Final Project

Shaunyell Bobbitt

Cline

English 102

04 November 2011

Edgar Allen Poe: The Deaths That Shaped His Poetry

            Edgar Allen Poe is one of the best known poets of the nineteenth century. Most of his poetry and stories have a dark beauty about them that captivates his readers, and inspires his fans to read more and more of his works. Though Poe had many different themes in his writing, the one that occurs most often is death. His obsession with death and dying was inspired by none other than his beloved wife and cousin, Virginia Clemm Poe.

            Edgar Allen Poe had a hard life from toddlerhood. He had to watch his father abandon his family, watch his mother die when he was three, and subsequently be put into foster care to a family that could not readily accept him. After gaining his education, and a stint in the army, Edgar found the love of his life. Her name was Virginia Clemm, and she was his cousin. They fell in love while he had been living in her house with her mother, and were married when she was thirteen years of age (The Crystal Reference Encyclopedia). The love that they had for each other was passionate. So much so that in his poem “Eulalie”, it is easy to see that he was completely in love with Virginia.

I dwelt alone/In a world of moan/And my soul was a stagnant tide/Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride (Poe pg. 67-68).

With the intense love he had for his bride, it is only logical that he would be devastated by her untimely death. It was the grief that he endured in his wife’s death that inspired him to write such poems as “Annabel Lee”, and “Ulalume”.

            “Annabel Lee”, describes the pain that a lover endures after the death of the one he loves. In the Poe encyclopedia written by Anthony Magestrale and Frederick Frank, says that even though other women that had been in Edgar’s life saw themselves as the subject of “Annabel Lee”, it was in fact written as a remembrance of the death of Virginia, and the love that they once had (Magestral and Frank pg. 21-22). In reading the poem it is apparent that the two subjects involved (the narrator and Annabel Lee), had a love that was intensely passionate and even coveted,

“But we loved with a love that was more than love/ I and my Annabel Lee/ With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven/ Coveted her and me” (Poe pg. 89-90).

In the last stanza of the poem, the Narrator expresses how grieved he feels over the loss of his lover,

“For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams/ of the beautiful Annabel Lee/ And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes/ of the beautiful Annabel Lee/ And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side/Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride/ In her sepulcher there by the sea/in her tomb by the side of the sea” (Poe pg. 90).

When keeping in mind that Poe had written “Annabel Lee” as remembrance to his wife, it is clear that he never truly got over her death, and had become even a bit obsessed with it. The reference to lying beside his lovers grave, and being constantly haunted by her eyes show how he truly felt about Virginia’s death.

            Another poem written by Poe that was inspired by Virginia’s death is “Ulalume”. This poem had been written after Virginia’s death, and shows how after her death, Poe struggled with keeping faithful to his wife’s memory. In “Ulalume”, Poe describes how he had been walking with his new love “Psyche”, when they had discovered the entrance to a tomb. When he asks his new lover what was written there, she began to scream “Ulalume”. It is in the tenth stanza that Poe really gives a clear sense of how the discovery of his past lover’s tomb made him feel,

“And I cried: It was surely October/ On this very night of last year/ That I journeyed-I journeyed down here!/ That I brought a dread burden down here/ On this night of all nights in the year/ Ah what demon has tempted me here? (Poe pg. 77)”

The evidence that Poe was actively obsessed with Virginia’s death, and that she was the inspiration for “Ulalume”, is found in Tony Magestrale’s book “The student Companion to Edgar Allan Poe”. Magestrale describes how Poe’s life had been affected when he had decided to see other women after Virginia died. He goes on to explain that less than one year after his wife passed, Poe struggled with the idea of finding companionship in other woman, or to stay single and therefore not muddy the memory of his beloved wife (Magestrale pg.42).

            My final example of Virginias inspiration in Poe’s writing comes from Poe’s very famous poem “The Raven”. In the second stanza Poe describes how the narrator had been morning the loss of his love “Lenore”. In the fourteenth stanza, the narrator thinks that he smells perfume likened to incense from a censer. He then begins to cry out from the pain of the memories of Lenore (Poe pg. 68-71). It would seem that “The Raven” was another of Poe’s writings that was inspired by Virginia’s death, and it was, but not in the same ways that “Annabel Lee” and “Ulalume” had. “Annabel Lee”, was not written after Virginia’s death, but was in fact written before her demise. Kevin Hayes, author of the “Cambridge companion to Edgar Allen Poe”, tells how Poe had anticipated his wife’s death, and as a result was inspired to pen “the Rave”. According to Hayes, Virginia Poe had come down with tuberculosis three years before “The Raven” was published. She had subsequently died two years after its publication (Hayes pg.194). If Poe had indeed been actively thinking about the death of his wife before it had even occurred, then it would seem that he was truly obsessed with her death. Personally, imagining the death of a spouse due to their illness years before their death occurs seems morbid and a bit obsessive. The social norm seems to point toward positive thinking when a loved one is ill, even in terminal cases.

