Among the Poe and Hawthorne stories we read this week, which one did you find disturbing and why? If you found none of them at all disturbing, why didn’t you, since to unsettle seems to be at least part of their intent? All of them call upon the 19th-century concept of monomania, but how is Hawthorne’s “Wakefield” different from Poe’s “Berenice” or “Ligeia” in its portrayal of it? You don’t, of course, need to address all of these questions in your brief post.
9 thoughts on “Poe and Hawthorne”
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I found “Young Goodman Brown” to be the most disturbing. You’d think I’d have gotten used to it by now, having had to read it for a few different classes at this point, but in reality, the more I read it, the more problematic it becomes. Why is that? I think that in Poe’s stories, there is always a closeness between the narrator and the character that creates a certain distance between myself (as the reader) and the characters of the story. What I mean is this: in Poe’s stories, I don’t necessarily have to consider how the story might relate to me. Although I’m inside the narrator’s head, so to speak, I am also aware that it’s definitely not my head, which means that I can immerse myself in the story and just be along for the ride. Once I come to the end of the story, it becomes easy to dismiss it on the grounds of its being something disturbing that happened inside someone else’s head. In Hawthorne’s stories however, the detachment of the narrator invites the reader to engage in a mental dialogue which from my end goes something like this: why, why, why?? And because that question is never answered, it sticks with me. I’m not saying that I don’t ask “why” of Poe’s characters; I definitely do. But because the narrator and character are the same in the Poe stories we’ve read, there isn’t room to discuss one with the other. “Young Goodman Brown” forces the reader to acknowledge the ambiguity of the situation: did Goodman Brown witness the midnight séance, or didn’t he? Is everyone masquerading as innocent, or are they actually innocent? The fact that these questions have no immediate answer necessitates further thought and, of course, sometimes the conclusions we draw are disturbing in and of themselves. They often reveal as much about the reader as they do of the characters.
I am interested by Millie and Emory’s point about how the distance between the narrator and the protagonist in “Wakefield” might amplify the reader’s unease, thus rendering the story more unsettling. I appreciate the fact that, when we, as readers, are presented with what we deem to be all the facts, we can fill this distance with the most disturbing corners of our imaginations. I did not, however, find myself as compelled to fill in gaps in “Wakefield” as I did in either Poe’s narratives. In “Wakefield,” the narrator seemed to know and understand the protagonist, and I trusted the narrator. I could empathize with Wakefield and relate to some of his struggles. He seemed to me a troubled soul who was unable to fully account for his unordinary actions – but I imagined that to be the extent of the short stories’ disturbance. If there had been more to it, I imagined the narrator would have told us. Conversely, in both “Ligeia” and “Berenice,” the narrators are completely untrustworthy, and I was unable to relate to their obsessive tendencies. Moreover, the storylines (disturbing in their own rights) have large gaps that the reader is obliged to fill in order to understand the narrative. How did Liegeia come back to life? Why did Lady Rowena die? How did Aegeus acquire the teeth? We are given snapshots of the two narrators’ frames of mind – just large enough that the full manifestations of their disturbing personalities remain unknown, yet imaginable.
To reference Meredith’s earlier point, I found Hawthorne and Poe’s stories to be disturbing in entirely different ways. The Hawthorne stories seemed more to be about larger social commentary than the “madness” of an individual. They are situated in society, unlike the stories of Poe in which the protagonist is truly the only human, their character of obsession functioning more like an object. This sense of solitude and complete internal struggle that Poe elicits in Berenice and Ligeia are the most unsettling to me personally. There is no indication that they could be in a larger society like Goodman Brown or the Minister are. The only exception to this difference between the authors is Hawthorne’s Wakefield that approaches the same feeling as do Poe’s pieces. As Millie and Emory observe, his internal and external worlds are severed, leaving the character unsituated in all regards. Wakefield’s apartment, the narrator of Ligeia’s bridal chamber in a distant turret, and the narrator of Berenice’s library chamber all manifest physical separation akin to the mental and social separation you can sense in the character. I think this total physical isolation cultivates a stronger sense of mental entrapment, and that is the most disturbing.
