Poe, insanity, and containing the feminine monstrous

In fiction, unlike his life, Poe was able to contain his women. He derived many features from the European Gothic tradition, and utilized motifs such as incarceration, premature burial, and the pathetic fallacy, or the use of external landscape to express or reflect psychological turmoil. Poe’s psychologically intense tales feature narrators whose mental fabric disintegrates before the reader’s eyes. This essay will concentrate upon three such tales: ‘Berenice’ (1835), ‘Ligeia’ (1838), and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839). Each of these stories are narratives of obsession and monomania featuring female incarceration and objectification, and the threat of the feminine monstrous. Berenice, Ligiea and Madeline Usher each embody the feminine monstrous in varying ways, a masculine projection of womanhood unrestrained, unsuccessfully repressed by their male counterparts, and thus returning in an act of unheimliche consummation. Berenice symbolizes the vagina dentata whose threat must be removed through dental extraction; Ligeia is an incubus who perverts the Eucharist in order to achieve an act of monstrous metempsychosis; and Madeline acts as both monstrare and monere: as both the warning and the source of impending destruction. The perceived female abandonment and thus betrayal which had become a pattern of Poe’s life was through his fiction able to be halted and contained. The inextricable link between Eros and Thanatos undergirds these stories in which, in a mirror of Poe’s own life, each love object wastes away during the prime of her beauty. This essay discusses the context of male–female relations in Poe’s life and how they impact upon his fiction. Unlike reality, in his tales Poe was able to resurrect the objects of his obsessions, and thus the female figures comprising the monstrous loves of his male protagonists. However, this essay also questions the extent to which such resurrections and containment are successful within each narrative, and how far Poe’s delineations of the feminine monstrous and unheimlich sexuality can be read as interrogations of compromised masculinity.