            In conclusion, the death of a loved one whether a spouse, friend or a family member can be traumatic and very difficult to handle. It is no wonder that Edgar Allen Poe had such a hard time dealing with the death of Virginia Clemm Poe. In his poetry Poe often describes how the death of a lover was unbearable, and how the narrator was haunted by their loves eyes or memories. Knowing how much he had loved Virginia while she was still alive would logically lead to the idea of how distraught he must have been after her death. Even after Virginia’s death he struggled with loneliness and wanting to be able to love another woman, this was made very apparent in both “Ulalume”, and “The Raven”. Perhaps Poe’s reason for wanting to love soon after Virginia’s death was because he wanted to cover his pain. No one can truly know his state of mind at the time. One thing that is clear is he loved his wife immensely, and grieved for her whole heartedly. For Poe, Virginia’s death was his inspiration, obsession, and in the end the one thing that may have kept him from a happy existence.

“Deep in Earth” by Edgar Allen Poe

Deep in earth my love is lying

And I must weep alone. (Poe pg. 72)

           

Works Cited

Hayes, Kevin. Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allen Poe. First. West Nyack, NY: Cambridge

            University Press. 2002. 194. eBook.

Magestrale, Anthony, and Frederick, Frank. Poe Encyclopedia. First. Westport, CT: Greenwood

            Press.1997. 21-22. eBook.

Magestrale, Tony. Student Companion to Edgar Allen Poe. First. Westport, CT: Greenwood

            Press. 2001. 11,42,45. eBook.

Poe, Edgar Allen. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe. First. New York, NY:

            Barnes & Nobel Inc. 2006. 67, 68-70, 72, 75-78, 89-90 Print.

“Poe, Edgar Allen (19 Jan. 1809- Oct. 1849)”. The Crystal Reference Encyclopedia. West Chiltington: Crystal Semantics. 2005. Credo Reference. Web. 06 November 2011

Bibliography For the Final ProjectAnnotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

Magestral, Anthony S., and Frederick, Frank S. Poe Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press. 1997

This source is an encyclopedia relating to anything and everything there is to know about Edgar

Allan Poe. This book lists things about Poe’s life, poetry, and all other literature written by Poe. I plan on using this reference for its background information on Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee”.

Magestral, Tony. Student Companion to Edgar Allen Poe. Greenwood Press. 2001

This source is as the title suggests a student companion to Poe. This book provides biographical information about Poe’s life, as well as analysis of his works. I will be using this source to help show that the death of the women in his poetry is a direct reflection of the deaths of the two most important women in his life (his mother Elizabeth, and his child bride Virginia).

The Crystal Reference Encyclopedia. Poe, Edgar Allen (19 January 1809 – 7 October 1849).

Credo Reference. 2011

This source is a biographical reference of Poe’s life from birth to death. This source is essential for writing my paper, because it gives insight to the deaths of Elizabeth and Virginia. It also shows how Poe’s life was filled with tragedy and heartbreak, much like his writings.

Final Project Choice #1

     For my final project, I have chosen to use option 1. I chose option 1 because it gives me the opportunity to use one of my most favorite authors, Edgar Allen Poe. For this essay I will be using my personal copy of “The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe”. When I chose to write this essay, I did not have any particular idea of what I wanted to accomplish in writing it other than trying to get an A on my paper. I was then faced with this (accomplish) question for my blog post. Honestly I could not think of anything. So far my focus has been on my grades and not much more. Then my oldest daughter asked me what I was doing, and I explained to her that I was intently trying to figure out what I wanted to accomplish with my essay. She looked over the outline for option one and asked me what I thought Poe’s hang ups in his poems and stories. My reply was death and heartbreak. My daughter then said, “So you are trying to show a correlation between the death and heartbreak in Poe’s stories to his life”. After she said this I just kind of sat there feeling a bit dumb. I spent most of this week trying to figure out what I wanted to accomplish, and my seventeen year old daughter answered this question for me in less than ten minutes. I might have felt stupid, but the whole “Child is Smarter than the Parent” scenario was quite comical, especially when she danced away singing, “I’m smarter than mommy”. I felt a tiny bit smarter about a half an hour later.  This is when I figured that maybe one of my accomplishments with this essay could be trying to inspire others to read Poe, and see that even in all the death and depression of his writing, there is a real sense of dark beauty in his writings. As far as my research goes, I will be using the college library databases for this. I have used them in the past, and have had a lot of success with them. I might also use other book, but I am not sure yet. Overall I am excited about this project, and have really enjoyed reading something that I like (unlike Frankenstein). 