Of all of these stories, the most disturbing for me were both Ligeia and Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe. In both of these stories, it is clear that the narrator has an incredibly obsessive personality, although I think that they both act on their obsessiveness in different ways. In Ligeia, I find it incredibly disturbing that the narrator claims to love Ligeia, and that Ligeia was a very knowledge person, but cannot actually remember anything that she said to him. He can only seem to focus on her eyes. What’s even more messed up is that he claims that Ligeia’s “devotion amounted to idolatry”, which I find really ironic, because I would definitely consider him the one idolizing her. I actually find it even more messed up that the narrator then focuses only on the his bridal chamber, instead of any of the features on his second wife. (Like her eyes also!) This is why I actually think that he poisoned Rowena, but just doesn’t remember poisoning her.
The narrator in Berenice definitely has a lot of the same obsessive tendencies as the narrator in Ligeia. The author both glorifies his cousin’s life while viewing his life as not as great. Specifically, he focuses on her pristine teeth as his main object of obsession. Unlike in Legeia, this narrator knows that he suffers from monomania. This is why I find it more disturbing that he doesn’t realize that he has yanked out all of his cousin’s teeth, until someone comes in and questions him.
I found myself most disturbed by Hawthorne’s “Wakefield”. As Emory puts it, the troubling discrepancy between the external and the internal world of a person is a disturbing idea that Hawthorne puts forth in his piece. It inspires an unsettling wariness in one’s regard for seemingly ‘normal’ company. What furthermore makes me feel this way about “Wakefield” is the distance that is afforded between the narrator and the protagonist (of which there is none in Poe’s stifling first-person narratives). I find that this distance has my imagination needing to fill in the gaps; something done only by placing myself in Wakefield’s shoes and attempting to formulate an internal monologue of my own to suit my imagined version of the protagonist’s inner workings. Having to provide your own monomaniac voice (as opposed to having it provided for you like in the two Poe pieces) is, to me, more disturbing an experience to have as a reader.
I also found myself most disturbed by “Berenice.” Like Nina I found myself sympathizing with Egaeus. I felt myself feeling bad as he describes the illness that affected his life, making him “buried in gloom’. Throughout the piece, I was struck by how aware Egaeus was of the symptoms of his monomania. I particularly liked when he explains, “In one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum or first cause of his musings entirely vanished and forgotten”. Due to this ability to describe how his thoughts run wild, I was shocked when he loses himself and does not remember taking the teeth. I think this made the writing the most disturbing for me. The fact that Egaeus could know his disease, explain how his obsessions lead him to wild daydreams, but this information can not save him
I definitely see where Meredith is coming from, and I certainly won’t try to argue that the actions of the Egaeus character aren’t disturbing, but I was actually vaguely comforted by Egaeus’ separation from himself. To me, I felt myself almost feeling bad for him, partially because the shock and terror he experiences after realizing what he has done is so sympathetic.
“Ligeia,” by contrast, was to me more creepy in its context. The premise of a man alone, high on opium, with the body of his dead wife (and perhaps the spirit of his former wife) was far more disturbing to me. I imagine a lot of my experience with the text is clouded by my contemporary judgement, but I couldn’t help feeling almost impatient with or frustrated by the protagonist in that story.
I definitely agree with Meradith’s argument about Berenice being the most disturbing, particularly in the portion where Poe writes about not looking out of admiration, but out of analysis. For argument’s sake, though, I believe Wakefield was a different type of disturbing. The idea of someone you live with and care about disappearing out of blue is a pretty jarring thought. More so, it is worrisome to consider that someone you may know very well could be completely different on the inside, susceptible to snapping at any point. Wakefield addresses an always looming question about whether or not you truly know someone.
I personally found “Berenice” the most disturbing out of Poe and Hawthorne’s stories. While Hawthorne’s stories can be disturbing, they seem to focus on a larger allegory or moral — such as Christianity, or deceit in the Church. I find most of Poe’s stories disturbing, but “Berenice” really took the topic of monomania to new levels. The way Poe writes, the reader can hear the obsession in his voice. The narrator in the story often repeats himself, and uses strong imagery. He uses specific details in his description, especially in terms of light and dark, and the imagination. The detailed imagery becomes grotesque when the Egaeus becomes obsessed with Berenice’s teeth. The end of the story is definitely the most shocking and grotesque, when Egaeus realizes he has pulled all 32 teeth out of his assumed-dead finance; however, I found the way the narrator seems to speak with such a detached, selfish mindset the most disturbing part of the story. When describing his younger life, the narrator explains he was taken over by illness, yet Berenice still loves him, though she is bright and lively. Egaeus explains he was never in love with her, but was instead fixated with her, like an obsession with an object (monomania). The way he writes reminds me of how I imagine a sociopath would think.