Article on Great Short Works by Blair Mahoney Area of Study 1: Reading & Responding

Article by Blair Mahoney

GREAT SHORT WORKS

Edgar Allan Poe

INTRODUCTION

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) was one of the great originators of the short story
form. Although most often associated with the gothic horror genre he also
invented the detective story with his tales of Monsieur Dupin. Poe’s own life was
plagued by poverty, alcoholism and illness. He died aged just 40 in mysterious
circumstances, a day after being found delirious in a Baltimore street wearing
another man’s clothes. It was a macabrely appropriate end for a man whose
stories explored madness, decay and death.

Poe wrote poetry, novels, essays and criticism as well as short stories. While
some of these achieved recognition during his lifetime, particularly the poem
‘The Raven’ (1845), he was not a popular success in the United States. He was
a great success in France, however, championed by poets such as Charles
Baudelaire, who translated most of his works. Since his death Poe has been
widely recognised as a highly influential writer and his works are widely
referenced in popular culture ranging from horror films to The Simpsons.

BRIEF SYNOPSIS

The twelve stories set for study can be grouped in a number of different ways.
Two that stand out as somewhat different from the rest are the ‘Dupin’ stories:
‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (p.272) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (p.430). It is
in these two stories that Poe essentially invents the detective story, with
Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin displaying his great analytical skills in order to solve
cases that are a mystery to the police, as well as to the narrator of the stories.

The remainder of the stories broadly fall within a category that can be
designated as Gothic horror. These stories are primarily concerned with themes
of fear, guilt, revenge, madness and death. Several of the stories feature a
beautiful woman who decays and dies, and this foregrounding of the feminine

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aspect of the Gothic is evident in ‘Berenice’ (p.152), ‘The Fall of the House of
Usher’ (p.216) and ‘The Oval Portrait’ (p.355), as well as to a lesser extent in
‘The Premature Burial’ (p.413).

Madness, particularly as evidenced through the character of the first-person

narrator, is a common thread through the stories ‘Berenice’, ‘William Wilson’
(p.238), ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (p.384) and ‘The Black Cat’ (p.390). In these
stories the narrator commits unspeakable acts, ranging from murder in the latter
two stories to acts of debauchery in ‘William Wilson’.

‘The Premature Burial’ (p.413) explicitly brings to the fore the concept of being
buried alive, which also features in ‘Berenice’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’
and ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (p.496). The latter story differs a little from the
others in that the victim is deliberately buried alive, while in the other instances
the premature burial was accidental, arising from a mistaken belief in the death
of the victims.

Both ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (p.359) and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’
(p.366) have more antiquated historical settings and deal particularly with the
theme of fear and with the attempted postponement of death. The former story
is unique amongst Poe’s stories for its third-person narration, while the latter is
unusual in the tales of Gothic horror for having a happy ending where the
narrator is saved from the unpleasant fate that he contemplates.

BACKGROUND & CONTEXT

Poe lived in a number of cities in the north-eastern United States during the first
half of the nineteenth century, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and
Boston. This broad area and time period provides the setting for some of his
stories, although others are set in the more distant past and in other locations
such as England, France and Spain. Poe was a somewhat marginal figure in
the fledgling American literary scene of the time which was, however, starting to
flourish, with writers such as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Nathaniel
Hawthorne gaining prominence. Poe was responsible for importing the already
existing tradition of ‘the Gothic’ into the American context, and some
understanding of some of the key elements of the Gothic tradition is necessary
when reading his stories.

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Although Gothic horror stories had long been part of the German tradition, the
Gothic novel is said to have originated in England with Horace Walpole’s The
Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, and increased in popularity through the
novels of Ann Radcliffe, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The genre
was a favourite of the poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wrote a
number of Gothic-influenced poems. Shelley’s wife, Mary Shelley, wrote one of
the most famous Gothic tales, Frankenstein (1818). Poe was an admirer of
these authors and they influenced him greatly. He even refers to Mrs Radcliffe
by name in ‘The Oval Portrait’, a story which reveals clear signs of her
influence.

