Standing upon the brink of a precipice: The nature of death anxiety in the works of Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe

In both Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and Emily Dickinson’s poems, the writers present a fascination with the nature of death anxiety. This psychological state only really developed in the nineteenth century, when decreasing mortality rates rendered death a less frequent visitor, and increasing secularism a more foreboding one. It has been argued that, ‘prior to the Enlightenment, human beings had never really known the fear of death.’¹ Thus, contrary to many other Romantics, such as Emerson and Whitman, Poe and Dickinson explore a sort of downward transcendentalism which assumes the natural insanity and ‘chaos’² of the soul: as subjects of eventual death, we have a primordial void, or abyss, and contemplating its mystery and terror is more likely to ‘vex’³ the soul, to lead one to ‘PERVERSENESS’⁴ than to self-reliance and divinity. However, their approaches are quite different. Because Poe was writing for the popular masses, it is possible to see his motives as didactic, and Roderick Usher as a warning against such obsessive anxiety in regards to death. Dickinson, on the other hand, was a private poet writing mainly for herself, so her poems do not demonstrate a drive for resolution, (like Poe's detective stories) but rather an exploration, or kind of play, with the abyss. Indeed, one could even equate her (or her speaker) with the lonely, death-obsessed and ‘ghostly’⁵ figure of Roderick Usher.

The growing fear of death, however, was not allowed to show its ugly face in public: what grew with it was a ‘mask of beauty’, a sentimental and idealized picture of death. As J. Gerald Kennedy observes: ⁶

As Enlightenment rationalism gave way to a sensibility infused with nature-worship, sentimentality, superstition and transcendental idealism, death itself began to acquire similar attributes. One obvious development was the growing association between death and nature.

Grave visits, extravagant mourning art, and even ceremonious funerals were all new industries that helped to bring in the ‘age of the Beautiful death’, on the surface at least. But Poe and Dickinson refuse to romanticize mortality, keeping its essential horror in view: Poe’s graphic descriptions of the Ushers’ deaths contrast significantly with the embalmed, flowery corpses of the time; he uses gloomy imagery to describe the place of death; and rather than a spiritual acceptance of his encroaching death, Usher is crippled with fear and insanity. Similarly, Dickinson satirizes her ritualistic culture, which flourished in the nineteenth century, in its attempts to formalize and control the pain of death:

The Bustle in a House

The Morning after Death

Is solemnest of industries

Enacted opon Earth –

The Sweeping up the Heart

And putting Love away

We shall not want to use again

Until Eternity -

By fusing routine domestic chores and such incomprehensible concepts as ‘Love’, she juxtaposes the trivial and the momentous and illustrates the absurdity of the former’s efforts to contain the latter. What’s more, the final line reveals how such actions are made possible: although Christianity was waning, the growing belief in deism and the generosity and goodness of nature, meant the continuance of ‘human loves and friendships beyond the grave.’⁷ But Dickinson warns that, inevitably, this trivial ‘Consciousness which is aware/Of Neighbours and the Sun/Will be the one aware of Death’.⁸

Neither were strangers to death, which is perhaps why they saw through the mask and determined to show the truth: that images of death are terrifying, no matter how much one decorates, or romanticizes them. Dickinson admits, ‘The Figures I have seen/Set orderly, for Burial,/Reminded me, of mine’,⁹ whilst Poe’s tales show how expectation of an afterlife is lost with loved ones. This is illustrated by the death of Roderick’s sister, and the death of Lenore in The Raven. Perhaps this is why the death of a beautiful woman is the most melancholy subject for Poe: it reminds him of his own. So instead of trying to conventionalize grief, both discovered in death a liberating energy for writing. Yet, despite their similar experiences and attitudes, the following paragraphs find that their methods in dealing with death anxiety are rather different.

