“Darkness There and Nothing More”: Edgar Allan Poe and the Popular Culture of Necrolatry and Thanatography

Abstract

This chapter explores the social and cultural contexts of death and the influence of mourning, consolatory literature, necrolatry and thanatography in Edgar A. Poe’s “Berenice,” “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In these tales of horror, Poe reflects on the social fascination with death and mourning in nineteenth-century American popular culture. Those social practices emerged and developed as a consequence of the death of children, infants and young women at an early age, as well as to the fact that intramural churchyards were replaced by rural cemeteries. Poe not only explored the impact of these social realities in his own vital experience, but he was also aware of the popular ritual expressions to this human reality. In these Gothic tales, Poe depicts an attraction for symbolically resurrecting the dead through the sublimation of what I call “the fetishistic synecdoche” (hair, eyes, teeth, bosom, smile, curls, countenance). Poe created his tales of horror for the mass audience and, at the same time, established a trans-cultural dialogue with his readership about necrolatry, using all sorts of symbols and rhetorical imagery for the representation of death. With these textual strategies, the American writer signified the Victorian’s fascination with death and mourning, and engaged the antebellum popular audiences.