The Living Poe Girl

Gazing at the Prototype

Edgar Allan Poe is known for many things: his grotesque horror, his flights of fancy, his progenitor detective, and his scientific authenticity. Laced between those tropes is an iconic specter. There’s the Lost Lenore, the chilled and killed Annabel Lee, the artless Eleonora, or as I like to collectively call them, the Poe Girls.

Stemming from Poe’s aesthetic belief that “… the death…of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (“The Philosophy of Composition), her common image is that of an invalid beauty cut down in her prime whose ghost either haunts her lover out of revenge and anger or out of a desire to comfort. Whatever their motives, Poe Girls share one common trait—“that, like the ephemeron, she had been made perfect in loveliness only to die.” (“Eleonora”).

In poetry, the Poe Girl is a memory, an absent presence. In his prose, the Poe Girl creates a more complex archetype. In theory, she has come to represent many and varied things. Within feminist circles she is symbolic of liberation or of oppression from the male gaze. Within alchemy she is the philosopher’s stone—or, with less mysticism, she provides a basic belief for the soul’s existence. Some critics dismiss the Poe Girl as a mourning mechanism for the author’s wife; however, before Virginia Poe’s fatal hemorrhaging in January 1842, Poe had already published “Berenice” (1835), and “Ligeia” (1838), as well as “Morella” (1835) and “Eleanora” (1841). Even so, it isn’t entirely unreasonable to look to Virginia as the Poe Girl prototype.

Details are unknown about Mrs. Poe. Her life has been as widely interpreted as her husband’s, but vastly unexplored. Married at 13, dying at 19, dead at 23, fragments of her life and personality are scattered throughout Poe scholarship like Sapphic manuscripts. To date, only one resource, a section entitled “The Real Virginia,” in Susan A.T. Weiss’s The Home Life of Poe seems to be completely dedicated to the poet’s wife. However, it is three pages long and only scratches the surface. Unfortunately, here too, must our focus be brief and peripheral.

We know enough to surmise she was the Poe-Girl prototype, whether intentional or not. Born August 15, 1822 to Maria Clemm, sister to Poe’s father, Virginia met her first-cousin when he came to live with her family at age 9. Like in “Eleonora,” the two doted on each other. She would deliver love letters for him, and he would take on her education. Somewhere, it is unknown why and how, the two became engaged when Poe moved to Richmond in 1835. They were married in Richmond on May 16, 1836, when Virginia was thirteen years old. She was described by friends as dark haired, fair complexioned, and violet-eyed. Friends and enemies, like Thomas Dunn English, remembered her “air of refinement and good breeding.” (Quinn, pg. 347).

Her one true interest was music. During better times, Poe indulged her by buying her a harp and a piano, which he would often accompany with his flute. She also sang, and on January 20, 1842, she would perform before a small party at the Poes’ Philadelphia residence. What should have been Virginia’s greatest moment became her worst. While singing, her lungs hemorrhaged and she collapsed. Virginia would never sing again.

She was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis, what polite society referred to as “consumption” of the lungs. Consumption in early nineteenth century America was a death sentence. According to Sheila M. Rothman in Living in the Shadow of Death, it was the cause of one out of every five deaths in the U.S. Its symptoms were subtle: hollow coughs, intermittent fevers, hoarseness, feverish skin that appeared as a becoming glow. The disease was torturous in that a sufferer would be completely bedridden and on the brink of death only to resurface from the disease and look perfectly healthy. It was this cycle of hope and despair that Poe, like Egaeus in “Ligeia,” found most horrible in the disease. He writes in a letter dated January 4, 1848:

“Her life was despaired of. I took leave of her forever & underwent all the agonies of her death. She recovered partially and I again hoped. At the end of a year…I went through precisely the same scene. Again in about a year afterward. Then again—again—again & even once again at varying intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies of her death—and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly & clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity.” (quoted from Quinn, P. 347).

As the letter shows, Poe was well aware of tuberculosis’ horrors, but he was more intimate than most, having watched it ravage his mother, foster mother, and brother. He knew, in fact had written implicitly, about tuberculosis’s last stages characterized by hallowed cheeks, glowing eyes, and emaciated and gaunt body. He knew from attending his brother the relentless coughing that produced profuse hemorrhaging and waterfalls of blood that made the sufferer feel like he would drown. His narrators mince words when describing their wives’ diseases, as did most Romantic literature. Not even in paintings like Munch’s The Sick Child does one get the true sense of the “death rattle’s” devastation.

