I found a comic of one of Edgar Allan Poe's stories

While I was on the internet, I discovered an adaptation of one of Mr. Allan poe’s short stories called “Morella”. This was a comic adaptation made by Richard Corben. The comic is very easy to read in terms of vocabulary, but it is not a 100% faithful to Mr.Poe’s version.

Briefly explained, “Morella” is story about reincarnation. The narrator’s wife dies. Her name was Morella. He never loved Morella, who was very intelligent and mystical, even though they have a daughter. After his daughter’s birth, Morella died. Ten years later, the narrator decides to baptized is beloved girl, because she was acquiring the same “darkness” of her mother. On the day of the ceremony, when the clergyman asks for the name of the child, the narrator whispers into the ear of the clergyman “Morella”. When he articulated the name of his dead wife, which had never been said again after her death, his daughter turns into hues of death. After this, He takes his daughter’s dead body to his wife’s tomb and the tomb was empty.

“Morella” can be classified as synthetic tale of Mr. Allan Poe because it has the presence of the supernatural, in this case, reincarnation. This story also has the most intense thing for Alan Poe, which is the death of a woman.

There are some elements that caught my attention in “Morella” and I am going to analyze them

Horror

And then, hour after hour, would I linger by her side, and dwell upon the music of her voice, until at length its melody was tainted with terror, and there fell a shadow upon my soul, and I grew pale, and shuddered inwardly at those too unearthly tones. And thus, joy suddenly faded into horror (Poe, 2)

This horror for the narrator can be interpreted as a fear of the mystical philosophy of Morella (Cummings) or a second vision could be a fear of Morella’s intelligence, which would be a chauvinist vision where a man feels threatened of being inferior of a woman.

Jealous, revenge and reincarnation

Maybe a reason why Morella came back to life was revenge. The source of this revenge could be the lack of love of the narrator to Morella (Cummings) and/or the envy of the narrator of Morella’s intelligence. There is more than one interpretation for reincarnation in this story: I founded a very interesting view of reincarnation, which has to do with a feminist interpretation.

During nineteenth century, women were seen by male authors as: passive, submissive, dependent, in charge of cleaning the house, taking care of children (Alves, 2). Allan Poe gives supernatural powers to woman to return from death to torment the narrator.

Mr. Poe empowers woman through reincarnation in this case in order to condemn misogyny.

Ending

The ending of the story can be understood in different ways, for example:

The narrator was insane and he imagined everything (Cummings).

The body of Morella vanished once her revenge was complete after making suffer the narrator for envy her (Cummings).

All in all, Mr. Poe did not consider himself as a horror writer; he just wanted to show his ideas. In this story, he strikes a controversial topic in society, which is how women are considered and treated in society by men.

References

Michael J. Cummings, 2007:

http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides7/Morella.html

Francisco Francimar de Sousa Alves, 2005:

http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs/index.php/artemis/article/viewFile/2207/1946

Story:

http://pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/morella.pdf

To download the Comic version:

https://kickass.so/edgar-allan-poe-39-s-morella-and-the-murders-in-the-rue-morgue-201-t9209507.html