the Maelström,” “The Gold-Bug,” and “The Oblong Box.”
Although often associated with Gothic tales of terror, Poe devoted roughly half of his fiction to humor, producing satires, burlesques, parodies, and spoofs. Several of these pieces now seem too silly, affected, or topical to engage modern readers, and a handful appear to be dashed off for the sake of money alone. But certain comic narratives cleverly lampoon the sensational tale as popularized in Blackwood’s Magazine, and other farces mock national myths and illusions. Even supposedly serious tales include grimly comic touches: Poe’s love of jokes and puns gives manic hilarity to “The Cask of Amontillado,” and a similar sardonic humor animates “Hop-Frog,” while “The Premature Burial” ends with an unexpected joke on the reader.
During the first decade of his magazine career, Poe devoted himself almost exclusively to foreign subjects: predicaments or conflicts grounded in Old World places—Venice, London, Paris, and other locales vaguely European. Nearly all of his greatest tales—such as “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or “William Wilson”—impute to foreign settings a strangeness that supplements the uncanny effect of narrative events. From “Metzengerstein” through “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Poe portrayed a distinctly imaginary Europe marked by decadence, rivalry, tyranny, and corruption—by the very evils from which the young republic naively supposed itself liberated. But by the early 1840s, literary nationalism had made American subjects and materials nearly obligatory, and beginning with “The Gold-Bug,” set in South Carolina, Poe pragmatically shifted his fiction toward domestic scenes and situations. Yet he refused to rewrite history for the sake of American mythmaking and argued defiantly that national literature was a contradiction in terms. Convinced that “the world at large [is] the true audience of the author,” Poe continued to prefer foreign themes and crafted several late European tales—such as “The Cask of Amontillado”—dramatizing universal human passions.
Predicaments
In an 1838 satire (“How to Write a Blackwood Article”) Poe mocked the formula for sensation that he used in his own magazine writing. His fictional “Mr. Blackwood” advises an aspiring author: “Get yourself into such a scrape as no one ever got into before” and then “pay minute attention to the sensations.” In the sequel, a would-be writer, Psyche Zenobia, climbs a clock tower, gets her head stuck in a narrow opening, and suffers decapitation by the clock’s “scimitar-like minute-hand,” but in Poe’s farce this predicament poses no obstacle whatsoever to the narrator’s talking head, which prattles on about the plight of her headless torso. The plot carries to absurdity a premise crucial to Poe’s sensationalism: No subject rivets an audience more than impending death by natural force or human contrivance.
Repeatedly, Poe conjured different scenarios of annihilation, sometimes dramatizing the spectacle of death, sometimes allowing horrified victims a last-second reprieve. An early tale, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” prefigures Poe’s own emerging relationship to writing. Stranded on a phantom ship caught in an immense vortex, the narrator believes himself to be “hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.” The manuscript in the bottle, the story itself, represents the deepest desire of writing: to bridge the abyss of mortality by imparting secret knowledge of what lies beyond.
In a later version of the whirlpool motif, “A Descent into the Maelström,” Poe endows his Norwegian fisherman with both dangerous forgetfulness—he fails to wind his watch and so miscalculates the onset of the vortex—and saving recollection of the scientific laws that preserve his life. But his brush
Although often associated with Gothic tales of terror, Poe devoted roughly half of his fiction to humor, producing satires, burlesques, parodies, and spoofs. Several of these pieces now seem too silly, affected, or topical to engage modern readers, and a handful appear to be dashed off for the sake of money alone. But certain comic narratives cleverly lampoon the sensational tale as popularized in Blackwood’s Magazine, and other farces mock national myths and illusions. Even supposedly serious tales include grimly comic touches: Poe’s love of jokes and puns gives manic hilarity to “The Cask of Amontillado,” and a similar sardonic humor animates “Hop-Frog,” while “The Premature Burial” ends with an unexpected joke on the reader.
During the first decade of his magazine career, Poe devoted himself almost exclusively to foreign subjects: predicaments or conflicts grounded in Old World places—Venice, London, Paris, and other locales vaguely European. Nearly all of his greatest tales—such as “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or “William Wilson”—impute to foreign settings a strangeness that supplements the uncanny effect of narrative events. From “Metzengerstein” through “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Poe portrayed a distinctly imaginary Europe marked by decadence, rivalry, tyranny, and corruption—by the very evils from which the young republic naively supposed itself liberated. But by the early 1840s, literary nationalism had made American subjects and materials nearly obligatory, and beginning with “The Gold-Bug,” set in South Carolina, Poe pragmatically shifted his fiction toward domestic scenes and situations. Yet he refused to rewrite history for the sake of American mythmaking and argued defiantly that national literature was a contradiction in terms. Convinced that “the world at large [is] the true audience of the author,” Poe continued to prefer foreign themes and crafted several late European tales—such as “The Cask of Amontillado”—dramatizing universal human passions.
Predicaments
In an 1838 satire (“How to Write a Blackwood Article”) Poe mocked the formula for sensation that he used in his own magazine writing. His fictional “Mr. Blackwood” advises an aspiring author: “Get yourself into such a scrape as no one ever got into before” and then “pay minute attention to the sensations.” In the sequel, a would-be writer, Psyche Zenobia, climbs a clock tower, gets her head stuck in a narrow opening, and suffers decapitation by the clock’s “scimitar-like minute-hand,” but in Poe’s farce this predicament poses no obstacle whatsoever to the narrator’s talking head, which prattles on about the plight of her headless torso. The plot carries to absurdity a premise crucial to Poe’s sensationalism: No subject rivets an audience more than impending death by natural force or human contrivance.
Repeatedly, Poe conjured different scenarios of annihilation, sometimes dramatizing the spectacle of death, sometimes allowing horrified victims a last-second reprieve. An early tale, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” prefigures Poe’s own emerging relationship to writing. Stranded on a phantom ship caught in an immense vortex, the narrator believes himself to be “hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.” The manuscript in the bottle, the story itself, represents the deepest desire of writing: to bridge the abyss of mortality by imparting secret knowledge of what lies beyond.
In a later version of the whirlpool motif, “A Descent into the Maelström,” Poe endows his Norwegian fisherman with both dangerous forgetfulness—he fails to wind his watch and so miscalculates the onset of the vortex—and saving recollection of the scientific laws that preserve his life. But his brush
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