Nevermore
HUM 2212: British and American
Literature I
Fall 2012
Dr. Perdigao
September 21-24, 2012
Gustave Dore, 1884
http://digitalpoe.org/gallery/paul_gustave_dore_the_raven_2.jpg
Edouard Manet, 1875
http://digitalpoe.org/gallery/edouard_manet_the_raven_1.jpeg
Performative
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NykmXl24qcc
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLSmhpwLdEQ
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSq4FNuW6GY
Recreating the Fall
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“Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844)
Innocence and corruption
Beautiful and terrible
Good and evil
Angel and demon
Spirit and flesh
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Female character, shallow young hero, Gothic, fantasy, faith, science, morality
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Beatrice—Dante; “Blessing”
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Pharmakon: poison and cure
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Garden of Eden, fall, temptress
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Gothic: garden as castle
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Femme fatale; man’s role as agent
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Physical and spiritual natures
Gender Constructs
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Man blind to own desires, desire for control
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Eden recreated by science
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Rappaccini as false God
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Not trasncendental because nature divorced from spirit
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Giovanni as conventional reader of romance; transforms what he sees
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Narrator reads Beatrice as symbol, misreads her
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Women—venomous, threat (physically and morally)
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Female sexuality
The Man
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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
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Authorial intention—real or manufactured
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Biographies, autobiography
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Hawthorne’s introduction, Poe’s introduction
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Revisions to Poe’s biography, reputation
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4 cities: Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, New York
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Interpretations of his work (632)
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“The Raven” (1845) marking success
“Annabel Lee” (1849) posthumously published, 2 days after his death
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Literary criticism: ideas about poetry and prose
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Influence on T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner
The Action Figure
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Analyzed effects on readers
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Addressed “philosophical, cultural, and psychological issues: the place of
irrationality, violence, and repression in human consciousness and social
institutions; the alienation and dislocations attending democratic mass culture
and the modernizing forces of the time; the tug and pull of the material and
corporeal; the absolutely terrifying dimensions of one’s own mind” (632)
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Poetry (more than fiction) as genre taking the reader out of the body, out of
time, in the “contemplation of the beautiful” (633)
The Critic
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Literary criticism
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Desire to influence the “course of American literary history” (632)
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Using examples from British literature, late-eighteenth century Scottish
philosophers
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Influence of Romantics
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Ideas about the beautiful
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Critical principles: poetry should appeal only to the sense of beauty;
informational poetry, poetry of ideas, or any sort of didactic poetry was, in his
view, illegitimate” (632)
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“Holding that the true poetic emotion was a vague sensory state inspired by the
work of art itself, he set himself against realistic details in poetry, although the
prose tale, with truth as one object, could profit form the discreet use of
specifics” (632)
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Skeptical of transcendental vision untethered by material body
The Critic
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“The Philosophy of Composition” (1846)
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Rational rather than Romantic
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Idea of denouement
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“Untying” of plot
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From William Godwin’s description of inception of Caleb Williams (or
Memento?)