After Virginia’s singing incident, Poe was heartbroken, often refusing to speak of it. When he did address it, he denied the disease by claiming Virginia had merely ruptured a blood vessel. Perhaps he was riddled with guilt from his women stories that seemed to have predicted this fate. Unlike those women, Virginia would not return.

Virginia suffered through the disease for five years, her suffering heightened by her husband’s inability to cope expressed through drinking binges, and worrying, like Eleonora over her husband’s fate. Towards the end, she reenacted Eleonora’s forgiveness by asking lady friends, like Mary Starr, whom Poe courted when Virginia was a child, to care for him: “I [Mary] had my hand in hers, and she took it and placed it in Mr. Poe’s, saying, ‘Mary, be a friend to Eddie, and don’t forsake him; he always loved you—didn’t you, Eddie?” (quoted from The Poe Log, p. 683). She died on January 30, 1847.

Immediately after Virginia’s diagnosis, his pen took a turn with “The Oval Portrait”, published in April 1842, and focused on the very real fear that Poe was coming to terms with. After “The Oval Portrait,” Poe turned away from mourning his female characters to focus on their violent murders in his detective tales. Shortly after that, female characters all but dwindled in Poe’s tales, making an occasional appearance as a corpse in transport in “The Oblong Box,” and as a epistolarian in “Mellonta Tauta.” Present as these female characters are in these stories, it is only the eponymous heroines like Ligeia and Berenice that compose the core embodiment and legend of the Poe Girl.

Objects of Desire

Within feminism, the Poe Girl’s exanimate state is controversial. Death is viewed as “the most passive state occurring,” which affects how women are viewed or not viewed. Women as dead objects are passive, lifeless bodies for the gaze to contemplate and the mind to idealize. It is easy to fetishize something that is no longer there; therefore, the ideal for a woman is to die and become an object.

In “Berenice,” the narrator Egaeus suffers from monomania, a now archaic malady in which those afflicted obsess over ideas. Riddled by this ailment, he is incapable of love, and after rhapsodizing the brilliance and beauty of his wife, states that: “During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.” (Poe’s emphasis).

Berenice suffers from epilepsy, a disease characterized with life-threatening seizures and death-like trances. Unable to come to terms with Berenice’s person, Egaeus is horrified by her illness. His coping mechanism is to focus on her Platonian ideal: “The teeth!—the teeth!—… everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them….”

When Berenice is pronounced dead, Egaeus obsesses over the teeth until, driven insane, he violates her tomb and body to extract them.

“The Oval Portrait” deals with objectivity in less visceral but more explicit terms. Published seven years after “Berenice” in 1842, Poe further explores woman as object by confining her entire person within the ultimate display case—a canvas. While exploring his new lodging, the narrator finds within his room the most life-like portrait he has ever seen. The Lodging has a catalogue of its paintings, and he finds the passage that explains the circumstances of the portrait: “…evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter. He, passionate, studious, austere, and having already a bride in his Art: she a maiden of rarest beauty, … loving and cherishing all things; hating only the Art which was her rival; dreading only the pallet and brushes … which deprived her of the countenance of her lover.” Regardless, she poses for her husband, and confines herself in the studio until she becomes ill and dies of neglect:

“…for the painter had grown wild with the ardor of his work, and turned his eyes from the canvas rarely, even to regard the countenance of his wife. And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him. And when many weeks had passed, and but little remained to do, …then the brush was given, and then the tint was placed; and for one moment, the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice, ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ turned suddenly to regard his beloved:—She was dead!” (Poe’s emphasis).

Poe was not the first to write about dead women. There was the courtly love of Dante and Beatrice, and the love poems of Novalis and Mérimée, not to mention the general Romantic dwelling on premature death as metaphor for sublimity and the ephemeral. Therefore, Poe was working within a “Western tradition of masking the fear of death and dissolution through images of feminine beauty.” (A Companion to Poe Studies, p. 392). In her book, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, feminist scholar Elisabeth Bronfen looks at Western aesthetic death culture, and sees within Poe’s work the trope of women as symbols for masking human vulnerability.