Poe’s stories employ a number of the regular features of Gothic literature.

These features include a castle or a ruined building of some sort; crypts and
tombs; darkness and shadows; extreme landscapes and weather; supernatural
elements (either real or suggested); a protagonist who is wilful, fixated or even
mad; a beautiful and/or sickly woman; ancient families and/or curses; and
elements of fear or horror. Gothic stories often have elements of suspense or
mystery and they can be very sensationalistic or melodramatic, tending towards
excess rather than subtlety. In addition, Gothic literature is concerned with
questions about the human condition, shaping it as an intermixture of good and
evil. It explores this concept through the use of doubles or doppelgangers
(German for ‘double-goer’), which is a kind of alternate identity or ‘evil twin’.
Gothic literature also often features a search for esoteric or forbidden
knowledge, something clearly evident in Poe’s stories with their bookish
protagonists and many allusions and quotations.

Some of Poe’s stories are set in more specific contexts, such as the Spanish
Inquisition in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ or the plague of Medieval Europe in
‘The Masque of the Red Death’, but these rarely play a significant role in the
stories themselves. Instead, the tales have something of a timelessness and
vagueness when it comes to the specific setting, which itself serves to highlight
the uncertainty and indeterminacy that is such a strong thematic concern for
Poe.

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STRUCTURE, LANGUAGE & STYLE

One of the most immediate points to note about Poe’s style is his use of first-
person narrators. All of the selected stories, with the exception of ‘The Masque
of the Red Death’, are narrated in the first person, giving the point of view of a
character who is a participant in the events that unfold. Whereas third-person
narration can be useful for giving an overview of events and allowing access to
a number of different characters and their motivations, first-person narration
provides greater immediacy and more opportunity for identification on the part
of the reader. When the character experiences unspeakable horrors the reader
is right there with them experiencing it from their point of view.

Poe employs two different kinds of first-person narrators. One kind is the
narrator who is also the protagonist, the leading character in the story who
personally drives the events or experiences them; in these cases it is their own
story that is being told. We see this kind of narrator in ‘Berenice’, ‘William
Wilson’, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘The Black Cat’, ‘The
Premature Burial’ and ‘The Cask of Amontillado’. In the majority of these stories
the narrator has performed some horrible act such as murder. They explain the
circumstances of the act and provide a sort of justification for what happened
while attempting to absolve themselves of the guilt they feel.

The other kind of first-person narrator that Poe uses is an observer. The
observer is a sort of stand-in figure for the reader, someone who is innocent of
any wrongdoing but who is witness to some extraordinary event, either from
some remove (a distance) or firsthand as the drama unfolds. This kind of
narrator relates the following stories: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Oval
Portrait’, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’. In ‘The
Fall of the House of Usher’, for example, the narrator is to some degree a
participant in the events that transpire, but merely in the capacity of assisting his
friend Roderick Usher. He is mostly there to record the utter destruction of the
family and their house as a witness. Similarly, the narrator of the Dupin stories
participates to some small degree in the events but his main function is to
convey the analytical brilliance of his friend in solving the cases. ‘The Oval
Portrait’ is a story told at one remove, as the narrator reads about the subject of
the portrait that hangs on the wall.

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First-person narration also allows for the employment of ‘dramatic irony’, which
is a literary technique by which the full significance of a character's words or
actions is clear to the reader even though the character remains unaware. This
is particularly evident in stories such as ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Black
Cat’. In each instance the narrator declares (perhaps a touch too strongly) that
he is not mad. Thus ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ opens with the question, ‘True!—
nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say
that I am mad?’ (p.384) and the narrator of ‘The Black Cat’ asserts that, as
crazy as his story sounds, he really is in his right mind: ‘Yet, mad am I not—and
very surely do I not dream’ (p.390). Everything that the narrators go on to say
serves to confirm in the reader’s mind that they are in fact mad, however,
creating an ironic distance between reader and narrator rather than an
identification.