The Fall of the House of Usher takes the form of a short story as Poe argues, in order to produce the most vivid effect, a literary work must be short enough to read in a ‘single sitting.’¹⁰ There is also less need to be realistic in the short story: his tales are far-fetched and built upon a kind of dream logic; his characters are mad; and his style theatrical and absurd. Although it seems the general consensus that the writer’s power lies in his/her power to sympathise with the reader, ¹¹ Poe actually tries to distance us. He seems more interested in the power of the sublime to terrify and delight, than the power of sympathy to comfort.¹²

But why does he wish to terrify his audience? Perhaps he feels it is preferable to not feeling anything, in which case he is comforting us after all. Perhaps he shares Ishmael’s fear of whiteness – the fear of nothingness, the unknown, or the abyss. This is the state in which we find the narrator, in an ‘unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.’ Indeed, he even admits to trying to ‘deepen’ his own terror in order to relieve himself of his ‘utter depression’.¹³ And Poe does relieve the narrator, and the reader too, by plunging them into a nightmare of terror, violence and suspense.

Dickinson, on the other hand, does not shy away from nothingness, declaring simply that, ‘Pain - has an element of blank’.¹⁴ As a private, esoteric poet, she is not concerned with exciting and terrifying an audience. She would rather feel than induce feeling, ‘Own the Ear’ than ‘be a Poet’.¹⁵ Unlike Poe’s extravagance and love for the sublime, Dickinson’s aesthetic is understated, quiet, indirect and unadorned. (Alduous Huxley equated Poe’s style with the ‘wearing of a diamond ring on every finger’)¹⁶ Perhaps this disparity can be explained by their difference in gender. Whereas the female was private, the male was ‘public – like a Frog’.¹⁷ And whereas Dickinson was a domestic creature by default, Poe dreaded confinement.¹⁸ Maybe this is why he felt the short story form would most effectively create a sense of foreboding, believing a ‘close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident’, and why his tales often take place in the privacy of house space where death and insanity lurk. According to Allison Giffen

Dickinson participates in a feminine elegiac tradition that offers an alternative dynamic to the masculine tradition. Within the masculine tradition, the elegist performs what Peter Sacks (by way of Freud) terms "the work of mourning": the poet "works" through his grief in the elegy. The impulse is always toward resolution. For women poets, grief is not something one "gets over" or works through; rather, it offers a kinetic site for poetic production.¹⁹

It seems this is the crucial difference between their approaches to death anxiety. Dickinson has no intention of relieving ‘dreariness of thought’. Instead she allows herself to feel it and lets it inform her art. ‘In Dickinson’s poetry, for example, her terminology for resolution – union, faith, satiety – ultimately signals a loss of self, a kind of stasis or nothingness.’²⁰ Having a public voice requires some sacrifice of oneself. For her, this loss is like the very nothingness that Poe fears.

But Poe implies that contemplating the ‘blank’, inscrutable aspect of pain is precisely what causes the narrator’s gloom in The Fall of the House of Usher:

‘What was it – I paused to think – what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered…the reason and the analysis, of this power, lie among considerations beyond our depth.’

If we see the house as a symbol of death, then pondering and analysing it too much can lead one to despair, as it defies all reason. A lot of Poe’s writings can be read as warnings not to ‘gaze into the abyss’, as ‘the abyss gazes also into you.’²¹ That inscrutability is part of the soul and to penetrate it, one would have to destroy oneself. In Poe’s words: ‘We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss - we grow sick and dizzy…and because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously approach it.’²² The introversion and isolation that comes with transcendental individualism, is what Poe warns against by using Roderick Usher as an illustration: a man who fears death so much that he becomes obsessed with it. He feels that he ‘must inevitably abandon life and reason together in [his] struggles with some fatal demon of fear’.²³ Wishing to escape fear, he hurries towards death, first aging rapidly, becoming a living ghost, and then burying his sister prematurely. Perhaps Roderick Usher is a larger comment on the nineteenth century psyche: the ‘alter becomes increasingly a tribute to death itself rather than a sign of grief or remembrance…and he fixes egotistically on the void, the gap, which his own death will fill.’²⁴

