Poe's Women

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how the author Edgar Allan Poe lost every woman he loved to an untimely death and how those experiences are reflected in his morbid fiction. It looks at how, from the necrophiliac mentions in his poetry to women buried alive in tombs, Poe explores all his personal horrors of losing women and the experience of what he terms "mournful and never-ending remembrance."

From the Paper:

"Edgar Allan Poe's writings embody what appears to be his lifelong obsession with what he termed "mournful and never-ending remembrance" (85) of those taken too early by the cruel claws of death. Many of his poems and tales depict striking women, too beautiful for this earth, suffering from a wasting disease as a maddened narrator looks on helplessly. A woman dying young was not an unusual thing in the 1800s, and authors frequently used this subject as the basis for their creative works. However, Poe's tales go much further than the sad telling of a life lost too soon. The women in his stories are not held back by the grave; they return to their lovers through other bodies, haunting the dark recesses of gloomy mansions where the suffering narrators wait to be reunited with their supernal beauties. Other poems and tales take the narrator into the tomb to reunite with his obsessive love. Considering the vast amount of "supposedly true" biographical information that has been published about Poe's life, many stories perpetuated by Poe himself, it is impossible to ignore the parallels between Poe and his maddened, drunken, drug-addicted narrators or those between the supernal beauties of his stories, and his mother, foster mother, close friend Jane Stanard, and child-bride cousin Virginia. "Whether all these parallels were planted deliberately by Poe is unknown. More than likely, some of them were the result of subconscious creation, no more deliberate than the psychological parallels with his own experiences. Yet both are there" (Broussard 96) Poe's autobiographical writings from a tortured, love-starved psyche, combined with his skill at propagating rumors about himself, assure him a place in history as an author more famous for his own desperate life than for his brilliant works."

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