Poe’s use of language is notable for his archaic word choices and frequent
quotations in Latin and French which, while they make reading at times difficult
for the modern reader, serve the stories themselves by creating an air of
mystery and antiquity that suits his Gothic style. He deliberately utilises an
elevated style that conveys a sense of erudition, suggesting that the events that
unfold are beyond the bounds of ordinary, everyday knowledge.

The structure of the stories varies, with some relying on a final revelation of the
horror that has transpired. We see this structure in ‘Berenice’ with the tumbling
of the box to the floor revealing the teeth that the dentally fixated narrator has
extracted in a trance from the still-living Berenice. It is also evident in the
similarly structured ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Black Cat’ where the
narrators unwittingly reveal their murderous crimes to police, compelled
respectively by the beating of the victim’s heart and the cry of the entombed
black cat. In other stories, such as the ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and
‘The Premature Burial’, the narrator gives a lengthy preamble about some
universal point such as the character of the analytical mind or the fear of being
buried alive before embarking on the tale proper which provides a specific
example of the universal principle described.

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CHARACTERS & RELATIONSHIPS

C. Auguste Dupin

Dupin is the only recurring character in the selected stories. He is introduced in

‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and then returns in ‘The Purloined Letter’. Like
some of the other main characters in the stories he is from a distinguished
family but has fallen upon hard times. He is very well-read, with books being ‘his
sole luxuries’ (p.276), and the narrator, his unnamed friend, is ‘astonished … at
the vast extent of his reading’ (p.277). Many of Poe’s characters have a great
interest in obscure knowledge and seek it out in books. Dupin’s character is
similar in this way to many of Poe’s other creations despite the contrasting tone
of the stories in which he features. Thus, he has a ‘wild fervor’ and is notable for
‘the vivid freshness of his imagination’ (p.277). Despite displaying all of the
features of the analytical mind he has a number of peculiarities, seeking out
seclusion and the night. It is these qualities that mark Dupin and his nameless
friend as eccentric, a step below the full-blown madness displayed by other
characters: ‘Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we
should have been regarded as madmen—although, perhaps, as madmen of a
harmless nature’ (p.277). Despite the similarities, it is this harmless nature that
sets Dupin apart from those that are all too capable of harm. Although Dupin is
a rational and insightful character, when he displays his ‘analytic ability’ to his
friend he displays something of the doubling that we see in less sane
characters, such as William Wilson: ‘Observing him in these moods, I often
dwelt meditatively upon the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul, and amused
myself with the fancy of a double Dupin—the creative and the resolvent’
(p.278).

Dupin’s abilities make him seem like a mind-reader to his companion, and this
gives an almost supernatural air to him. This air exists even though his
observations are actually grounded in his keen scrutiny of the smallest details:
he notices things that pass by the narrator, evident in his examination of the
neighbourhood of the Rue Morgue, ‘with a minuteness of attention for which I
could see no possible object’ (p.291). Although the narrator takes pains to
depict himself and Dupin as being like-minded, the latter takes a very superior
attitude towards his friend as well as to the police, whom he regards as

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incapable of solving the crime. For Dupin, the solution is simplicity itself: ‘In fact,
the facility with which I shall arrive, or have arrived, at the solution of this
mystery, is in the direct ratio of its apparent insolubility in the eyes of the police’
(p.293). The narrator admits his own difficulty in following Dupin’s logic,
commenting that, ‘I seemed to be upon the verge of comprehension, without
power to comprehend’ (p.301). Solving the crime is something of a game for
Dupin, who considers it will be an ‘amusement’ (p.291), something that strikes
the narrator as being ‘an odd term’ (p.291) when it is a horrific double murder
that they are investigating. When he ultimately spells things out for the Prefect
of Police there is an undisguised triumphalism in his manner at having
demonstrated his superior intellect: ‘I am satisfied with having defeated him in
his own castle’ (p.313).