Perhaps Roderick’s situation is also the same as Dickinson’s, the same as woman’s. Dickinson can also be accused of being a living ghost in a haunted house. Her speaker says ‘It was not Death, for I stood up.’ She only knows she is alive because she is physically standing up, but she feels dead. The speaker, like Roderick Usher, sometimes appears calm and resigned to fate, but she admits that this is the cool calm of ‘Chaos’ and ‘Despair’. Dickinson knows as well as Poe does that no amount of contemplation can solve the mystery of death – it breaks a ‘Plank in Reason’ and then the abyss ‘stares – all around’. But unlike Poe, Dickinson cannot repress her emotions, or vent them through manifestations of the sublime. She argues, ‘Narcotics cannot still the tooth/That nibbles at the soul’. The torment of death follows her like a ‘hound’. One cannot deny that these images of being hunted and devoured by death contain literal truth: unlike the prevailing Emersonian idea of nature as a benign force, Dickinson’s images of decay portray nature as a relentless, and ‘stopless’ predator. In poem 448, ‘Adjusted in the Tomb’, the dead speaker’s conversation is inconsiderately cut short by Nature: ‘We talked between the Rooms -/Until the Moss had reached our lips -/ And covered up – Our names’. For Dickinson, the death anxiety that wears down the soul is as ‘stopless’ as the earth that decays the flesh.

It seems Dickinson is a transcendentalist who examines herself via death rather than nature. But perhaps what looks like an artist that has been introverted by ‘the grim phantasm Fear’,²⁵ is quite the opposite: through death, Dickinson is able to see herself from the outside, with the same objective perspective that nature offers Emerson. Life is a ‘brief Drama’ in which her own death is as trivial as hearing a ‘fly buzz’.

For Poe, on the other hand, death is not private, quiet and stealthy, but public, violent, gory and terrifying. Unlike Dickinson’s, Poe’s characters struggle against death, hence the spirits that cling to life so dearly. A great image of these lingering spirits is conjured in the last verse of Roderick Usher’s song, which struck me as a sort of inversion of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan: where the latter can be read as a celebration of transient pleasure, such as that of music, the former is about the dead souls that cannot accept the transience of life. So they go on dancing, even when the melody has become ‘discordant’, for eternity.

Both, then, seem to present split personalities. Dickinson’s personality depends upon her feelings about death: it is ‘The difference between Despair/And Fear’. When she despairs, she is objective, ‘The Mind is smooth’ and resigns itself to not knowing – like the 'eye upon the forehead of a bust that knows it cannot see.' Death might even be kind and civil, as she remarks, ‘Because I could not stop for Death - /He kindly stopped for me’. But when she is fearful she retreats into herself and is desperate and mad. She loses herself in the ‘chaos’ and unreality of the unconscious. Poe’s tone also reveals a contradictory relationship with death: his exaggerated and sublime over-expression which represses dull fear is quite similar to the outwardly extravagant, but inwardly frightened, culture that he tries to resist. Just as these writers seem to be in control, to have mastered their fear of the unknown, their conscience, or ‘demon of fear’, sneaks up behind them.²⁶ As Dickinson describes it, ‘Ourself behind ourself, concealed -/Should startle most -/Assassin hid in our Apartment’.

To conclude, the states of fear and despair that Dickinson and Poe depict are significant to American romanticism because they reveal the underside of both transcendentalism and the nineteenth century American psyche. Indeed, they are themselves proof of the latter's complex and paradoxical relationship with death.

1 J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987) p. 7

2 Emily Dickinson, Poem no. 355 [510], in The Norton Anthology: American Literature, 7^th edn (London & New York: W. W. Norton)

3 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Black Cat’, in The Norton Anthology: American Literature, p. 1594

4 ibid.

