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, 7th edn (London & New York: W. W. Norton)
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)
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)
14 Poem no. 760 [650]
15 Poem no. 268 [288]
17 Poem no. 268 [288]
The Emily Dickinson Journal, 5 (1996), 273-279 (p. 279)
20 Ibid
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