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Gives m.o., modus operandi (“method of procedure”) for “The Raven”
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108 lines, decides length
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Beauty as sole province
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Melancholy as the “most legitimate” of poetical tones
The Beautiful
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The refrain, use of repetition
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Attributed to non-rational creature, repetition
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Death as the “most melancholy topic”
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“And when . . . Is this most melancholy of topics most poetical? . . . ‘When it
most closely allies itself to Beauty: 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’” (723724)
Death and Beauty
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Most poetical is the death of a beautiful woman
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Sorrow and despair because he never receives the “real” answer to his query
(724)
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Criticism to start “The Raven”; here, full essay
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Chamber filled with memories
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Fantastic appearance of bird to reality, site of terror
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Human thirst for self-torture, persistence of superstitious beliefs
Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930)
American Gothic(s)
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Poe and Hawthorne in the American literary tradition
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Past made to “live again” in present (Savoy 176)
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Connections to colonial past—Hawthorne; family history—Poe
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Use of symbols in Hawthorne’s writing—not Romantic ideology of stable,
transparent, coherent meaning (179) but subject to interpretation, failed symbol,
misinterpretations, multiple competing readings
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“Ghosting,” uncertainty
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Poe slowing down in his writing while Hawthorne’s career accelerated
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Poe—not a revered public figure like Hawthorne—part of “urban underworld,”
alcoholic
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Poe’s writing as corollary to Freud’s unconscious
American Gothic(s)
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While James Fenimore Cooper and Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasized space
and self-reliant freedom, Poe shows imprisonment, persons “bricked up in walls,
hidden under floorboards, or jammed in chimneys,” creating “a mythology of
enclosure, constriction, and victimization” (Savoy 181)
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Spatial configuration in stories
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There is an escape from Hawthorne’s haunted houses, Poe reveals sealed coffins
and tombs
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Poe set few tales in the US; he was suspended between cultures and political
values
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Poe’s fiction as a no-place and nowhere (Neil Gaiman?)
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Poe is a southerner, but wandering between North and South, has no home
anywhere (181)
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“The Raven” as meditation on American culture
American Gothic(s)
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Victorian American’s elaborate mourning rituals taken to poetic excess
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Elegy turns to self-elegy
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No end to sorrow; sorrow embodied in raven that is never to depart
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Melancholic shadow falling permanently on him
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Death drive of male protagonists alongside erotic drive (Savoy 184)
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Freud’s death drive as biological urge in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
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Prosopopoeia: return of the dead
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Decimated body “assert[s] the residue of history” (185)
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Uncanny: otherness
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Dickinson’s reverse apostrophe
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Gothic house—patriarchal enclosures designed to conceal and bury (Hogle 10)
“You Got It Bad”
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“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839)
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Introduction of the house
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Sublime, dreariness
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Mystery
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“Mansion of gloom”
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Roderick Usher
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Terror as basis of all sentiments
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Decayed trees, gray walls, silent tarn, vapor or gas (655)
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Antiquity
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Gothic archway
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Pity and awe for Roderick
“Burn”
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“Family evil”
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Sister’s illness; Roderick as last Usher
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Madeline, as ghost, even in life
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Double to Roderick
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Roderick’s pictures
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Song “The Haunted Palace”
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Preserving Madeline’s corpse in vault in main wall
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Fear of dissection (662)
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Look at corpse
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Twins
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Doppelganger
“Yeah”
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Reads him a romance, because going mad
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Electrical storm
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Story echoes in house
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She was living in the tomb (666)
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Rending of coffin
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“Lofty and enshrouded figure” of Madeline
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He dies of terror
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Narrator flees
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Blood-red moon
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Fissure grows
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House in fragments
“The first rule of Fight Club…”
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“William Wilson. A Tale” (dated 1840 dated, published 1839)
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Calls self William Wilson, as disguise
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Loses virtue
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Home: decaying building (668)
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Gothic steeple, church bell
Enclosures—school
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House, “palace of enchantment”
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Gothic windows
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Another with same last name
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William Wilson, “a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real” (670)
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Entered school on same day—thought to be brothers
“The Second Rule of Fight Club”
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Same birthday (close to Poe’s)
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Anxiety about Wilson
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Cannot hate him
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Same height, similar features
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Imitates narrator
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Voice as echo, whisper (672)
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Thinks they had been acquainted earlier in life (673)
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Chambers in house connected
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Sees him as double
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Goes to Eton, Oxford
“You must fight”
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“Who is he?—whence came he?—and what were his objects?” (679)
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After defeat of Glendinning, double appears in cloak
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Reveals Wilson’s character
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Mr. Preston gives his coat back but it’s a double
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Tries to find him—Paris, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, Moscow
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Terror
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Masquerade—Neapolitan Duke Di Broglio—pursues his wife
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Sees him in black mask, cloak
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Mirror in corner, his image
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As morality? Conscience?