In Rough Country Read Free

infant, and his mother died when he was three; he was rejected at the age of nineteen by the well-to-do Richmond merchant who’d adopted him; prone to gambling and alcohol he was “withdrawn” from the University of Virginia and expelled from West Point; his cousin-bride Virginia whom he’d married when she was fourteen—and he was twenty-eight—collapsed of a “burst blood vessel” while singing, at the age of twenty, never regained her health and died a few years later. His great achievements— Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque and The Raven and Other Poems (1845)—sold poorly. Though Poe’s work is far from realistic in any external way its Gothic excess is surely a psychological mirror of his beleaguered personal life.
    I was sick—sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at last unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence—the dreadsentence of death—was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. [“The Pit and the Pendulum”]
    In fact it is not merely “I” but an accursed collective “we” of whom Poe speaks:
    We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain…[For] we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore , do we the most impetuously approach it. [“The Imp of the Perverse”]
    (How I identified with such peculiar epiphanies, though I’d never seen an abyss, let alone peered into it; let alone felt myself drawn to its brink! Yet I felt the same sympathy reading this Poe story that I would feel years later reading Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground and the terrifying prophetic tales of Franz Kafka imagined in the years before the Holocaust—a sense of kinship, a predilection for uttering the truth that “will not be comforted.”)
    Though Poe’s prose and poetry are saturated with a kind of high-voltage Gothic sexuality, in fact Poe’s men—and women—(a single female-type)—are asexual as mannequins. They never touch one another—or, if they do, their touch isn’t caressing or provocative but, as in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” fatal as a cobra’s bite. As a literary sensibility, Poe was unapologetically sexist: famous—or infamous—for havingstated explicitly what others assume implicitly, from the most revered Romantic poets to our tabloid cable TV news:
    â€œOf all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death—was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?”…The answer…is obvious—“When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world…” [“The Philosophy of Composition”]
    A woman writer/reader is bemused to discover how very many beautiful dead or near-dead females abound in Poe’s prose and poetry—in fact, there is not a “living” female character in all of Poe, of any significance. The attraction is to the (safely) deceased female from Roderick Usher’s ghastly pale sister Madeleine—one of the “living dead”—and the vampire-like Ligeia to the more innocent child-heroine of “Annabel Lee”—inspiration for Nabokov’s obsessive pedophile Humbert Humbert of Lolita . The Gothic imagination has no interest in, not the slightest awareness of, ordinary women and men and their erotic relations, still less their relations as mature individuals in society. As a woman writer, I make no more or no less of this than it requires: we read our classic writers because they are visionary geniuses,