Image source: http://www.youdopia.com/2010/06/08/basement-cat-loves-the-work-of-edgar-allen-poe-a-classic-lolcat/
 Here is a link for more Edgar Allen Poe

Portfolio Cover letter

Shaunyell Bobbitt

Cline

English 102

23 October 2011

To whom it may concern,

            This semester I have faced many challenges, from time issues, to transportation and even family emergencies. By far my biggest challenge that I have had to face so far has been my health. I have been living with Lupus for almost 10 years, and it causes many problems with my health. This semester, I have had my lupus flare up, which caused me to have issues with walking, and daily function. I also had a bad case of pneumonia that landed me in and out of the hospital emergency room several times. Luckily after several weeks, and two rounds of antibiotics, it cleared up. This was all a hassle, but I pulled through well, and did not fall far behind in my classes. As far as my successes go, I would have to say that trudging through my illnesses, and not having to quit this semester (which was a fear I had to face) and maintaining A’s and B’s in all my classes would be on the top of the list. 

            Another challenge I have had was the readings. Besides this class, I have three other classes that I have do extensive weekly reading in, and it has been tough to find time to read everything I have to. I had one advantage in the Frankenstein reading though, I had read Shelley’s Frankenstein before so it was a bit of a review for me.

            The literary analysis that we have done has been a fun and new experience for me. I have done a lot of research writing as well as narrative and creative writing, but this was the first time that I did any literary analysis. I have enjoyed it a lot; it seems to be a very natural thing to do. I love to read, and it is just natural for me to analyze what I am reading. The main reason I have enjoyed the analysis writing, is because that is a new experience for me, and I like to think that I thrive on new experiences.

            Finally, I come to my goals for myself in this class. I have to say that my highest goal for myself is simply to become a better writer. This is a goal that I have had since English 100. I feel that at this point I am a good writer, but I know that as humans, we all have room for improvement. As a secondary goal, I would like to eventually start to write a novel, and hopefully have it published. This I am afraid, is more of a long term goal, and not simply a goal limited to this semester. In time, I will stick to writing poetry and the occasional short story for fun.

Essay 3

Shaunyell Bobbitt

Cline

English 102

14 October 2011

Frankenstein: a Look at the Strength of Women, and the Weakness of Men

            I personally have never been a big fan of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I think that there were much better classic science fiction/horror books written, but one thing that does stand out in Shelley’s chilling tale is her imagination. When I read Frankenstein for the first time, I was captivated with her ideas about medical science, and the moral repercussions of an issue very close to the cloning issues we face today. As I read Frankenstein again for this essay, I began to ask myself why in the world a woman of the 1800’s would write a tale of such dark and sinister content. It is not like women back then had the same luxury of being able to speak their mind freely like women can now. That is when it hit me, Shelley was not simply writing about medical horrors and the effects of playing God. She was in fact writing about the issues regarding how women were perceived to be the weaker sex back in the 1800’s. In my opinion she even goes a step further in her description of the men in her macabre tale. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a tale of the oppression women felt in her generation, always having to be weaker in comparison to men, and she goes as far as to show that men in general are weaker when compared to the lives women traditionally live.

            “The Women of Frankenstein,” was an article written by William Veeder. In Mr. Veeder’s article he states that Shelley had felt weak as a woman, and due to her weakness, she became defensive, and portrayed the men in her book Frankenstein as weaker than the female characters. Veeder goes on to say that the character Justine had first appeared to be weak in nature, but had showed much more strength when she had been in the courtroom (Veeder 271). One thing that he did not state was how the male characters exuded any weakness.

            In Shelley’s book, I find that the character of Victor shows a lot of weakness, especially when it comes to his monstrous creation. In the fourth chapter of volume one Victor describes how he had intended his creation to be beautiful. What he saw in reality was the complete opposite. Victor describes the monster as such:

His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with the watery eyes, that seemed almost the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips (Shelley 34).

I find that this passage shows how weak Victor is in comparison to the average woman. Here Victor has given life to his creation, and in a way can be compared to the birth of a child. Instead of looking at his child with love and admiration, he is fixated on the deformities of his child. Though it is true that there are women that lament when they see that their child has been born with a deformity, not many women would do what Victor Frankenstein does next:

He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and hushed down stairs. I took refuge in the court-yard belonging to the house which I inhabited; where I remained during the rest of the night, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demonical corpse to which I had so miserably given life (Shelley 35).

