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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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1.1. Representation of Female Characters: A Glimpse into Poe's Biography and

Era:

Poe's fascination with the motif of death of a beautiful woman is not restricted to the tales under study. It is rather a common recurrent motif throughout the different writings of Poe, either in poetry (for example, "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee") or fiction. However, the particularity of these tales lies in the presentation of female characters in a midway state between death and life, reduced in the act of premature burial. Ligeia, Morella, Berenice and

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Madeline Usher present all different faces of the same story and the same fate. All of them share the image of a typical young and beautiful lady, being a victim of a sudden, mysterious illness that leads to her apparent death and hence to her premature burial. This recurrent presentation of female characters presents a revisited true story, related to Poe's biography.

In the process of describing female characters' last moments in their deathbed, and notably in the case of Ligeia and Morella, Poe did not present the death scene as a moment of peaceful, sad farewell, he rather stresses on the agonizing moments and their ceaseless conflict to defeat death. This particular detailed depiction may be related to Poe's personal experience with death. Poe uses the "I" narrator as a strategic choice to revive his personal experience with the mysterious death of his young wife Virginia Clemm, who was like Ligeia and Morella, kidnapped by the angel of death in an early age. Hence, the fictional stories of Ligeia and Morella, in particular, goes in parallel with Poe's biography. Poe attempts to ponder the last image of his dying wife, engraved in his tormented memory. Yet, the return of the female characters from death and their successful survival from the grave presents his subconscious wish to see his wife again, succeeding to overcome illness and death. Thus, the fictional stories presents for Poe an outlet for his deep repressed sadness.

Female representation in Poe's tales is not related solely to his own biography, it is also related to a whole culture that characterized the United States during the 19th C. Throughout the six tales, Poe portrayed his female characters in relation to their male counterpart so that the analysis of one of them necessitates the presence of the other. Poe's female characters are presented as both classical and unorthodox. Berenice and Madeline Usher present examples of classical women who embody the characteristics of an "Angel in the House". Portraying Berenice, Poe stresses her beauty and innocence, following the same classical portrayal. The powerlessness and submissiveness of Berenice and Madeline are

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further accentuated through the act of premature burial, which can be explained as an execution of male power within the world of American patriarchy.

However, Poe presents another side of female representation through the characters of Ligeia and Morella. Portraying these two characters, Poe starts with the same classical image of women as weak and fragile. According to Leland S. Person, in his essay "Poe and Nineteenth Century Gender Construction", the female characters are classical at the level of being trapped in the domestic sphere that is controlled mainly by the male figure (134). However, the same image is used to subvert the classical notion of womanhood since Ligeia and Morella do not embody the submissiveness of the 19th C American women who were reduced to objects to be controlled and means to fulfill the male's desires. They are rather highly intellectual women who were empowered by their knowledge of mystical and forbidden sciences. The deathbed scenes of both Ligeia and Morella present very symbolic scenes of the female/male relationship. The female characters in both scenes present the dominant figures who control the dialogue and try to find solace, while the male characters act passively. This shift on the gender roles of both characters show how the relationship between them becomes a constant battle for dominance and authority. Hence, the act of premature burial can be explained as an act of championing the traditional patriarchal view or as Sandra Gilbert and Suzan Gubar state in their book The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (1979) " a paradigmatic [...] of the plight of the woman in patriarchal culture" (94).

Poe's choice of taphephobia presents a planned choice that serves his perception of gothic literature and notably his re-defined concept of the sublime, a concept created by Longinus and developed by Edmund Burke. Poe revisited the same concept trying to adjust the term according to his revolutionary vision of the horror, which consists of a psychological horror originated from the human subconscious and a new definition of the beauty as a major

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component of the sublime. Thus, he deconstructs the mythical Romantic image of the beautiful female characters as the source of love, delicacy and courtship. Poe builds a revolutionary image of both female and male characters, showing that women in 19th C can be highly intellectual and competitive. By portraying female characters as a threat to the patriarchal dominance, Poe shows that the act of premature burial that presents the worst nightmare of the 19th C Americans is a manifestation of male's schizophrenic character, being apparently gentleman, but in their deep personality, they are fierce people who aim to assuage the hunger of their manhood by repressing the female body. Poe's presentation of the motif is also in a unique form, within a world of intermingled disciplines of literature, medicine, history and religion.

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