Symbolism in Poe's Tales
On "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe
Author: Guy Davenport
From: Edgar Allan Poe, Bloom's Major Short Story Writers.
Poe titled the collection of his stories published that year Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
These two adjectives have given critics trouble for years. Grotesque, as Poe found it in the
writings of Sir Walter Scott, means something close to Gothic, an adjective designating the
Goths and their architecture, and what the neoclassical eighteenth century thought of medieval
art in general, that it was ugly but grand. It was the fanciful decoration by the Italians of grottoes,
or caves, with shells, and statues of ogres and giants from the realm of legend, that gave the word
grotesque its meaning of freakish, monstrous, misshapen.
Arabesque clearly means the intricate, nonrepresentational, infinitely graceful decorative style of
Islam, best known to us in their carpets, the geometric tile-work of their mosques, and their
calligraphy.
Had Poe wanted to designate the components of his imagination more accurately, his title would
have been, Tales of the Grotesque, Arabesque, and Classical. For Poe in all his writing divided
all his imagery up into three distinct species.
Look back at the pictures on the wall in his ideal rooms. In one we have grottoes and a view of
the Dismal Swamp: this is the grotesque mode. Then female heads in the manner of Sully: this is
the classical mode. The wallpaper against which they hang is arabesque.
In the other room we had a scene of oriental luxury: the arabesque, a carnival piece spirited
beyond compare (Poe means masked and costumed people, at Mardi Gras, as in "The Cask of
Amontillado" and "The Masque of the Red Death"): the grotesque, and a Greek female head: the
classical.
A thorough inspection of Poe's work will disclose that he performs variations and mutations of
these three vocabularies of imagery. We can readily recognize those works in which a particular
idiom is dominant. The great octosyllabic sonnet "To Helen," for instance, is classical, "The Fall
of the House of Usher" is grotesque, and the poem "Israfel" is arabesque.
But no work is restricted to one mode; the other two are there also . . .
Were we to follow the metamorphoses of these images through all of Poe—grotesque, or Gothic;
arabesque, or Islamic; classical, or Graeco-Roman—we would discover an articulate grammar of
symbols, a new, as yet unread Poe. What we shall need to understand is the meaning of the
symbols, and why they are constantly being translated from one imagistic idiom to another.
The clues are not difficult, or particularly arcane. Israfel for instance is an arabesque, and
Roderick Usher a grotesque Orpheus; Orpheus himself does not appear in Poe in his native
Greek self. But once we see Orpheus in Usher, we can then see that this masterpiece is a retelling
of his myth from a point of view informed by a modern understanding of neuroses, of the
inexplicable perverseness of the human will. That lute, that speaking guitar, all those books on
Usher's table about journeys underground and rites held in darkness—all fit into a translation by
Poe of a classical text into a Gothic one. "The Gold Bug," as Northrop Frye has seen, is strangely
like the marriage of Danaë; the old black who lowers the gold bug is named Jupiter. Danaë was
shut up in a treasure house and a riddle put her there.
Where do these images come from? The Mediterranean in the time of Columbus was from its
western end and along its northern shore Graeco-Roman, what historians call the Latin culture,
and at its eastern end, and along its southern shore, Islamic. So two thirds of Poe's triple imagery
sums up the Mediterranean, and fed his imagination with its most congenial and rich portion.
The Gothic style has its home in northern Europe, "my Germany of the soul" as Poe put it. He
was always ambiguous about the culture with which, ironically, he is identified. Death,
corruption, and dreariness inhere in the Gothic. Poe relates it to melancholia, hypersensitivity,
madness, obsession, awful whirlpools in the cold sea, ancient houses spent and crumbling.
Citation Information
Text Citation: Davenport, Guy. The Geography of the Imagination. New York and San
Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1954, pp. 6–8. Quoted as "Symbolism in Poe's Tales" in Harold
Bloom, ed. Edgar Allan Poe, Bloom's Major Short Story Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House
Publishing, 1998. (Updated 2007.) Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.
http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=&iPin=BMSSEP32&SingleRecor
d=True (accessed March 9, 2008).