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1
2 MAGGIE TONKIN
All ran to her side. She was carried upstairs and laid to bed. While her mother applied wet
towels, Edgar, distracted, hastened to the doctor.
Doctor Mitchell lived on the further side of town. He returned with Poe but now had two
invalids to tend, each with a different ailment. (101)
For Poe had another drug at his call, to keep his strange, unstable, hag-ridden nature from
ending in madness or crimea drug out of reach of most men. This was the ink, with which he
eternalized on paper, in his fine, careful hand, the fearsome but comforting imagos which at
times gave him respite from grief. It is because he achieved, as none before or after, this feat of
sublimating in artistic form our souls darkest and most horrible aspects, its sado-necrophilist
urges, that Poes name, whether unjustly reviled or overpraised by his critics, in its way,
remains immortal. (89)
Bonaparte does not utilize the word muse, yet the implication
of her thesis is that the act of writing transfigures the dead Mama
of Poes unconscious fixation into his unconscious muse. Poes
muse is all the more powerful because he cannot know that it is
her image that compels him to write. Bonaparte looks for and
finds Mama everywhere in Poes workshe is not only the model
for every female figure but also the House of Usher itself, the sea,
the sky, etc. Indeed, she accords Mama such a global and all
pervasive presence, such totemic power, that she inadvertently
inscribes her as a muse in the classical sense. To witPoe, out of
his witsis possessed by his muse, and his literary production is
entirely determined by the unconscious need to revivify her image.
The classical muse has specific attributes which distinguish it
from later figurations of the muse trope. Greek mythology holds
that the muses were the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnesmonyne,
the goddess of memory. Mnesmonyne was the daughter of Ouranos
and Gaea, the primordial gods of heaven and earth; and, as Pamela
Di Pesa points out, this lineage links the muses to the creation of
the cosmos, to memory, and to prophecy (63). In the classical
tradition the muses endow the poet with the poetic gift and he, in
return, must address and celebrate them so as to convey his grati-
tude. The muses are deities in direct touch with the Godhead and
with Memory; they speak their divine utterance through the
poet, who is no more than their mouthpiece, the earthly vessel or
conduit of their words to other mortals. This conception of the
muse-poet relation later was elaborated upon in Platos Ion, in
which Socrates suggests that inspiration only comes to the poet
when he has abandoned reason:
For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has
been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not
attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles. (108)
The relation of the poet to the muse that emerges here reverses
the conventional gender roles that prevailed in classical Greek
society. The poet is passive and feminized in relation to the muse,
8 MAGGIE TONKIN
Laura is always presented as a part or parts of a woman. When more than one part figures in
a single poem, a sequential, inclusive ordering is never stressed. Her textures are those of metals
and stones; her image is that of a collection of exquisitely beautiful disassociated objects.
Singled out among them are hair, hand, foot and eyes: golden hair trapped and bound the
speaker; an ivory hand took his heart away; a marble foot imprinted the grass and flowers;
starry eyes directed him in his wandering. In terms of qualitative attributes (blondness, whiteness,
sparkle), little here is innovative. More specifically Petrarchan, however, is the obsessive insistence
on the particular, an insistence that would in turn generate multiple texts on individual fragments
of the body or on the beauties of woman. (Vickers 96) (italics mine)
At this hour, this very hour, far away in Paris, France in the appalling dungeons of the Bastille,
old Sade is jerking off. Grunt, groan, grunt, on to the prison floor . . . aaaagh! He seeds
dragons teeth. Out of each ejaculation spring up a swam of fully-armed, mad-eyed humunculi.
Everything is about to succumb to delirium. (262263)
Now and then, as a great treat, if he kept quiet as a mouse, because he begged and pleaded so,
he was allowed to stay in the wings and watch; the round eyed-baby saw that Ophelia could, if
necessary, die twice nightly. All her burials were premature. (268)
Poe and the psychoanalytic tradition that has produced the Poe-
etics around him:
I have been here before. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud says this feeling of familiarity
means that we are remembering the bodies of our mother. If so, Poes mothers body is a
haunted house, one haunted by allusion. Allusions to the blasted heath in King Lear perhaps.
To the castle where Macbeth killed the king, in the play from whence flapped that raven over
the infected house, perhaps. And mightnt the body of an actress contain within it just such
abandoned, weathered stage sets? (Through a Text Backwards 482)
A mug of porter or a bottle of whisky stood on the dressing-table all the time. She
dipped a plug of cotton in whisky and gave it to Edgar to suck when he would not stop
crying. (263)
And besides, isnt an undemanding, economic, decorative corpse the perfect wife for a gentle-
man in reduced circumstances, upon whom the four walls of paranoia are always about to
converge? (270)
He rearranges the macabre candelabra so that the light from her glorious hand will fall
between her legs and then he busily turns back her petticoats; the mortal candles shine. Do not
think it is not love that moves him; only love moves him.
He feels no fear.
An expression of low cunning crosses his face. Taking from his back pocket a pair of enormous
pliers, he now, one by one, one by one by one, extracts the sharp teeth just as the midwife did.
Yet, even as he held aloft the last fierce canine in triumph above her prostrate and insensible
form in the conviction that he had at last exorcised the demons from desire; his face turned
THE POE-ETICS OF DECOMPOSITION 19
ashen and sear and he was overcome with the most desolating anguish to hear the rumbling of
the wheels outside. Unbidden, the coachman came; the grisly emissary of her high-born kinsmen
shouted imperiously: Overture and beginners, please! She popped the plug of spiritous linen
between his lips; she swept off with a hiss of silk.
The sleepers woke and told him he was drunk; but his Virginia breathed no more! (271)
NOTES
1. In Through a Text Backwards: The Resurrection of the House of Usher
Angela Carter quipped that in the light of Poes enthusiasm for dead and dying
women this essay should by rights, be retitled The Philosophy of Decompos-
ition (487).
2. The final stanza of Annabel Lee reads as follows:
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THE POE-ETICS OF DECOMPOSITION 21