Bronfen also sees in Poe’s women the muse-artist paradigm where “…death transforms the body of a woman into the source of poetic inspiration precisely because it creates and gives corporality to a loss or absence…. The Poet must choose between a corporally present woman and the muse, a choice of the former precluding the latter.” (Over Her Dead Body, p. 362). In “The Oval Portrait’s” case, “the woman, representative of natural materiality, simultaneously figures as an aesthetic risk, as a presence endangering the artwork, so that as the portrait’s double she must be removed.” (Ibid, p. 112).

Recently, Poe’s work has been given a more sympathetic look by feminists. While some, like Beth Ann Bassein, believe Poe was reinforcing oppressing images, others like J. Gerald Kennedy and Cynthia S. Jordan argue “that Poe did, indeed, know better, that he did not simply reinscribe conventional (repressive) attitudes toward women but that he critiqued these attitudes in his tales.” (A Companion to Poe Studies, p. 388). One of the stronger arguments is that most of Poe’s women refuse idealization and objectification by refusing to stay dead. Female characters like Ligeia are wise and powerful, the possessors of esoteric and arcane knowledge and often described in intimidating terms. She is a proactive woman who uses her knowledge to rage against the night, as Thomas would say.

Alchemical Marriage

The basis of alchemy was to transmute “prima materia” (representing the material of creation) by placing it into a furnace until it changed through various phases to come out as the desired product: the philosopher’s stone. According to Randall A. Clack’s “Strange Alchemy of Brain: Poe and Alchemy”—a chapter in the wonderful Companion to Poe Studies—alchemy, on a philosophical level, represents spiritual gold that emerges through the Alchemist’s fiery imagination as new life. This was done in stages, beginning with “nigredo” where the dark prima materia is “tortured” and purified until it has achieved albedo, also known as the whitening. With this transmutation completed, the final stage, the rubedo, can be achieved and is signified by the glowing red heat seen from the still.

At rubedo, which generates the philosopher’s stone: “the prima material has reached celestial or spiritual perfection… [and at] “this final stage represented…the freeing of divine Wisdom…imprisoned in the darkness of matter and delivering it to a new life.” (A Companion to Poe Studies, p. 369). It also yielded a byproduct, the elixir of life, which could grant regenerative and healing powers.

Alchemical mythology begins with the Hellenic Egyptian goddess Isis. While her son Horus battled rival gods abroad, Isis fled to Hermes, where she was accosted by a lustful angel. Unable to fend him off, she cut a deal with him. She promised to sleep with him if he would share with her “life’s greatest secret.” He agrees, and tells her “the great secret” that everything stems from common matter and therefore can be transmuted. Isis is sworn to secrecy, her only allowance is to enlighten her son. (Alchemy, p. 46).

According to Jungian Marie von Franz, who collects her lectures on alchemical symbolism in Alchemy, this myth is archetypical and demonstrates woman as the progenitor of all knowledge, but unlike Eve, whose knowledge acquirement brought sin upon man, Isis’s education “…is quite changed, for when Isis succeeds in getting the secret from those angels it is seen as a great achievement. So here we have a switch in the feeling judgment, though the event itself seems a very near parallel: the female element, the feminine principle, gets it from deeper layers and then is the mediator who hands it on to mankind.” (Alchemy, pp. 46-51).

Isis’s departing of knowledge to Horus creates a relationship built upon “the great secret,” which leads to a required sympathy within Alchemy. Not only present is a feminine respect, but also a marriage of opposites: heaven is wedded to the earth, sun to moon, and body to spirit. It is this last marriage that Poe was most interested in.

In “Ligeia,” she is not only distinguished by beauty but by brain, which is more vast and therefore perhaps threatening to the narrator husband, whose relationship is more pupil than lover:

“… the learning of Ligeia…was immense—I said her knowledge was such as I have never known in woman—but where breathes the man who has traversed, and successfully, all the wide area of moral, physical, and mathematical science?… With how vast a triumph—with how vivid a delight—with how much of all that is ethereal in hope did I feel, as she bent over me in studies but little sought—but less known,—that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!”

