he sources of Poe’s alienation lay in the personal traumas that affected his early life. Some scholars, however, have proposed instead an alleged disenchantment with his honor-conscious culture. To be sure, as a white and privileged Southerner he was naturally reared in the atmosphere of gentility and under the rubric of honor. The customs of the country required that Southern aspirants to high status possess a strong sense of manhood. But also the code of gentle society entailed a dread of shame for failing to match heroic expectations. To exhibit an appearance of cowardice would not only ruin one’s personal reputation but the family’s standing as well. Poe embraced these principles of Southern life, and he never showed any interest in the antislavery movement of the antebellum period. At the same time, he recognized his social and moral inadequacy by the standards of current respectability.

The reasons for that self-loathing, as it came to be, arose from his sad, unlucky childhood. Poe not only lost both parents but was reared by a foster father who entirely misunderstood his charge and his urgent needs for reassurance and affection. Edgar's natural father, David Poe, Jr., had given up a law career in his native Baltimore to marry Elizabeth, also known as Eliza, a popular actress. He joined her profession—a decision that itself was a social declension in that rank-conscious world. Still worse, David Poe was not even good in his new, unrespectable vocation. As one critic advised, his talents should have limited him to play footmen and nothing grander. Moreover, whatever his dramatic deficiencies were, he scarcely made up for them in his domestic conduct. David Poe was usually in debt, probably faithless, and often "indisposed," as theatrical folk preferred to label the drive for drink. His irascibility matched his other failings. In a surviving note to a cousin, from whom he demanded but failed to receive a loan, David Poe asked whether he "was to be despised by (as I understand) a rich relation because when a wild boy I join'd a profession which I … now think an honorable one." It would seem that Edgar Poe's future woes with money and alcohol had been foreshadowed in the even briefer public life of his parent.

Genetics might have a part in Poe’s problems with depression, an inheritable condition that one can only infer in the absence of modern clinical verification. It does seem, however, likely that Poe’s father was afflicted with that mental state of mind and that such a predisposition affected his sons. Both Edgar and his brother William Henry Leonard Poe showed signs of a similar constitution. In any event, to make matters worse, the father absconded in late July 1810 when Edgar was just eight months old. His disappearance reduced the family to still more abject penury and social declension. Mother Elizabeth had to rely on her acting skill when life in the early American theater was a study in poverty, discrimination, and even contempt. When a Richmond theater caught fire and killed seventy-two patrons, the religious folk of the town considered the tragedy a just punishment from God. Throughout their married life, the Poes, like many others on the stage, had been compelled to hold benefits—basically charity gatherings—to survive.

Unable to spend her time simply caring for her babies, Eliza had assumed more than two hundred roles. With "wide-open mysterious eyes" and thick, raven curls, she was a versatile and popular actress, but we know little of her family’s medical and emotional history. Reared in an English stage family, Elizabeth had lost her father when she was only two and her mother when she was just nine. The early losses, though, seemed not to have diminished her spirits. Poe’s inheritance from her was less a predisposition to madness than a tendency toward theatricality, a kind of dramatic narcissism. Even if that trait has no biological roots, certainly Eliza’s life story, as others told her son about it, would have its effects on his sense of who he was.

That biography did have adventurous qualities. At fifteen, Eliza married a teenage actor named Charles Hopkins, but, rendered a widow several years later, she remarried, to David Poe. The newlyweds took parts in Boston productions and then joined a Richmond troupe. With a natural presence and strong singing voice, Eliza was by far the greater success of the two. A critic gushed, "On the first moment of her entrance on the Richmond boards, she was saluted with plaudits of admiration, and at no one moment has her reputation sunk." After David Poe, a failure on and off the stage, vanished, she would act in a dreary and taxing succession of towns as far south as Charleston, with Edgar and baby Rosalie in tow (Henry had been left behind with grandparents in Baltimore). When she became desperately ill, the family returned to Richmond, where in 1811 there occurred the crisis that would shape Poe’s character more than anything else in his life. In early November at Mrs. Osborne’s boardinghouse Elizabeth lay dying of pulmonary tuberculosis—what was then called phthisis or spitting blood. Luke Noble Usher and his wife, a name little Edgar never forgot, and other stage friends sadly attended the dying actress. In the midst of the deathbed scene, the children, "thin and pale and very fretful," as a contemporary reported, could be quieted only by a liberal feeding of bread soaked in gin, laudanum, and other spirits so that they might sleep. An old nurse, who continued in service to the children for years thereafter, steadily applied such ministrations as a way, she said, "to make them strong and healthy." Elizabeth Poe died on December 8, with Edgar taken into the room to see his "sleeping," emaciated mother's cadaver for the last time. Apparently he was allowed to remain with the corpse the entire night and was separated only in the morning.

