublime. The concept of the
sublime is generally related to the gothic context and to Edmund Burke
in particular. However, this term dates back to the first Century and notably
to the Greek literary critic and rhetorician Longinus. Longinus's definition of
the sublime is placed within the frame work of rhetoric, referring to the
reader's experience of pleasure and ecstasy originated from the power of
language. Longinus's ideas presented a starting point for Burke to build his
own theory of the sublime. Believing that Longinus's ideas were not developed
enough, Burke states in the
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Preface of his book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins
of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) that "in his incomparable
discourse upon a part of this subject, [Longinus] has comprehended things
extremely repugnant to each other, under one common name of the sublime". He
builds a definition of the sublime as the experience of terror and amazement,
outlining the concept as "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of
pain and danger" (34). It is what may be referred to as the enjoyable pain. It
is the experience of being under an enduring state of fear.
Poe shares the same Burkean belief in physical and psychological
pain, fear and danger as sources of an enjoyable experience and that the
classical belief in beauty as the major source of aestheticism and sublime is
no longer convenient. However, ugliness, the dark, gloomy and grotesque
elements are the source of sublime. Accordingly, the use of taphephobia
presents a strategic choice to convey Poe's theory of Gothicism since it
conveys, pain, confinement, terror, darkness, and silence, which are all
components of the sublime. The basis of taphephobia originates from Poe's
belief in Burke's theory that the sublime in general and fear in particular
block the mind and stop its ability to think logically. Poe reflects the same
idea through the use of taphephobia as an example of a morbid fear that creates
a state of panic and inability to react or to reason. The example of the
narrator in "The Premature Burial" shows the effect of the sublime on the
victim's reactions and obsessive, unreasonable precautions. However, this
effect is not exclusive to the narrator. Poe's style in this particular story
destroys the rigid boundaries between the reader and the fictional narrator in
order to show that taphephobia is not a simple motif in a fictitious narrative,
but rather a social phenomenon presented and studied in a literary form. In
"Communities of Death: Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe and the Nineteenth Century
American Culture of Mourning and Memorizing", Adam C. Bradford claims that
Poe's strategic use of the plural pronoun "we" in "The Premature Burial" in
addition to his enumeration of different cases of hasty burials
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present a stylistic tool to internalize the pain, darkness,
confinement, horror and sublime in the reader and narrator, forming from the
two parts one entity (90 - 93).
Throughout the six tales, Poe's descriptive style serves as a
stimulus to create the sublime effect and to internalize the horror. His unique
style consists of an analytic, detailed description of characters, settings and
situations that can form a general portrait or a complete picture in the
reader's mind. It refers to what Frederick L. Burwick calls in his article "
Edgar Allan Poe: The Sublime, the Picturesque, the Grotesque, and the
Arabesque", "the act of visual appropriation" (American Studies
427). The detailed description of the characters' physical and
psychological agony creates a nightmarish picture of what the victim may feel
and hence, the process of reading becomes a real life experience. This
stylistic strategy and its effect serve Poe's aim of choosing taphephobia as a
motif; to reflect the phenomenon as it is and to present the obsessive fear of
the mass that led to the creation of a new lifestyle dominated by fear and
characterized by exaggerated use of precautions, inspiring people to innovate
radical solutions to stop the phenomenon. "The Premature Burial" presents one
example of Poe's analytic, life like description of the narrator's physical and
psychological horror when he realized that he is mistakenly buried after a
cataleptic trance
I endeavored to shriek ; and my lips and my parched tongue
moved
convulsively together in the attempt - but no voice issued from
the cavernous lungs, which, oppressed as if by the weight of some incumbent
mountain, gasped and palpitated with the heart, at every elaborate and
struggling inspiration.
The movement of the jaws, in this effort to cry aloud, showed me
that they were bound up, as is usual with the dead. I felt, too, that I lay
upon some hard substance, and by something similar my sides were, also, closely
compressed. So far, I had not ventured to stir any of my limbs -- but now I
violently threw
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up my arms, which had been lying at length, with the wrists
crossed. They struck a solid wooden substance, which extended above my person
at an elevation of not more than six inches from my face. I could no longer
doubt that I reposed within a coffin at last. (CTP 260)
The example quoted above presents an illustration of Poe's style
of description, characterized by a mixture of mysterious gothic content and
romantic style of description at the level of symbolic language and the focus
on the character's subconscious emotions and phobias. This style aims to
concretize the description, melting the boundaries between fiction and reality
and helping to intensify the phobia that overwhelms the public. Hence, the
personal experience of the narrator becomes a shared experience with a shared
horror. Poe adopts this particular style of description, presenting a feature
of dark romanticism, in order to transcend the norms of classical Gothicism
based upon the external darkness and the gloom of the environment and to focus
on the human soul as both the source and victim of the horror. Poe's style
helps to create a space between reality and fiction where the notions of reason
and madness, objectivity of the reader and the subjectivity of the narrator are
deconstructed and where the effect of verisimilitude is realized and the horror
is intensified .
In addition to the stylistic strategy used to highlight
taphephobia and to create the sublime effect, Poe chooses another strategy
based upon his perception of the sublime. Out of six tales, four tales share
the same concept of horror, which is the physical act of premature burial of
female characters. Berenice, Morella, Ligeia and Madeleine Usher are all
examples of beautiful victims of the hasty burials exercised by male
characters. Poe's choice is not arbitrary regarding his belief that the source
of sublime is the death of a beautiful lady. In his essay "The Philosophy of
Composition" (1846), Poe states that " the death then of a beautiful woman is
unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond
doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover"
(5). He believes that the
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sublime presents an unusual mélange of beauty and horror.
Poe subverts the Romantic, idealistic image of women as sources of love and
innocence, to become in his perception of gothic literature, sources of the
uncanny and horror. Observing the female characters previously referred to, Poe
uses the same techniques to present them to the reader. They all share the
mysterious identity with no enough detailed description. They share the mixture
of fatale beauty and the enigmatic identity, tenderness and aggressiveness.
Hence, female characters present the source of suspense, darkness, gloom and
horror. Following Poe's statement, previously quoted, the act of premature
burial exercised upon the female characters presents the peak of the sublime.
Repressing the female body into a confined, dark coffin, to experience an
unbearable psychological agony presents an example of the ultimate horror that
affects male characters. The consequence of such an event did not stop at the
level of the description of the subconscious agony of the victims. However, in
all the four tales, the horror of a potential premature internment extends to
reach the male characters who lived in a state of mental imbalance that led to
madness. Thus, Poe chooses the female figure to represent the eeriness of male
characters and the act of premature internment as an act of repressing the
horror originated from them. Yet, Poe's choice of female characters as source
of sublime is not based solely upon literary basis, but it is rather a
reflection of both his tormented life and his era.
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