5 Roland Hagenbüchle, ‘"Sumptuous—Despair": The Function of Desire in Emily Dickinson's Poetry’, The Emily Dickinson Journal, 5, (1996), 1-9 (p. 2)

6 Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing, p. 9

7 Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing, p. 10

8 Poem no. 817 [822]

9 Poem no. 355 [510]

10 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Philosophy of Composition’, in The Norton Anthology: American Literature, p. 1619

11 Adam Smith, ‘The Theory of Moral sentiments’, (Lecture, week 9)

12 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

13 ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, The Norton Anthology, p.1553

14 Poem no. 760 [650]

15 Poem no. 268 [288]

16 http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/allam/17841865/lit/poe.htm [accessed 4 May]

17 Poem no. 268 [288]

18 Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness, (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), p. 171

19Allison Giffen, ‘That White Sustenance Despair: Emily Dickinson and the Convention of Loss’,

The Emily Dickinson Journal, 5 (1996), 273-279 (p. 279)

20 Ibid

1. 21Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollindale (London: Penguin, 1973), p.102

22 Edgar allan Poe, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’

23The Fall of the House of Usher

24Harry Levin, ‘Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing’, p. vii

25 The fall of the House of Usher

26The Fall of the House of Usher

Inside The Bell Jar

From what I understand, impressionistic writing requires you to talk about your impression of a work of art, how it makes you feel. But what if it is the decision of the artist not to let you feel? What if, rather than taking you on an emotional roller-coaster, you are merely taken aboard, let’s say, a train? An empty train with no particular destination. Unlike on the roller-coaster, you feel no extremes. You are boxed in and cut off from the real world and as the train moves steadily forward your world becomes increasingly unreal. Yet you still cannot feel anything. You are just numb.

 Sylvia Plath is one such author. And her ‘train’, The Bell Jar, allows us no reprieve from this numbness, not even to feel pain. Indeed, on closing the book, I sat feeling nothing but despair and after a while I just broke down, releasing all the emotion that she had not let me feel. She suffocated me the way modern society suffocated her. This is why she is so insensitive to the reader, because we play both her and society, both of whom she cowers from and despises.

 Every element, down to the very syntax, language and sound that forms its structure, is fat with pent up grief. Every word trembles. But rather than bursting fourth, it is buried deeper and deeper, until she is no longer human but more like a robot, “a numb trolley-bus” that has no control over anything in this dream-like world. At one point she says:

My hand advanced a few inches, then retreated and fell limp. I forced it towards the receiver again, but again it stopped short.

 The novel is written in the style of a confession, but her lack of control (as exemplified above) seeps into this style and removes the blame from her. But then whose confession is it? What is the point of these floating, disowned confessions? The point is that everything is floating: her, the reader, the words on the page, the whole story is floating, unanchored by a beginning or an end. We are meant to feel detached and futile at every turn.

 So how did this train make me feel? Well, it made me feel quite vulnerable as I wondered who was steering:

 I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself.

Goshka Macuga’s current installation ‘The Nature of The Beast’

This installation bombards you: with different art forms, different media types, different questions, all of which force you to use our own discretion as opposed to kitsch art where you just absorb whatever propaganda it feeds you. Yet despite this, it does not hit you: unlike a viewer of Guernica, one is not shocked into a revelation but encouraged to think and learn and discuss the numerous ideas presented. It is a cumulative process of exchange and dialogue, durational rather than immediate. Avant-Garde art aimed to shock people out of their objective, positivist view of the world and become more sensitive and human. But Macuga seems to ask whether it is possible for art to reclaim a less violent relationship with the viewer whilst maintaining its power to broaden his/her mind.

Like Cubism, however, its archival nature brings together heterogeneous elements to emphasise their proximity rather than their difference. For example, Macuga essentially equates fascism and the bombing of Guernica with America’s invasion of Iraq. But the links are never that simple, or two-dimensional. They build up like the layers of a collage, made up of different mediums and historical figures: you find out that the tapestry was covered by Colin Powell at the U.N when he declared war on Iraq, which had been put their by Nelson Rockafella as a deterrent to war (who in turn had destroyed Diego Rivera’s painting as it included a portrait of Lenin), and the tapestry was a copy of the original by Picasso against fascism, which was very useful to Clement Atlee’s campaign and was claimed by Franco after Picasso died, despite his last will and testament. As you can see, layers are constantly stuck on and peeled off people’s mouths as they try to fight their corner. It seems then that the nations are not united, but fractured, like the installation itself.

