The Survival Theme in Selected Tales of Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

216Notes Conscience (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1971), pp. 23-24, 27-29. 10See: Bell, pp. 119-20; Frederick Crews, The Sim of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 17-24; Daniel Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 131-32, 144-45; John Caldwell Stubbs, The Pursuit of Form:A Study ofHawthorne and the Romance (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1970), pp. 76-77; J. Golden Taylor, Hawthorne's Ambivalence Toward Puritanism (Logan: Utah State Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 26-29; and Hyatt H. Waggoner, ifawthome:A CriticalStudy, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1963), pp. 156-57. "Hoffman, p. 129. 12In Defense of Reason (Denver: Swallow, 1947), p. 170. THE SURVIVAL THEME IN SELECTED TALES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE Julia Wolf Mazow University of Houston Much of the prose fiction of Edgar AUan Poe represents a quest which has survival as its goal, a matter of significance to Poe as man and artist. As the concept occurs in his works, the word does not have its usual connotations. "Survival" most commonly suggests a passive adherence to life. One is said to survive "after the end or cessation of some thing or condition or the occurrence of some event (expressed or implied) Z'1 However, the Latin root, super plus vivere, suggests an ongoing process, a going beyond rather than a passive or static existence following the situation which one survives. David Halliburton approaches this view of Poe's main concern when he says that "a leading goal of Poe's imaginative works is transcendence or 'going beyond'—the making of a bad situation into a good one, the reworking of an adequate poem into a better one, the conquest of decay and death through a theory of indestructible life."2 To survive, within the context of Poe's tales, is greater than to remain alive. Poe's protagonists have survived an outré situation, as he would call it, even one so overwhelming as the strugglewith death itself. The confrontation of character and outré event has been touched upon by critics, Harry Levin, for instance, who believe that Poe's "eagerness to confront the unknown extends to the very brink of the abyss, and beyond it to that undiscovered country from whose bourn, though no Studies in American Fiction217 traveler returns, he may send back desperate messages—manuscriptsin bottles, as it were."3 However, Levin confuses Poe and his protagonists. Using a somewhat different focus, Joel Porte sees "Poe's career" as "emblematic of the underlying aspiration of every American romancer to find a way of exploring the secrets of the human soul."4 Furthermore, paraphrasing R. W. B. Lewis, Porte sees Poe's narrator-protagonists as examples of the American "hero in space," "free—indeed, compeUed— to confront in solitude the ultimates of the universe and his own soul."5 The freedom and the compulsion to recreate and to explore one's experience is reflected in the plots of tales as diverse as "A Descent into the Maelstrom," "Mesmeric Revelation," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "Some Words with a Mummy." As the narrator relates his experience in each instance, he simultaneously guides thereader through the labyrinth of events he has witnessed. Within the tale there may be another figure who guides the narrator; he also may awaken him to the necessity for survival, pointing the way both physicaUy and psychologically. Many of Poe's contemporaries and near-contemporaries also depict figures which represent guidance. In Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, Carwin is the protagonist's guide; inArthurMervyn, theyoung hero becomes his own guide by the end of the second volume; he also becomes the narrator shortly before the conclusion, suggesting that he has internalized the concept of guidance. Hawthorne's Robin in "My Kinsman Major Molineux" is told by his mentor at the end of his story that he may indeed rise without the help of his Kinsman, who has just been led away in tar and feathers; in"Rappaccini's Daughter" Giovanni's "withered guide" is old Lisabetta, who shows him the way into Beatrice's garden. Leatherstocking is...