Dupin continues with his superior attitude towards the Prefect of Police in ‘The
Purloined Letter’, employing sarcasm in describing him as ‘sagacious’ (p.434)
when he is in fact scornful of his abilities, commenting later that ‘many a
schoolboy is a better reasoner than he’ (p.441). The sarcasm goes undetected
by its recipient, who is then lured into offering his reward to Dupin if he can
solve the mystery, only to be ‘absolutely thunderstricken’ (p.439) when Dupin
then produces the stolen letter immediately, having already located it. Although
Dupin respects the intellect of the Minister who has stolen the letter and hidden
it in such an ingenious way he has ‘no sympathy … no pity’ (p.451) for his foe
and in fact delights in bringing down a man who once ‘did [Dupin] an evil turn’.

William Wilson and the other mad narrators

Most of the first-person narrators of Poe’s stories remain unnamed, which lends
them something of an air of mystery. William Wilson is one of the few who is
named, but even that is not his ‘real appellation’ (p.238), which he considers too
notorious to repeat. Like the narrators of ‘Berenice’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and
‘The Black Cat’ he seeks to excuse his horrific deeds in some measure while at
the same time accepting responsibility for them. He tells his story because he
wants readers to identify ‘some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error’
(p.239). That is, he wishes to attribute his actions to fate, and not just to his own
poor decisions; he wants people to feel sympathy for him and for what he has
experienced. Similarly, Egaeus, the narrator of ‘Berenice’, seeks to blame his

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peculiar disease, or monomania, for his extraction of the teeth from his cousin
and fiancée; he was not in his right mind when he performed the act, so he
cannot be held responsible. The narrator of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ asserts his
complete sanity and disavows any base motives for killing the old man: ‘For his
gold I had no desire’ (p.384). Instead he is driven to be rid of his ‘pale blue eye,
with a film over it’ (p.384), which troubles him. The narrator of ‘The Black Cat’ is
in somewhat better possession of his faculties, but he finds the events that have
befallen him inexplicable and sets them out for the reader so that

perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to

the common-place—some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less
excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail
with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes
and effects (p.390).

Again, by claiming that his behaviour is the effect of ‘natural causes’, the
narrator can excuse his actions and assert that he is in effect not to blame for
what he has done.

William Wilson also attributes his actions to inherited characteristics, a common

element in a number of the characters in Poe’s stories. He explains:

I am the descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable

temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable; and, in my
earliest infancy, I gave evidence of having fully inherited the family
character (p.239).

He is therefore ‘self-willed’ and prone to ‘evil propensities’ (p.239). Egaeus, the

narrator of ‘Berenice’, also comes from a noble family, of whom he says, ‘Our
line has been called a race of visionaries’ (p.152), a trend he continues with his
study of the ‘very peculiar’ (p.152) contents of the family library. Roderick Usher
also comes from a long, and eccentric, line: ‘his very ancient family had been
noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament’ (p.218).

Like some of the other ‘mad’ narrators, William Wilson appears to be operating
under a delusion, experiencing his namesake and double as a real person
when he is no more than an alter ego, or an aspect of his own personality, a
form of conscience operating as a counter to Wilson’s ‘evil propensities’. There
are a number of clues in the story that this appears to be the case, although it is
not entirely conclusive that the ‘other’ Wilson, the doppelganger, does not really
exist. Apart from the remarkable coincidence of the identical name, which is

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explained away by its being so common, the further coincidence that his
namesake also has the identical date of birth seems to move beyond the realms
of possibility. The other Wilson leaves the school on the same day as the
narrator and when he foils his plan to cheat at cards he leaves behind a coat
that is the ‘exact counterpart in every, in even the minutest possible particular’
(p.257) of the narrator’s own. Yet despite all of these remarkable similarities and
coincidences, nobody but Wilson himself ever remarks upon them due to what
he describes as ‘some unaccountable blindness’ (p.244). In a final confrontation
with the other Wilson he stabs him(self) ‘with brute ferocity’ (p.261) only to see
his own image in the mirror covered in blood, and there is a merging of the
identities: ‘It was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could have
fancied that I myself was speaking’ (p.261). Wilson’s final words are that he has
murdered himself, making it apparent that the other Wilson was only ever a
delusional projection, a manifestation of his own conscience visible to nobody
else but himself.