So in this sense, the exhibition is a paradoxical experience. The emotional aspect of war is both freed and covered up in a rather kaleidoscopic manner: art and dialogue might reveal the true nature of the beast, particularly the documentary that airs the views of disillusioned soldiers, but does it help in stopping it? After all, these soldiers go on fighting. I guess it is slightly encouraging that when Colin Powell tried to destroy the link between art and dialogue, for the sake of war, his actions backfired, merely adding to the anti-war discussion. But is this enough? I think if anything, the exhibition’s location in Whitechapel, where the original Guernica had rallied so much support, seems to call for ‘the good old days’ when art brought society together as a force against tyranny. Perhaps Macuga's aim is to rebuild the social links that have disappeared in modern society.

Reading Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' after 9/11

From the very beginning of Kafka's most reknowned tale, one is lulled into an unflinching acceptance of Gregor's hellish reality. The perceived normality of Gregor's treatment (even to himself) makes it harder to question. This is similar to what happened after 9/11: the unguarded demonisation of all Muslims as terrorists made such thinking mainstream. (Indeed, in my experience, many didn't even know what a Muslim was before 9/11!) But can people who think this way be excused for being ignorant and scared? Gregor feels sorry for his family, as ‘it was precisely all the uncertainty that was oppressing the others and that excused their behaviour.’[1] But surely such behaviour is not innocent and excusable if it results in the demise of another?

At first, Gregor is not at all self-conscious or pre-occupied with his appearance, he is mainly concerned about the weather and work. His self-perception only changes after seeing other people's reactions to him: rather than feeling normal he feels he has to try to ‘make bearable the unpleasantness he was absolutely compelled to cause them in his present condition.’ There is now no doubt in his mind that he has a ‘condition’, a very inconvenient one at that. His perception of the world also changes, ‘with each passing day his view of things at only a slight distance was becoming increasingly blurry...what he saw from his window was a featureless solitude, in which the grey sky and the grey earth blended inseparably.’ And when his sister removes everything from the room, it is as though the world around him is shutting down bit by bit, until even Gregor himself is deleted. By positioning the reader so that they are with Gregor before the others enter, we are able to see that the psychological transformation inflicted upon Gregor by society is far more consequential than his physical metamorphosis. Similar to Fanon's depiction of being black, Gregor, and perhaps the Muslim too, begins to feel a desperation to shed his treacherous skin.

Gregor’s character also changes as a result of his dehumanization. At first he is very considerate but towards the end he feels indifferent towards everyone, including himself, and goes into the room where his sister is playing the violin. He even has violent intentions, wishing to kidnap his sister and ‘spit at his assailants like a cat’. His family consider this a violation, “it has to go.” But when reading this in the wake of 9/11, I couldn’t shake the (rather contemporary) adage that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’. Like 9/11, Gregor’s transformation throws everything into a state of panic and a world of extremes - good and evil, zealous love and irrational hate, utopian happiness and hysterical grief - which makes any attempt at understanding and integrating impossible.

The sickly sweet and rather surreal ending, depicting the rebirth of the family out of Gregor's ashes, could be used to parody the right wing notion that the suppression and eradication of 'alternative' sectors will bring society together. I don’t think this ending is supposed to feel right or fit with the realism of the rest of the tale, because the idea of self-othering as an acceptable path to social cohesion is unnerving, to say the least.

But Kafka also warns against mere ‘tolerance’, a term we’ve become so accustomed to using, which really just means swallowing one’s repulsion and being patient, ‘only patient’. What is wrong with using the term ‘duty’, or even ‘empathy’, with regards to our global family?

The reader is constantly made to feel that Gregor's is a temporary condition that will go as quickly and randomly as it came. But it is only when he dies that we realise it was actually the beginning of the end for Gregor: ‘he realized that the sight of him was still unbearable for her and would surely remain unbearable for her in the future’. This is how dehumanization happens. Whether it is the sudden enslavement and colonization of the African peoples or the overnight stigmatization of Muslims after 9/11, all are suddenly pushed out of ‘the circle of humanity.’