That occasion left a sensation if not an actual memory that lingered forever in his mind. An ashen corpse would become a familiar image in his writing. Only several months more than two years old, the child had no means to verbalize such a loss at the time. Art, however, can prove a creative memorial of past tragedy. The living corpses of "The Premature Burial" and the animated dead in "The House of Usher" and "The Case of M. Valdemar" had a clear relationship to Poe's early acquaintance with terror, grief, and a sense of abandonment. Union with the dead seemed more real than love in flesh and blood. The closing stanza of Annabel Lee reads: "And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side / Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, / In the Sepulchre there by the sea, /In her tomb by the sounding sea."

According to psychoanalyst Robert Jay Lifton, early anxiety of parental separation has a deeply morbid effect on the child. He argues, "Separation is the paramount threat from the beginning of life and can give rise, very early, to the rudiments of anxiety and mourning." Particularly during the second half of a child's second year (Poe's age when his mother died), the child, once exposed to death of human beings or even animals, finds in sleep, in pain, in cuts and bruises what Lifton calls "death equivalents." Within a year or two more, "the child shapes an increasingly formed notion of being or becoming dead." Lifton might have used Poe's tales to illustrate how the adult may reconstruct the past in metaphor, symbol, and situation through imagery of horror and loss. Lifton continues, "The child now ruminates in endless detail about people who had 'gone away for good.'" They have died by some act of violence—a burning house, falling walls, or sadistic doctoring. Or else they have become "permanently still, 'asleep for good' because," Lifton asserts, "they can't breathe anymore.'"

oe would spend his life writing about loss in exactly Lifton's terms. He dreaded the thought of dying but also of losing hold of those upon whom he depended. When he was six years old, Poe's hysteria emerged in a dramatic way. The little boy was traveling on horseback with his favorite uncle, Edward Valentine. As they approached Staunton, Virginia, the pair passed a forlorn-looking family cemetery. The child, riding behind, shrieked uncontrollably. Uncle Edward moved him in front to hold him tight. "They will run after us and drag me down into their graves," the boy wailed. He had heard of such malevolent ghosts from the black servants, but the roots of his distress ran much deeper.

The kind of anger, remorse, guilt, and dread that Poe was later to exhibit in his adulthood years parallels the nightmarish imaginings of any child in mourning—a fear of being abandoned and swallowed up in the earth. D. W. Winnicott, the British psychiatrist and pediatrician, offers the case of Peter, an eleven-year-old boy. He had been brought to him for analysis. While sailing with his son, the father had drowned, but Peter had luckily survived the accident. After several sessions, the lad reported a complicated and terrifying dream in which he entered a church where three coffins rested. A body from one of them arose as a ghost with a waxen face that looked as if it had been the victim of a drowning. Did the ghost intend to return him to a scene of death from which Peter had miraculously escaped? Whether the fantasies were happy or fearsome, as Winnicott, John Bowlby, Lifton, and others suggest, the child's forlorn hope of fashioning something credible or at least expressive of inner thoughts may be the seeds of later creativity.

To deal with the emotional turmoil, the child Poe could not have looked for succor from his father David. Poe later told his friend the novelist Nathaniel Beverley Tucker that within weeks after his mother passed away, his father David had followed her to the grave, the second victim of consumption. Long since departed from his wife's side, he never had any sustained relationship with his three children. Nor did Poe's adoptive family offer steady comfort to Edgar, grieving for his mother. At age twenty-five the beautiful but childless Frances Allan and her up-and-coming merchant husband John took Edgar to their ample house and met his material needs. The William Mackenzies, another Richmond family, adopted Poe's sister Rosalie. Rumor had it that Rosalie was not the daughter of Elizabeth’s wayward husband but rather a consequence of the mother’s adultery. Within a few days, the Allans had the Reverend John Buchanan christen the child Edgar Allan, adding their name as emblem of his new status.

As he grew up, Poe showed signs of his later melancholy. The household itself was marked by gloom. Frances Allan was remembered by friends for her hypochondria and "habitual pessimism." Poe could be imperious, unapproachable, solitary, shunning friends and wandering off by himself. One contemporary reminisced that he was often "singularly unsociable in manner." Another remembered that, presenting always the "same sad face," young Poe "laughed heartily" and, when he did, it "seemed to be forced." In his mid-teens, Poe was much attracted to the beauty, musical voice, and charm of a fellow schoolmate's mother, Jane Stanard, wife of a future judge. She supplied him with maternal comfort. Unfortunately she suffered from severe depression, which had been growing worse when she suddenly died. Her demise seemed almost a repetition of the death of his mother, whom this young matron had replaced in Poe's affections. In 1831 he published a poem, "To Helen," that suggests how deeply he grieved:

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.