The sickly female

In his essay, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (p.529), Poe writes that ‘the
death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in
the world’ (p.535). This is evident in his stories ‘Berenice’, ‘The Fall of the
House of Usher’ and ‘The Oval Portrait’. The women in Poe’s stories are
somewhat spectral figures who glide around without speaking and who slip
inexorably towards death. Berenice is described as ‘agile, graceful, and
overflowing with energy’ (p.153) and as a ‘gorgeous yet fantastic beauty’
(p.154). Despite her energy she is never described as uttering a word and even
when she was in good health Egaeus describes how, in his view, ‘she had flitted
by [his] eyes, and [he] had seen her—not as the living and breathing Berenice,
but as the Berenice of a dream’ (p.157). He strangely prefers her in her illness
and proposes marriage while in this state, with her eyes ‘lifeless, and lustreless,
and seemingly pupil-less’ and with ‘thin and shrunken lips’ (p.158). Berenice
becomes less a real person and more a catalogue of parts, emphasised by
Egaeus’ final, and horrific, fixation on her teeth, for which he ‘longed with a
phrenzied desire’ (p.159).

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Madeline Usher is the mirror image of her twin brother Roderick (‘A striking
similitude between the brother and sister’ (p.230) strikes the narrator after her
supposed death), intrinsically tied to him and not a complete person in her own
right. Like Berenice she moves around silently and is a ghostly presence on the
verge of death, one who has ‘succumbed … to the prostrating power of the
destroyer’ (p.224). Yet the narrator notes a certain beauty in her features after
she has been declared dead, observing ‘a faint blush upon the bosom and the
face’ and a ‘lingering smile upon the lip’ (p.230). After her burial in the vault she
becomes a sort of avenging angel, her ‘lofty and enshrouded figure’ (p.237)
appearing at the door to drag her brother down into death with her.

The subject of the oval portrait in the story of the same name is viewed ‘with
deep and reverent awe’ (p.357) by the narrator who is moved by her ‘immortal
beauty’ (p.357). She too is a largely passive figure who submits to the will of her
husband: ‘she was humble and obedient, and sat meekly for many weeks in the
dark high turret-chamber where the light dripped upon the pale canvas only
from overhead’ (p.358). Her husband the artist, by contrast, is a ‘passionate,
and wild and moody man’ (p.358) who fails to see how ‘the light which fell so
ghastily in that lone turret withered the health and the spirits of his bride’
(p.358). He soon brings about the death of his beloved, transforming her from
‘all light and smiles, and frolicksome as the young fawn’ to a ‘dispirited and
weak’ (p.358) creature.

THEMES, IDEAS & VALUES

Binary opposites

Many of the stories are characterised by binary opposites, strongly contrasting

features or ideas that sometimes merge into one or become less clear. These
can be things such as good and evil, life and death, or beauty and ugliness.
This is expressed most clearly in ‘Berenice’ when the narrator asks:

How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? —from the
covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a
consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born (p.152).

Egaeus implies that ugliness comes specifically from its opposite, as do sorrow
and evil; the opposites are all inextricably intertwined. So Berenice moves from

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beauty to ugliness, from life to death, but there is an uncertain grey area. She
falls into a trance that appears like death yet is not, which leads to her being
buried alive. A similar scenario occurs in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and in
multiple instances in ‘The Premature Burial’. Poe is particularly interested in
premature burial as a plot element precisely because it blurs the boundary
between life and death, making it less clear-cut.

Life and death are also brought into strong contrast in ‘The Masque of the Red
Death’, in which Prince Prospero walls himself and his court off from the outside
world where a plague is rampant. The many forms of beauty and entertainment
confined within the abbey are listed: ‘All these and security were within. Without
was the “Red Death”’ (p.360). The opulence and revelry of those within is
contrasted with the pestilence and despair outside, yet the division cannot be
maintained. The unearthly personification of the plague manages to gain entry,
‘And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all’
(p.366).

‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ employs binary oppositions by displaying the
interplay of light and darkness as an allegory for life and death as well as hope
and despair. The narrator observes the whiteness of ‘the lips of the black-robed
judges’ (p.367) who sentence him to his terrible torture. He describes the ‘seven
tall candles’ which ‘seemed white slender angels who would save [him]’ (p.367),
but then ‘the tall candles sank into nothingness; their flames went out utterly;
the blackness of darkness supervened; all sensations appeared swallowed up
in a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades’ (p.367). The division
between sleep and waking, which themselves often function as metaphors for
life and death, is also blurred in the story, with the narrator describing how he
‘had swooned; but still will not say that all of consciousness was lost’ (p.368).
Hope and despair are intermingled as life is confronted with death by the
swinging pendulum:

I grew frantically mad, and struggled to force myself upward against the
sweep of the fearful scimitar. And then I fell suddenly calm, and lay smiling
at the glittering death, as a child at some rare bauble (p.377).

The terror that he feels at his imminent fate is counterbalanced by a sort of

reverence for the sublime aspect of death.

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Guilt and conscience

Being able to display a sense of guilt for one’s actions is one of the key values
that Poe promotes in his stories. Despite the scenes of murder and horror, the
stories have a strong underpinning of morality, and atonement looms large as a
concept, as do the consciences of the protagonists. The narrator of ‘Berenice’ is
filled with horror at what he has done, even as he is unsure what it actually is
until the final revelation. Roderick Usher is consumed with guilt over his
awareness that he has buried his sister alive yet has been too terrified to take
any action over it. He almost looks forward to the vengeful apparition of his
sister returned from the tomb to punish him for his haste in burying her. The
epigraph to ‘William Wilson’ reads, ‘What say of it? What say CONSCIENCE grim,
That spectre in my path?’ (p.238). The story itself then proceeds to personify
the abstract concept as Wilson’s guilt over his behaviour manifests itself in the
literal embodiment of his conscience. As he lords it over his fellow schoolmates
his double appears and undermines his ‘ascendancy over all not greatly older’
(p.243). He later reappears to interrupt a night of ‘debaucheries’ (p.251) at Eton
and a scam at Oxford.

When the narrator of ‘The Black Cat’ recounts how, in a drunken state, he
cruelly cut his pet’s eye out, he writes how he ‘experienced a sentiment half of
horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which [he] had been guilty’ before he
‘drowned in wine all memory of the deed’ (p.392). The cat functions, in a way
similar to the double in ‘William Wilson’, as the narrator’s conscience made
corporeal (flesh and blood), not allowing him to get away from the guilt he
should feel for his actions. The narrator of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ undergoes the
same experience when the beating of the heart of his victim, unheard by
anybody else, drives him to admit his terrible deed.

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The role of the family

Family plays a significant role in a number of the selected stories, and the family
units are often depicted as unsatisfactory. The relationship of husband and wife,
or husband-and-wife-to-be is the family unit most often depicted, and it is one
that usually results in death. There is a doubling of family relationships in
‘Berenice’, where the title character and Egaeus are cousins who become
engaged to be married on the basis of a perverse whim from the latter. The
relationship is deficient in the necessary elements, as Egaeus admits that ‘most
surely I had never loved her’ (p.157) and he proposes to her only when her
death seems imminent. The artist in ‘The Oval Portrait’ is another failure as a
husband, so fixated on his art that he fails to notice the steady decline of his
bride towards death. The narrator of ‘The Black Cat’ starts out as a loving
husband but as he descends into alcoholism he resorts to ‘personal violence’
(p.391) towards his wife and ultimately ‘buried the axe in her brain’ (p.398) in his
fury towards the black cat. ‘The Premature Burial’ also depicts a less than
desirable husband in the case of Monsieur Rénelle, who ‘neglected, and,
perhaps, even more positively ill-treated’ (p.416) his wife before her apparent
death and premature burial.

