"I Triumph": Poe as Moralist
Abstract
Abstract
Poe’s short stories frequently are divided into neat categories: (1) tales of ratiocination; (2)
humorous tales; (3) phantasmagorical and science fiction tales; (4) adventure or fantastic voyage
tales; and (5) terror/horror tales. In critical assessments of Poe’s works, though, one never
encounters the category of morality tales, a deficiency which this dissertation hopes to remedy. It
should be noted that tales which fall under the traditional classifications may be situated in this
newest category as well; in point of fact, most of the best-known tales selected for scrutiny in
this essay are regularly deemed horror tales, and the horror ultimately rests in the callous and
calculated inhumanity displayed on the part of the villains who populate these stories. The
murderous fiends who feature in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,”
“The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Cask of Amontillado”(as well as other tales
touched upon briefly, e.g. “Hop-Frog” and “The Imp of the Perverse”) – all owe their inspiration
to Judeo-Christian Scripture, and all are modelled after its verses dealing with the Devil
(especially as given in Genesis 3, Ezekiel 28, Isaiah 14, the Gospels, and the Book of Revelation,
passim). Poe consistently points to the identity of what this paper terms “Lucifer-figures,”
characters exhibiting the sentiments, traits, and deeds associated with Satan in both Christian
literary and religious traditions. These characters are not to be confused with Satan as an actual
figure involved in plot machinations or the exchange of dialogue (e.g. John Milton’s Paradise
Lost). Instead, these are human, all too human individuals having run drastically and defiantly
afoul of the two greatest commandments given in Scripture, characters who exhibit an abject
disregard for both God and their fellow man. For Poe, a malady of the soul is engendered by
over-inflation of the ego, which crowds out both the divine and mortal “Other,” causing the
eventual collapse of the Self into the Self, resulting in madness and the certainty of eternal death:
Who but a madman would think he could do away with God and His Law? Satan, who rebelled
in his pride, and who is condemned to the oblivion of hellish flame. Poe uses madness (mental
imbalance) to signify evil (moral imbalance); importantly, contrary to the contentions of all (yes,
all) other Poe criticism, the madness results from the murders, not the other way around.
Poe achieves a type of “narrative hieroglyphics” by utilizing subtle textual clues which serve as a
semantic cipher: Readers ultimately are reliant upon the King James Version Bible of 1611 as
the code-breaking syllabary necessarily utilized to tease out the moral aspects of his tales. The
undercurrent of a work, that feature so-prized by Poe, is evidenced here in the subtlety of his
moral element. A hieroglyph is a phonetic signifier which functions in the same way as an
alphabetical letter, but it also can symbolize a sacred idea. It has, therefore, an apparent purpose
but also may have a hidden meaning, the association of which is known only to those initiated in
both modes of communication; the “hiero” in hieroglyphics signifies pointing towards the
“higher,” the supernal and the divine. Poe’s clues and message are hidden in plain sight, just as
are Egyptian hieroglyphs and the parables of Jesus, yet they are discoverable and understood
only by readers who have eyes to see, since they have been well versed in both modes. Poe
insists on both original plausibility and fairness in engaging his readership, but he also demands
of them to practice the clever observations employed by Monsieur Dupin in his detective fiction
titled “The Purloined Letter,” in which the object was obvious (in being openly displayed), but
the recognition of its location was not: Poe’s object lesson is on obvious display, but it largely
remains unrecognized while present before us. The undercurrent which feeds all of his morality
tales is that we are called to obey the two greatest commandments handed down in Scripture,
recognizing that the Law of the Most High God is love for Him and for one another—not merely
performing good deeds (which are the fruits of love), but actually loving as the mandated activity
itself (which is the seed which makes those deeds come to fruition); this is the obverse
distinction between wickedness (which is internal) and evil (which is externalized acts).
