Poe’s Women: His Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance
By Tonja Cox
Edgar Allan Poe’s writings embody what appears to be his lifelong obsession with what he termed mournful and never-ending remembrance of those taken too early by the cruel claws of death. Many of his poems and tales depict striking women, too beautiful for this earth, suffering from a wasting disease as a maddened narrator looks on helplessly. A woman dying young was not unusual in the 1800s, and authors frequently used this subject as the basis for their creative works. However, Poe’s tales go much further than the sad telling of a life lost too soon. Poe’s autobiographical writings from a tortured, love-starved psyche, combined with his skill at propagating rumors about himself, assure him a place in history as an author more famous for his own desperate life than for his brilliant works.
The grave cannot hold back the women in Poe’s stories; they return to their lovers through other bodies, haunting the dark recesses of gloomy mansions where the suffering narrators await a reunion with their supernal beauties. Other poems and tales take the narrator into the tomb to reunite with his obsessive love. Considering the vast amount of supposedly true biographical information that has been published about Poe’s life, many stories perpetuated by Poe himself, it is impossible to ignore the parallels between Poe and his maddened, drunken, drug-addicted narrators or those between the supernal beauties of his stories, and his mother, foster mother, close friend Jane Stanard, and child-bride cousin Virginia. Whether Poe purposely created these parallels is unknown. It is likely “some of them were the result of subconscious creation, no more deliberate than the psychological parallels with his own experiences. Yet both are there…(Broussard 96).
Edgar Allan Poe wrote, in his Philosophy of Composition, “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the...