Man's Need For Woman in the Works of Edgar Allen Poe
In the beginning, there was Adam. Adam felt incomplete in the Garden of Eden and needed a companion. Eve was created and Adam had his woman. Edgar Allen Poe experimented with man's eternal necessity and drew his final conclusion near the end of his literary career. With the publication of Eureka, Poe made his final realization that tied every one of his love driven short stories together and triumphantly proclaimed: "I have no desire to live since I have done Eureka. I could accomplish nothing more" (n. pag.). Kenneth Graham puts it best: "For Poe, the most notable glimpse of eternity available to man is in the beauty of woman, always ephemeral, always melancholic" (2760). With this idea in mind, Poe shows the consequences of losing the love of one's life through his short stories and his poetry, and also tries to bring reason to his own troubled life. In the works of Poe, a man without his love becomes a man without the most vital part of his spirit and collapses in a horrifying manner.
"For Poe, the most notable glimpse of eternity available to man is in the beauty of woman, always ephemeral, always melancholic" (Graham 2760).
Poe's obsession with dying women stems from his own life. His mother died when he was only three. His first love, Elmira Royster was forbidden from associating with him by her father. His child-wife, Virginia, who was also his cousin, died at the age of 24. Just when he found Elmira once again, who was by this time a widow, he died of his own health problems. These stinging losses, especially that of his mother, left a subconscious scar in his already convoluted psyche. Poe's personal history compelled him...
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Christopher Rollason, has a PhD from the University of York in English. He has written many papers on Edgar Allan Poe. In fact his thesis paper was written on the topic; The Construction of the Subj...
Before the age of three, Poe was already an orphan after his Mother dying and his Father walking out on them (Frank 56). Poe was too young to remember his Mother since her death occurred when he was very young, but later in his life he grew resentful for being raised as a foster child. After the loss of his Mother, Poe would go on to experience the death of many more loved ones. This became the source of the terrible fear Poe would associate with death and dying, a common theme in many of his works.
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The hardships of Edgar Allan Poe gave us his amazing short stories and poems. Throughout his life he loses many people dear to him, but his most commonly written about was his wife Virginia. In his poems ‘The Raven’ and ‘Annabel Lee’ Poe writes about love and loss which is all he feels after Virginia his wife dies of tuberculosis at the age of 25. Throughout the years that she was sick and the two years after her death before his death is when he wrote the heartfelt works of art. ‘The Raven’ is about a man who is heartbroken over the loss of his lover/wife Lenore.
Edgar Allen Poe was a deeply troubled man. From a young age he struggled with a love life that would slowly tarnish his mind. Poe frequently turned to controlled substances and alcohol to help sooth his pain. Poe’s only true solace from the harsh reality to which he was doomed to live was through his writings. Poe helped developed several major literary genres including American gothic style and the American Detective Story. Both his short stories and poems are littered with themes expressing deeply macabre scenes such as mutilation, gore, and criminal insanity. However, one of his most prominent and well known topics in Poe’s writing deals with the death of beautiful women. This is directly
...n with death. His fascination with death can be traced back to the death of those he loved in his life, including his mother, step-mother, and wife. Poe conveys his fixation through his narrators in short stories, whether they kill based on fear, hate, or anxiety. By including death in all his works, he frightens his audience and shows them that death is unavoidable and constantly chases us throughout our lives.
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Poe uses the tragic death of the wife to point out that domestic abuse does not always have a happy ending. The story speaks to us today, as forcefully as it spoke to people one hundred or more years ago. Alcoholism, mental illness and domestic abuse lurk in the human condition, and Poe uses the four walls of our own home to plant a seed of fear in our mind, that no one is safe from such a fate.
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