In these memorable lines, Marie Bonaparte sees intimations of Poe's "mournful return to the mother, who, for him, would always be one who was dying or dead." As the biographer observes, Poe's lifelong conviction about the nature of love was summarized in a couplet he wrote when just twenty: "I could not love except where Death / Was mingling his with Beauty's breath."

John Allan. Poe's foster father. (Courtesy of the Poe Museum.)

Deprived of a fully satisfactory relationship with Fanny Allan, his surrogate mother, Poe was even more estranged from his selfish and unloving foster father. John Allan added little to domestic happiness in his household, through his widely rumored infidelity. Although a submissive child in his early years, Poe turned rebellious in his teens, much to his foster father's vexation. Little did he understand how hard Poe, then fourteen, had taken the death of Jane Stanard. Even if sympathetically called upon to do so, Poe himself might have been unable to articulate his feelings. In 1824 Allan confided to Edgar's elder brother Henry, that Edgar "does nothing & seems quite miserable, sulky & ill-tempered to all the Family." He continued, "The boy possesses not a spark of affection for us, not a particle of gratitude for all my care and kindness toward himself." Further adding to Edgar's unhappiness, Fanny Allan was herself a semi-invalid, "never clear of complaint," as her husband once declared.

Allan’s attitude toward his foster son was shaped in part by his own experience with an elder. A mean-spirited uncle had put Allan early to work in his Richmond store rather than permitting him a chance for schooling. Certain of his own forbearance, Allan claimed to have given Edgar a better education than he had himself received. Still worse, Allan complained, Poe was too self-centered to show even the barest affection for his sister. "If Rosalie has to relie on any affection from him," the disgruntled father added, "God in his mercy preserve her." His sister was emotionally and perhaps mentally handicapped, and unlike the affectionate relationship between the early-orphaned Rudyard Kipling and his sister, Edgar never warmed to Rosalie. Yet only a few doors separated them in their youthful years in Richmond. "Edgar could never love me as I do him," Rosalie once sighed, "because he is so far above me." She died in a shelter for the homeless in Washington in 1874 and was buried in a pauper's grave.

Poe's relationship with Allan deteriorated when he began his first year at the University of Virginia. Notwithstanding his ward's excelling in language studies—German, French, Italian, and Latin—John Allan refused to pay off a mounting accumulation of debts that Poe incurred. American university life, particularly at Charlottesville, was more expensive than the noncollegiate Scotsman understood. Only seventeen and immature when he entered college, Edgar made matters worse with his own extravagances of fancy waistcoats, "Best Gilt Buttons," and gambling. As the adopted son of a Scottish merchant and the son of an actress, Poe may have been highly sensitive to his social inferiority to other young gentlemen of the planter class.

Less than a year after Poe entered Virginia, Allan refused to pay for any more semesters. Lenders pursued the student back to Richmond. Threatened with warrants and arrest and receiving no help from Allan, Poe broke with his foster father, whom he claimed to have overheard saying that he "had no affection for me." Poe's reaction was constantly to test his father's love and concern. Invariably he showed an emotionality that the old Scotsman found highly disturbing. He sometimes tried to hurt Allan's feelings—"Your love I never valued." On other occasions he cried for either love or funds—or both. These commodities Poe claimed to need urgently. Away from home, he grew desperate: "I am in the greatest distress and have no other friend on earth to apply to except yourself." A month later, he tried again only more strenuously. He begged Allan "not to leave me to perish without leaving me still one resource." Allan's answer was usually to send small aid but to give no sign of love. As a result, Poe constantly had before him the remembrance of his inadequacy and loss.

In fighting his guardian, Poe was acutely conscious that, insofar as Allan was concerned, he was dishonoring his parents and himself. That angry crossing of conventional boundaries—subjecting the family to the whispers of neighbors—became one of the most important tropes in his stories. In so many of them, he dwells on the delights of vengeance for the sake of personal gratification and

"Redemption, grace, salvation—these Christian principles that permit a sense of hope and release—almost never appear in his work, . . ."