For Poe, grotesqueries of character (best embodied in the Medieval-era Roman Catholic notion
of the seven deadly sins) are deformities of the soul which result when the wickedness of an
individual proceeds without restraint, in having rejected the buffering elements which help keep
the mind and soul upright, the two greatest commandments. Lucifer-figures are so consumed
with gratification of their own egotistical desires that they crowd out God and Man, thereby
twisting their minds and hearts to so great an extent that they collapse like rotted fruit on the
ground and eventually succumb to the consequences of that rejection. Poe was a traditional
biblical moralist, even though his critics almost universally have failed to recognize the moral
content of his tales. The “heresy of the Didactic” which Poe scorned was not bald allegory or
overt preachiness (both of which he disdained), but an insistence that poetry must be moral; it
was a criticism of form and content, not of intent. Critics who apply this limited principle to all
forms of Poe’s writing are guilty of propounding that Poe advocated art for art’s sake, when
nothing could be further from the truth. For Poe, beauty is the natural province of the poem, truth
is the natural province of criticism, and goodness is the natural province of the tales; taken
together, clues in his prose essays reveal that they amount to height (supernal beauty), depth
(detailed analysis), and breadth (greatest possibility of variety).
This dissertation argues for and hopes to witness the recognition of a novel classification of
Poe’s short stories, that of morality tales. The “Introduction” offers a brief and general
biography, and touches upon how popular misperceptions of Poe the individual and historical
trends or events have impacted critical assessments of his work. It also provides general,
sweeping overviews of cultural and ideological phenomena circulating in his lifetime, the
controversies and manifestations of which likely compelled him to craft his moral tales,
including the contra-biblical and sometimes related aspects of Utopianism, Progressivism,
Pantheism, Romanticism, Utilitarianism, Positivism (with attendant Rationalism, Scientism, and
Materialism), German Idealism, Higher Criticism, and American Transcendentalism. It points
out Poe's heavy debt to the British Neoclassical moral satirists having preceded him, all of whom
draw upon Classical notions of perfect moderation and harmony. The paper contends that Poe
was a visionary, one whose trajectory thinking led him to speculate the disastrous consequences
to ensue for both individuals and human societies willfully departing from the divine mandates
of Scripture, as such apostasy paved the road to Auschwitz. In fact, Poe’s moral content only
can be construed properly and fully through the lens of the Holocaust, for that historical event
embodies the fears he anticipated, and gave substance to them; to argue about the dangers
inherent to theory is one thing, but praxis makes manifest the deadly seriousness of its
consequences. It is for this reason that arguments plainly stated by Holocaust-era biblical
apologist C.S. Lewis are drawn into the essay, for he states explicitly in the social criticism of his
age precisely that which Poe is contending implicitly in his tales, which must also be understood
to be social criticism of dangerous ideologies of his own day. It is also why the post-Holocaust,
biblically-minded literary critic David Hirsch must then be drawn into the discourse of Poe, for
Hirsch demonstrates the connection between the barbarism of Nazi Germany and Communism to
the academic ideologies and cultural theories which helped to make them possible. Hirsch’s
analysis is crucial to understanding the self-wrought catastrophic results against which Poe
warned, because it is the role of the humanities, if taught as grounded on the two greatest
commandments, to preclude such disasters from being visited upon the individual and the
collective of humanity. When one stops to consider that even in the eighteenth century, Friedrich
von Schiller is contending that the Arts will save humanity, one should not readily dismiss the
role which the humanities have to play, historically, in considerations of the beautiful, the true,
the good, and, for Poe, the holy.
The Postmodernism against which Hirsch writes, the poison of Subjectivism against which
Lewis writes, and the vaunting of ego and human agency celebrated by the Kantianism and
Romanticism against which Poe writes—all thee authors offer like criticisms of the lawlessness
and barbarism which ensue when every man seeks to do that which is right in his own eyes, the
description of the anarchical time given in Scripture. Poe understood the “germ” of this
catastrophic trajectory to begin in German metaphysics, and sounds out the cries of alarm against
it; the “disintegration of personality” is a result of its embrace, which, left unchecked by biblical
mandates and standards, results in the disintegration of all human society, hence the apocalyptic
visions in Poe’s works which directly fault the influence of the contra-biblical, anti-biblicism of
the German Idealists. All three authors speak to how righteousness is not possible in the absence
of recognition of fixed standards of good and evil deriving from the Most High God, Man’s ruin
always being the result of Man succumbing to the temptation first recorded in the Edenic
encounter with the Serpent, to be as God. The Devil, in fact, is the seminal Postmodernist.