---

[1] All the quotes for this piece are taken from Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Impressionism and The City

I think the city inspires art that mirrors the movement of the city. Degas' subjects have blurry outlines and he focuses on the basics, such as the colours and actions of his subjects, as though everything is moving too fast to be able to see anything in great detail. As Ford Maddox Heuffer says, in impressionist writing, 'there would be conveyed the idea that all these human beings melt into the tide of humanity.'[1] Such movement gives the paintings, especially when seen all together, a sense of excitement, as though there is so much to see in so little time. For these scenes of everyday life all take place out in the big wide world and with each narrative we are dropped in media res, the metropolis being ‘a place upon which there is no beginning’ and no end. Having come from the other rooms where more traditional subjects pose for you against an empty backdrop, to now wondering through these scenes of life like a ghost, is a strange sensation; such intimacy with a subject who seems not to see you, transforms you from audience to flaneur.I think the main reason why the city inspires Impressionists is because the artist wants to paint feeling. Painting ‘the great moments, the poignant moods of his life’ is made so much easier by the city, as it is a background that is ‘always in the right note’. Perhaps this is why Impressionists are able to convey both the warmth and the melancholy of the city. Degas portrays both its familiarity and its alienation: for a local, homely feeling he plays boldly with light and colour. These scenes are alive, intimate, real bits of the whole, glimpsed through a window, or from a crowd, perhaps. The focus on colours, the way they jump out at the audience more than the features, also creates a sense of hurriedness and distance, as though passing unnoticed on a bus. The people themselves 'melt' into the background and become part of the 'not me' that merely serves to echo one's mood. This diffuseness can make one feel quite lonely.

However, individuality is at once crushed and celebrated by Impressionist art. Hueffer argues that modern man, whose talents are unchallenged and overlooked in the work place, picks up a hobby to assert his individuality, be it through a sport or merely personal adornment. And Degas kindly displays his subjects in these more defining and even heroic roles - the ballerina, the musician and the trapeze artist. However, for every dainty dancer bathed in light there is a lonely alcoholic, a beggar, or even a rape victim sunk in shadow. They dwell in the 'underbelly', the city's the tragic heroes.

---

[1] All the quotes for this piece are taken from The Soul of London, by Ford Madox Hueffer.

A Permanent State of Flux

Help! I cried to myself, and I held my mouth shut to stop my stomach leaping out of it and closed my eyes tightly to stop the tears from bursting forth and knotted my morose brow into a stern and defiant frown. But why did I do all this? Why did I stifle my own cry for help? As though my 'better' judgement had kidnapped my natural soul and clamped a rough hand over its mouth to prevent it calling out for freedom. Was it fear of rejection? After all, people cry out for help all the time: I am no different. But there was something else. Perhaps I did not wish to disappoint. I'm a hero, not a common civilian who cannot bear the burden of life, but a hero. I love this idea of myself more than myself, and so it was this idea I have to maintain in the mind of others. Yet clamping and paralysing myself into submission rendered me just as useless as everyone else.

And there I had it: It was not life that bewildered and crushed me, it was myself. It was not life that had tied me up with thousands of ropes, tugging violently in different directions, it was me. It was all me. I felt as though I had just been diagnosed with schizophrenia: all this time I had been blaming a figment of my imagination for harming me, when it was myself all along. Ha! To have summated that Life is but an imaginary friend, a scape goat. The ground seemed to give way beneath me. My face was wrenched downwards as though unusually predisposed to the Earth's gravity. And lo, the tears were pulled from my eyes and gathered on my eyelashes like the morning dew on a spider's web. And my 'stern' frown unravelled to reveal a wide, vulnerable brow that opened up to the sky. A symphony of birds erupted into the bright grey expanse and as they spread into every corner I realized they were in my stomach too and there were no corners, no limits, to this fluttering feeling of elation. How wonderful it all was! My heart reached out to them and yearned to grasp the beauty, to taste its deliciousness.

But the desire to contain beauty can never be satisfied, and I made my way home.

Sentimentality

Is it the optimistic version to be nostalgic and in a state of childlike wonder about the proximity of the Docklands? Rather than putting it in its place as a long lost speck, the small fuzzy thing in my gigantic, solid loaf of life? I think perhaps. Don't want to feel too real.