By Lyndsey Holder
At the risk of ruining my literary geek cred, I have a secret to admit to you: I read Lovecraft long before I read Poe. Any desire I would have had to read Poe was murdered during the high school English class in which we dissected “The Raven”. No matter how cute the specimens we were given to cut up in Biology class happened to be, there was never anything quite as traumatic as clumsily dismembering literature in English.
By the time I bothered to pick up a Poe anthology, I’d read so much about Lovecraft being inspired by Poe that I’d assumed Poe was Lovecraft from a different time. I can’t tell you how shocked I was, then, the first time I read a story of Poe’s that had a female character, hearing him wax poetical about the finer qualities of feminine beauty. At first, I was surprised that Lovecraft could have taken so much from Poe and yet, never have written decent female characters, but after a while, I realized that Poe himself really didn’t understand women either. While Lovecraft tried to avoid writing about them as much as possible, or complained about their inferior brains, Poe wrote about women mostly as beautiful and exotic creatures, but hardly ever as humans.
In a reading of Poe’s writings that feature female characters, three themes become apparent. First of all, the female characters are almost always breathtakingly gorgeous. Poe’s imagery is fantastic. His paragraphs on a woman’s beauty are forged from a symphony of metaphors and yet, one never has the feeling that the women in Poe’s writing are abnormally gorgeous. It seems more that Poe is simply enthralled with femininity, with the idea of womanhood, and this casts a rosy hue over every character he writes about. Of Ligeia, he writes:
“Yet, although I saw that the features of Ligeia were not of a classic regularity – although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed ‘exquisite’, and felt that there was much of ‘strangeness’ pervading it, yet I have tried in vain to detect the irregularity and to trace home my own perception of ‘the strange’. I examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead – it was faultless – how cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty so divine! – the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, ‘hyacinthine!’ I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose – and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection.”
Ligeia, then, is beautiful but not classically so, strange but not in a perceptible manner, and gorgeous but still strange. I’m not sure how this manages to sound kind in the end, but it somehow does. Poe talks about Ligeia’s beauty for three paragraphs, flinging around compliments as though he’d just bought shares in insults and was hoping to oversaturate the flattery market and cause it to crash.
The next theme I noticed was an idea that women are frail. Berenice, Madeline Usher, Eleonora, Ligeia, Morella…they all fall ill and die so quickly. They are like flowers – beautiful and radiant, but short-lived. Men, however, carry on, mourning and grieving for their lost wife (or sister). Poe’s own wife died at a young age, so I suppose it is hardly surprising that this is a consistent theme in his work. But take note, guys, if you aren’t treating your wife right, you’ll get yours. This brings us to the third theme: be good to women, or else.
Poe’s tales are full of men who are cruel to women receiving justice for their callousness, although this is never carried out by the women themselves – at least, not on purpose. In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Roderick Usher shuts his sister’s body up in the family vault, deep within his house, shortly after she dies. However, she is not actually dead, and though Roderick can hear her trying to get out, he does nothing. Eventually, she manages to free herself and collapse dead in his arms. Overwhelmed with grief, shock and guilt, Roderick dies too. See what happens when you leave your sister for dead? As if that weren’t enough, their house gets struck by lightning and is totally destroyed.
The protagonist in “A Loss of Breath” lost the ability to breathe (yet somehow stayed alive and could talk) after throttling his wife and yelling at her, and ended up hanged and then eviscerated. If you think those two guys got a raw deal, the king and his seven councillors from “Hop-Frog: or, the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs” were burned to death because the king splashed wine in a young woman’s face. The king was kind of a jerk and certainly had it coming, but the reason given for such a gruesome death was not any of the very legitimate complaints that could have been aired about him, but the wine-splashing.
I wanted to write this article featuring the women that Poe wrote about, but as I went back and re-read each story, I realized that these women aren’t so much separate characters as they are different masks worn by the same woman. She is beautiful, thoughtful, caring, and patient, although the men in her life do not always deserve it. She is ethereal – kind and good beyond belief – and each story is but a different lens with which to view the same woman. I would complain more about Poe’s portrayal of women – how they never seem to be their own people; they merely exist to interact with the protagonist – but his words are so filled with grief, that it seems as though he is simply writing about himself over and over again, and that each incarnation of his female character is a way for his lost wife to live once more. I do not have it in my heart to fault that.