Religious Satire and Poe's “Angel of the Odd”

Abstract

In his 1844 tale “The Angel of the Odd,” 1 Edgar Allan Poe tells the story of the drunken narrator’s visitation from an “Angel,” who proceeds to torment him with a series of odd incidents that upset his expectations of ordinary life. Conventionally read as an attack on the reign of reason,2 the tale also contains numerous references to the Christian tradition. Cataloging the biblical references in the Poe corpus, William Forrest establishes in Biblical Allusions in Poe that “The Angel of the Odd” indeed contains several allusions to the Old Testament, but he ignores any to the New Testament.3 As the present essay will show, however, connections to the New Testament and Christian institutions abound as part of the tale’s interest in satirizing both. Like the New Testament, “The Angel of the Odd” tells a story of unbelief versus belief. While the biblical text concerns itself foremost with how its characters respond to Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah, Poe’s tale describes how the narrator responds to the antics of the Angel of the Odd. Although he exhorts the narrator to stop drinking alcohol so heavily, the Angel’s real interest lies in trying to arrest the narrator’s reason in order to make room for the incredible, or the “odd”; yet the manner in which the Angel inculcates these lessons colors them in hues common to the Christian tradition.4 “The Angel of the Odd,” then, functions on two levels: On its upper level, the tale parallels the New Testament; its characters, images, and motifs, by way of analogy, evoke certain features of that text while also probing its implications for human life. On an underlying level, the grotesque qualities of “The Angel of the Odd”—its comedic and profane suggestions—twist and destabilize the religious parallels. Thus, the analogues become satirical comments on religion, at first lighthearted then progressively more serious. Many writers of Poe’s day, responding to the broad spirit of reform that suffused antebellum American society, sought to correct human behavior by representing the grave consequences of profligacy, but they did so in stylistically restrained prose that maintained a safe distance from the vices they condemned. However, other reform writers, David Reynolds observes, “described vice in such lurid detail that they themselves were branded as dangerously immoral or sacrilegious.”5 Poe was not a reform writer in the sense