honor, but almost always shame for the misdeeds overwhelms the narrator. The use of aristocratic and medieval settings for posing such issues was a clear signal of how deeply Poe was immersed in the tenets of honor and shame. A single story, "Metzengerstein," sufficiently illustrates the point. The tale concerns a young baron, Frederick von Metzengerstein of Hungary, whose parents had died when he was a mere infant. Totally self-absorbed, the haughty and friendless recluse indulges in every sort of debauchery (not described) and form of cruelty. The baron victimizes his servants. At the climax of his atrocities, he conspires to have the stable of a rival noble family, the Berlifitzings, set afire. As the flames mount, Frederick, seated in his hall, notices that a great, curiously marked horse in an ancient tapestry has turned toward him and come alive. He leaps from the room in panic to encounter his equerries at the gate. They are barely able to hold a horse of similar temper, a fugitive from the raging conflagration nearby. The servants at Castle Berlifitzing disclaim ever having seen the horse before, even though it is marked with the letters W. V. B. on its forehead, the initials of the old Count Berlifitzing. One evening Metzengerstein awakes to ride into the forest on his mount. In his absence, his castle, like that of his enemy, is fiercely engulfed by fire, and the domestics cannot extinguish the inferno. The horse and rider return. At a fierce gallop that the baron cannot halt, the powerful steed bears its dissolute master into the heart of the fire itself.

Little imagination is required to identify the horse as a metaphor denoting Authority, indifferent and cruel. It may have been just retribution for the baron’s sins, but punishment of the self was part of the emotional pattern that Poe both illustrated in his stories and felt as a man. Redemption, grace, salvation—these Christian principles that permit a sense of hope and release—almost never appear in his work, and they certainly do not emerge in this story. At the base of the matter was Poe’s resentment of John Allan, but the fictional horse might be called a screen image, a double representation of both a child’s anger and patriarchal willfulness. In this story as in others, Poe creates a setting of romanticized aristocracy. He did so not only because such representations fit the popular mode of the Gothic but also because Poe himself saw himself in a similar light—a nobleman shamed but rebelliously proud to the point of self-destruction. Son of a drunkard, grandson of a Revolutionary hero (who had fallen into bankruptcy in later years), Poe was in a sense recapitulating in Gothic terms his familial biography. An imagined revenge against the foster father was a form of release for the writer. Yet Count Berlifitzing, the emblem of a senior’s power over the young, would always win in the end or at least his own death would signify the demise of the son.

Likewise in the better-known story "The Cask of Amontillado," Poe has Montresor seek vengeance against Fortunato for the "thousand injuries" he has had to bear. They are unnamed, but the language betokens the impulses behind the Southern cavalier conventions of the challenge and duel. Both names, Montresor and Fortunato, mean practically the same thing so that there is the sense of doubleness of identity. Victim and persecutor are almost interchangeable. One is full of malice, and the other is a drunken sot, easily beguiled. The mandates of honor and shame are thus not so clearly differentiated but together perform a partnered dance of defiance and death. Montresor had always turned the other cheek, or so he claims, as Poe liked to think he did in relation to his foster father John Allan. The narrator "vowed revenge" because of the "thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could." Poe assumed that his readers shared his presumptions and would intuit why the narrator Montresor felt justified and why insults made such behavior acceptable. One may speculate that Poe expected his audience to accept Montresor's logic of the decision. At the same time, readers would justly think the narrator obsessional to the point of insanity.

Even in the fiction of "The Cask of Amontillado," however, Poe would not confront the father directly. There are no fathers or sons anywhere in the Poe stories or poems. In spite of this absence, the desire to "punish with impunity" represents the wishes of the resentful child against the powerful parent. It is scarcely a wonder that Poe’s most avid readers are those in their teenage years. In the story, before Fortunato's death, the transgressor must come to see the error of his ways. Montresor entices his "friend" into the family crypt, lined with bones, underneath his mansion to taste from the pipe of Amontillado. "‘I drink,’ I said, ‘to the buried dead that repose around us.’" Abruptly, he chains his besotted nemesis to the side of the damp vault. With a mason's trowel Montresor walls up the captive. Fortunato fusses at first but then falls silent after desperately crying "For the love of God, Montresor!" The last sound that the narrator hears is the jingle of Fortunato's fool's bells on the cap of his carnival costume. The silence that follows breaks the once playful bond and exchange between them. "My heart grew sick—because of the dampness of the catacombs." The explanation rings hollow. Instead, we are to understand at the end that the avenger has gained from his act little "satisfaction." That word was a dueling term almost uniformly invoked to demand vindication on the field of honor for insult. Montresor has become a psychological victim of his crime. He is no less a prisoner of his deed than his victim is. He must constantly revisit the horror in his recollection fifty years afterward in confession to the reader. The tangle of identities and issues of dishonor, anger, contrition with which Poe coped with his filial concerns fell under his artistic control in a masterful way.

(More, to Part 3 of 3)

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