The allusion to incest in the relationship between cousins in ‘Berenice’ is

repeated in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, in which the narrator comments on
the ‘deficiency’ in the Usher line: ‘that the entire family lay in the direct line of
descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain’
(p.218). This history has resulted in the sickly twins Roderick and Madeline,
both seemingly well advanced on the road towards death. Roderick then
proceeds to fail in his duty of care towards his sister, burying her alive and
failing to act when he suspects what he has done. The family of William Wilson
also functions in an unsatisfactory way, with the parents allowing their son’s
voice to become ‘a household law’ because they are ‘Weak-minded, and beset
with constitutional infirmities’ (p.239).

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DIFFERENT INTERPRETATIONS

There is no single correct reading of a text, nor is one reading more valid than
another. Different interpretations arise from different responses to a text and
each essay question may also have a number of possible approaches. An
interpretation is more than an ‘opinion’ – it is the justification of your point of
view using relevant examples or evidence from the text to support and
strengthen it. Interpretations develop through your response to a text’s key
ideas, characters and themes. You should refer to these as you pull together
the various elements of a text to present a point of view of its overall meaning.

The two different questions below are on a similar theme. They reveal how the
text is open to a range of interpretations and will help you to develop your own
ideas on what the text is about.

Poe’s characters are consumed by feelings of guilt and fear.

When writing on a collection of short stories there will often be scope to bring
different interpretations to topics by selecting particular stories with which to
support your response. Guilt and fear are feelings that frequently arise in Poe’s
stories, but do not feature in all of them. Consider the following points when
responding to this topic:

• Egaeus, the narrator of ‘Berenice’, feels guilt and horror over his actions, but
the story ends before this can be developed or resolved.
• Roderick Usher is consumed with guilt over what he has done to his sister, a
guilt that arises specifically out of his fear, the fact that he ‘dared not speak’
(p.237).
• William Wilson is pursued by his conscience in the form of his double, and
he comes to fear his appearances, but he shows little remorse for his deeds
during the bulk of the story.
• The narrator of ‘The Black Cat’ feels remorse even as he commits his
horrible acts, such as hanging Pluto, but his alcoholism allows him to escape
his feelings of guilt.
• The narrator of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ outwardly displays no guilt over his
actions in murdering the old man, but the beating of his heart could be a
manifestation of his conscience, ‘telling’ a more truthful tale.

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Despite the horror they experience, Poe’s characters are able to conquer
their fear and any guilt or remorse they might feel.

This contrasting topic to the first can also be supported by a number of the
selected stories. With both this topic and the first one it is possible to take an
approach that recognises the nuances of the topic and elements of the stories
that support it in part, but not entirely. The following pieces of evidence could be
used to support the proposition in this topic:

• Montresor feels no apparent guilt over his actions in murdering Fortunato in

‘The Cask of Amontillado’. Rather, he relishes taking his revenge.
• Prince Prospero feels no guilt over his self-serving actions in abandoning the
bulk of his populace to the Red Death.
• Even as ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ is an exercise in exploring the limits of
fear for its narrator, he is able at times to escape the feeling, and it is
because he does not give in to his fear that he is able to survive long
enough to be rescued.
• The narrator of ‘The Premature Burial’ is consumed with fear at the prospect
of being buried alive but by the end of the story he has conquered his fear
and become ‘a new man’ (p.429).

ESSAY TOPICS

1 ‘Because Poe’s stories are narrated predominantly in the first person we

learn little about characters other than the narrator.’
Do you agree?
(This question asks students to demonstrate knowledge of some of the
consequences of first-person narration.)

2 ‘Poe’s characters are interchangeable; they show little variation and we

see the same experiences repeated throughout the stories.’
Do you agree with this interpretation of the text?
(This question asks students to demonstrate an understanding of the
differences and similarities between the characters, and sustain a detailed
interpretation of the characters’ views and values.)