Here his monster reaches out to him much like a newborn would reach out to its mother. But being a man, Victor cannot feel warmth for this demon, and he runs out of the room like a coward, and as he holes up in the courtyard of the building, he jumps and startles at any little sound. The thing that I do not understand is why he suspected a created person made up of corpses was going to be a sight considered beautiful. After all this was his creation, and I am pretty sure he saw what this thing looked like on a regular basis, there is no sense in being scared when life is bestowed upon his child. Another Author that saw the dynamic of female and male strength differences was Anne K. Mellor.

            In Mellor’s article “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein”, Mellor describes the male/female role division from the eyes of Victor, “Victor Frankenstein’s nineteenth century Genevan society is founded on a rigid division of sex roles: the male inhabits the public sphere, the female is relegated to the private or domestic sphere” (Mellor 274-275). This clearly shows that in the case of Victor’s character, he had the same gender ideals that the majority of people had in the nineteenth century. This is the same ideal that Shelley was trying to disprove in her book “Frankenstein”. Further into her writing Mellor describes the scene where Victor decides to go against his own word, and not make a female for his creation, and she questions why he came to this decision.

First he is afraid of an independent female will, afraid that his female creature will have desires and opinions that cannot be controlled by his male creature. Like Rousseau’s natural man, she might refuse to comply with a social contract made before her birth by another person; she might assert her own integrity and the revolutionary right to determine her own existence (Mellor 279).

When this excerpt is analyzed, it is easy to see that Victor feels threated by the thought of any woman being truly independent. Mellor clearly states that Victor worries that his “male” creation might not be able to control his “female” creation. Only a man that feared losing his own authority over the female sex would even consider an atrocious idea like men controlling women. In knowing Victors fears, one has to ask why he would be fearful of a woman with a mind of her own. The only clear explanation there is, is that Victor fears females in general. If he did not fear them, then why worry if this potential female creature could be uncontrollable. It is as if he thinks that if a female were (God forbid) allowed to think for herself, to make her own opinions, and to think differently than her male peers, then all hell might break loose in society. This may have been the opinion Mellor, but not every critic thought like she did.

            In the article “Female Gothic: The Monsters Mother”, written by Ellen Moers the Idea that Shelly wrote Frankenstein to show the world that women are stronger than men is not there. Moers likens Shelley’s story to the tragedies of motherhood, specifically the tragedies of Shelley’s real life experiences of motherhood. Moers describes the real life experiences of Shelley as a mother as one of pain

According to Moers, “Pregnant at sixteen, and almost constantly pregnant throughout the following five years; yet not a secure mother, for she lost most of her babies soon after they were born; and not a lawful mother, for she was not married-not at least when, at the age of eighteen, Mary Goodwin began to write Frankenstein. So are monsters born (Moers 216-217)

All this shows is that Shelley had a difficult life when it came to child rearing, and by no means does this show that she wrote Frankenstein as a metaphor for her life’s pains. If one was to compare Shelley to Victor, and her children to Victor’s creation, things do not match up. Shelley never abandoned any of her children, unlike Victor with his creation. Shelley also did not show fear of creating and giving birth to more children, because she repeatedly tried to have more. This also goes against what Victor felt as the creator of his monster. It is not like shelly was feeling guilt for the birth of her children, she simply felt grief over the deaths of the ones that passed away.

            Finally, Mary Shelley tells a story of horror, and paints a scene that is both breathtaking, and chilling. Since the publishing of “Frankenstein” many critics have tried to quantify the meaning of Shelley’s tale. As to what she truly intended we can only speculate. But when one takes into account the social and moral boundaries that women had to adhere to in the nineteenth century, and how it was a man’s place to guide and control a woman’s thoughts and actions, it is easy to see that Shelley would be angry about these unwritten female laws. Shelley knew from experience that women are strong both mentally and emotionally, why else would she continue on trying to have children even after so many of her own had tragically died. Can a man go through the same and come out mentally and emotionally stable. That is not to say that a man would not grieve the loss of his child, but could the same man handle it if he had given birth to it? Victor could not even handle the sight of his creation, and if his monster died, than he would no doubt rejoice in its death. Shelley intended to show the world the inner strength of a woman, and to show that men in general are not the stoic rocks they portray themselves to be.

Works Cited

Mellor, Anne. Comp. Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition. 1^st. New York: W.W. Norton &

            Company Inc. 1996. Print.

Moers, Ellen. Comp. Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition. 1^st. New York: W.W. Norton &

            Company Inc. 1996. Print.

Shelley, Mary. Comp. Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition. 1^st. New York: W.W. Norton &

            Company Inc. 1996. Print.

Veeder, William. Comp. Frankenstein Norton Critical Edition. 1^st. New York: W.W. Norton &

            Company Inc. 1996. Print.