Ligeia is dark, with fierce black eyes and long, ebon black hair, making her the prima materia that undergoes nigredo during her illness. Thrown into a furnace of disease, she is tortured and tormented by the dawning inevitability of her death:

“…Words are impotent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the Shadow. …but in the intensity of her wild desire for life—for life…. Yet not until the last instance, amid the most convulsive writhing of her fierce spirit, was shaken the external placidity of her demeanor. Her voice grew more gentle…yet I would not wish to dwell upon the wild meaning of the quietly uttered words.…to assumptions and aspirations which mortality had never before known.”

Ligeia relates her death’s deconstruct through writing the poem “The Conqueror Worm.” According to Clack: “While the images of ‘The Conqueror Worm’ reflect the death (nigredo) of ‘Man’…alchemically, the poem seems to end too soon, for there is no alchemical resurrection (or transmutation).” (A Companion to Poe Studies, p. 382). This abrupt end upsets Ligeia who rages against the seeming irreversibility and totality of death. Shortly after this passionate rage, she dies. However, as the story progresses, she is resurrected as the philosopher’s stone.

After mourning Ligeia, the narrator marries Rowena, the fair and blue-eyed foil. The marriage was strained from the beginning: “I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man. My memory flew back…to Ligeia,…”

By the second month, the newlywed Rowena falls ill and undergoes a similar nigredo as Ligeia. Feverish and bedridden, Rowena is hallucinatory and has nightmares of shadows outside her room. She oscillates between recovery and relapse, each cycle more violent and hallucinatory than before. Towards the end of Rowena’s convalescence, she tries to convince her husband that something lingers over her. The narrator begins to sense shadows but credits it to his opium intake. However, when Rowena begins to fade, he rushes to restore her with a glass of wine: “...It was then that I became distinctly aware of a gentle foot-fall upon the carpet, and near the couch; and in a second thereafter, as Rowena was in the act of raising the wine to her lips, I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid. If this I saw—not so Rowena. She swallowed the wine unhesitatingly….” The fluid, Clack writes, is “analogous to the alchemical elixir vitae—the elixir of life that is a by-product of the Philosophers’ stone.” (A Companion to Poe Studies, p. 383). After drinking the wine, Rowena relapses a final time and dies three nights later. On the forth night, the narrator keeps wake over her bandaged-wrapped corpse to find that Rowena’s funereal looks are deceiving.

The narrator describes a series of reanimations: a sigh, a blush on the cheek, sanguine glow among the forehead (the rubedo). Unknowingly playing his role as partner, the sun to the moon, the narrator tries to revive Rowena but, as she had during her illness, she relapses back into death. This ebb and flow of life continues throughout the night, her corpse seemingly changed with each resurrection. He notices the corpse has grown longer, and when he goes to analyze her feet, the corpse recoils at his touch and jumps up, shaking off the bandages at the head.

“…there streamed forth into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber huge masses of long and disheveled hair; it was blacker than the raven wings of midnight! And now slowly opened the eyes of the figure which stood before me. ‘Here then, at least,’ I shrieked aloud, ‘can I never—can I never be mistaken—these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes—of my lost love—of the Lady—of the LADY LIGEIA.’”

The transmutation alluded to in “The Conqueror Worm” is now complete, as is Ligeia’s role as the philosopher’s stone. Also successfully completed is the alchemical marriage. While the marriage of Ligeia and the narrator was built on love and passion, there was also an implicit spiritual relationship that is realized by Ligeia’s reincarnation through Rowena: “The narrator metaphorically has attained the supernal, for Rowena has been alchemically transmuted into Ligeia—the narrator’s “lost love.” Likewise, Poe has created the philosopher’s stone in the final image of Ligeia’s resurrection, for she represents a symbolic bridge to the unknown—the alchemical marriage of heaven and earth.” (Ibid, 384).

While faint echoes of the Poe Girl reappeared in Poe’s poems like “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee,” those women never lived to die like Ligeia, Berenice, and the subject of “The Oval Portrait.” The poems’ shadows exist in a state akin to memorial statuary: static, melancholy, and eternally beautiful. The Poe Girl, however, is something more terrible. She lives and breaths and occupies her husband’s life, be it as an object or a superior in arcane knowledge and passionate love. She is flawed, powerful, and intimidating. While she will meet the same fate as Ulalume or Lenore, she does not die quietly. She inevitably returns, making her death not a sad instance, but a philosophical positioning of what love, the afterlife, identity, and the soul really mean.

Selena Chambers