The chapter entitled “The Lucifer-Figure” demonstrates that Poe was working within a wellestablished tradition by documenting the archetype of the Lucifer-figure in the novels of his
predecessors, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Charles Brockden Brown, as well as in a small
number of tales penned by his contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Films directed by his
successors—the Cohen brothers, the Wachowskis, and Ridley Scott—are drawn into the
discussion, to demonstrate that this tradition of subtle biblical allusions which propound biblical
values remains very much alive, if one only looks for it; not surprisingly, all of these films are
based on stories written by authors of Jewish heritage and/or ancestry (the Cohens and the
Wachowskis), or by those sympathetic to Jews (Philip K. Dick), since it is the ethical tradition
handed down to the ancient Israelites, being Judaic first and foremost and then only Christian
latterly. It also points out the similar means by which these characters are conveyed, as well as
makes the argument that Poe had been no less a traditional biblical moralist than had been the
others, especially relevant since Poe consistently is posited as being contrary to Hawthorne in
this regard. Poe is squarely posited in the middle of this tradition, thus examples are culled from
both his predecessors and successors, in order to demonstrate that his works are perfectly in line
with those which explore moral issues and propound biblical values, therefore to deny his
moralism would be illogical. The “Review of the Literature” chapter examines critical
assessments of Poe from his own lifetime to the present, offering common areas of agreement
but also pointing out general misconceptions and particular errors therein. The subsequent five
chapters consist of one each devoted to the five tales afore-named, in which documentation of
the presence of the Lucifer-figure is given special attention, and at times, even his foil, the
Christ-figure. The final chapter, the “Conclusion,” offers a summary of the major points, traits,
textual clues, and motives offered in making the contention that Poe’s subtle use of biblical text
and Christian tradition consistently point to his being a traditional biblical moralist, albeit via
unconventional focus on the villains instead of the victims: We are not meant to have sympathy
for the Devil, and Poe’s prophetic message to Mankind is to avoid Satan’s fate by avoiding his
conduct and any self-deluded, inflated opinions about his (or our) true nature. The “radical
Democracy” against which Poe warned, and which he heavily derided in his apocalyptic tales
and mocked in his prose essay from 1848, Eureka, was the Postmodern levelling of the
hierarchical distinctions between the biblical tripartite entities of God, Man, and the World, for
Poe best typified in the American Transcendentalist camp which bought into the dangerous
foreign ideologies of the Germans, the British, and the French. Poe’s moral insistence should be
understood primarily as his opposition to German metaphysics, in terms of philosophical and
religious posits, which taken together challenged the grounding of ethics, situating them in the
Self or the Collective Self, which Poe believed instead correctly derived from the revealed
religion of Judeo-Christian Scriptures.
This dissertation also speaks to the methodologies by which Poe’s works must be assessed if the
moral content is to be teased out of them, specifically addressing the short-comings of Freudian
analyses and the woeful “scholarship” evidenced in Postmodern Deconstructionist and ReaderResponsist “interpretations,” which are pseudo-analytical at best. It validates reliance on Cultural
Historicism for the context, and Formalism’s approach of New Criticism for the text. Contrary to
the claims of Postmodern theorists, Poe’s works do contain inherent morality and intentional
meaning, evidenced by the consistent patterning of the works addressed in this paper. By his own
clever-albeit-subtle admission, Poe meant for his messaging to be understood. If Poe’s work is to
be understood properly, then it must be read through the personality of Poe, through a constant
mindfulness of his innate and irrepressible sense of humor and his biblically-derived moral
inclination, for those aspects of his personality and psyche are so integrated and ingrained within
him (internal factors) that even the ceaseless barrage of disappointments, heartaches, alienations,
and frustrations, and the poverty, pettiness, slander, and malice directed against his person
having contributed to the “mournful and never ending sorrow” of the circumstances of his life
(external factors) could not wholly eradicate those twin sails by which he navigated the rough
waters of his life, regardless of the ocean of salted tears they warranted.