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3 ‘Poe’s families and friendships are all dysfunctional. No character is able

to develop a satisfying relationship with others.’
Do you agree?
(This question requires students to examine the ways in which the author
constructs meaning through the characters.)

4 ‘The characters in Poe’s stories make poor choices time and time again.
They have only themselves to blame for their fate.’
Discuss.
(This question focuses on how the author expresses views and values
through the characters.)

5 ‘Poe’s stories show how characters who are fixated on one thing can
destroy all that they love.’
Discuss.
(This question requires students to examine the ways in which the author
constructs meaning through the characters.)

6 ‘These stories demonstrate that our conscience will always return to haunt
us.’
Discuss.
(This question asks students to demonstrate an understanding of a key
theme and to offer their point of view on the role of conscience in people’s
lives.)

7 ‘Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe demonstrates that opposites are
never quite what they seem.’
Discuss.
(This question asks students to present an understanding of a key theme
to show how authors express or imply a point of view and values.)

8 ‘Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe shows that people’s strongly held
values can be tested under extreme circumstances.’
Discuss.
(This question asks students to examine the social and historical values
embodied in the text.)

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9 ‘Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe offers us a bleak world where
goodness is destroyed and only evil thrives.’
Do you agree with this interpretation of the text?
(The question asks students to develop and justify a detailed interpretation
of the text using appropriate evidence from the text to support their point of
view.)

10 ‘Poe’s stories show that justice will always prevail and evil actions will be
punished.’
Discuss.
(This question asks students to examine the social and historical values
embodied in the text.)

ANALYSING A SAMPLE QUESTION

3 ‘Poe’s families and friendships are all dysfunctional. No character is

able to develop a satisfying relationship with others.’ Do you agree?

This topic conforms to a typical exam question format: a contention about the
text, then ‘do you agree?’ The key terms that warrant further consideration here
are ‘families’, ‘friendship’, ‘dysfunctional’, ‘satisfying’ and ‘relationship’.

The statement is a strong one in that it is global, suggesting that there are no
characters who are able to develop satisfying relationships. This provides an
obvious point of divergence for individual interpretation. You might plausibly
argue either that the statement is true and that satisfying relationships do not
exist in the stories or you might argue that although some (or even many) of the
relationships are indeed dysfunctional, not all of them are, and there is a place
for fulfilling friendships and/or family relations in Poe’s world.

The question will require you to identify significant family relationships and
friendships across a number of different stories. You might consider the family
relationships in the stories ‘Berenice’ (cousins who become engaged to be
married), ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (brother and sister), ‘The Oval
Portrait’ (husband and wife), ‘The Black Cat’ (husband and wife), ‘The
Premature Burial’ (husband and wife) and ‘William Wilson’ (parents and child).
You should also consider the friendships that are depicted in the stories ‘The
Fall of the House of Usher’ (the narrator and Roderick Usher), ‘The Tell-Tale

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Heart’ (the narrator and the old man), ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (Montresor and
Fortunato) and ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (the
narrator and Dupin). You must discriminate in the evidence you select,
however, as there will not be enough time or space to write about all of these
stories.

You must also define the term ‘dysfunctional’ and decide whether certain
relationships fit the bill or not. We can define dysfunctional as meaning not
operating normally or deviating from the norms of social behaviour. The narrator
of ‘The Black Cat’ clearly has a dysfunctional relationship with his wife, whom
he abuses and ultimately kills, but can Roderick and Madeline Usher be
described as dysfunctional in their sibling relationship? The friendship between
the narrator and C. Auguste Dupin is probably the most satisfying one depicted
in the stories, but could they be described as deviating from the norms of social
behaviour in their seclusion?

THE TEXT

Poe, Edgar Allan 2004, Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Perennial
Classics, New York.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Blair Mahoney, MA, DipEd, teaches VCE English at Melbourne High School. He
has tutored and lectured on literature at universities in New Zealand and
Australia and regularly writes reviews and study material for a range of
publications.

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