The disintegration of the self

 The brilliant Edgar Allan Poe is commonly known as a horror writer. We can’t deny that he wrote many spooky stories about unnatural phenomena, but we also have to acknowledge that he was writing beyond those superficial stories.

In "The Poetic Principle’’ he stated that meaning in literature should be an undercurrent just beneath the surface. Works with obvious meanings, he wrote, ‘’cease to be art’’.

But what was Poe writing about?

He basically wrote about the disintegration of the self. He developed the concept of division of the self way before Freud.  Poe can be seen as a dark reflection of America. We can contrast his vision with Whitman’s.

First, we have that Whitman talked about greatness, brightness, positivism and a sense of expansiveness of America. Whitman constructed an epic of America. On the contrary, Poe talked about the implosive nature of the individual and the darkness.

Poe is instead looking at the present and a bright future he went to the past. He thought indoors.   In contrast, Whitman was all about expansion.  Edgar thought of the human soul to be infinite, stating that the true space in not a physical one, is inner one.

 Poe said that Americans needed everything that they were surrounded by a world full of materiality, but in the inside human beings were confronted to emptiness, confronted to be Americans. He put emphasis that people were   forgetting what it was to be human.

 We can see this idea of disintegration of the self in The Fall of House of Usher. The disintegration of the self-expands, to the disintegration of the sense of reality. While reading we have the feeling of reading another reality, a fantasy.  The integrity of the usher’s is collapsing at the same time that the house collapses.  There’s a collapse of the sense reality.

References

http://www.nps.gov/archive/edal/index1.html

This site provides information about Edgar Allan Poe's House in Philadelphia, things that he wrote there, and other interesting information about his life.

http://www.eapoe.org/

This is the site of the Edgar Allan Poe society which contains useful pointers to other Poe resources including their newsletter, other links, and works.

http://www.poedecoder.com/Qrisse/

This site is an index to finding a great deal out about the life of Edgar Allan Poe. The links lead to more information.

http://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poechron.htm

This site provides a comprehensive chronology of Edgar Allan Poe's life, ending with his induction into the Hall of Fame in New York.