LOVE KILLS WITH OBSESSION IN THE TWISTED ROMANCES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE

Edouard Manet, “The Raven / Le Corbeau,” (1875) (book cover)

W

hat we now call Valentine’s Day went from the orgiastic throes of Lupercalia to solemn Christian saint’s day to a commercial lovefest celebrated with stale chocolates, boxed wine and sleazy D-list adult entertainment. Edgar Allan Poe didn’t exactly do Valentine’s Day. It is just about impossible to image the man who is just about synonymous with the croak of a raven as partaking in a heart-shaped box of discounted truffles. What he did do was romance, in the most disturbing way possible. 

Obsession, in the most literal sense of the word, is a force so ruthless that its claws bury themselves deeper and deeper into the flesh of the victim until he finally succumbs. The obsessions that consume Poe’s characters do not always have a beating heart—except the hideous heart whose beating that echoes throughout the pages of The Tell-Tale Heart. Never mind that the narrator of The Tell-Tale heart is brazen enough to murder someone and hide the dismembered parts of the body beneath the floorboards. That isn’t quite as romantic as wasting away for a lover who is now a corpse. 

Haunting Poe’s stories and poems is the theme of obsession with a ghost lover who may or may not come back from the grave and take his narrator down with her. Love beyond the grave became especially common during the Victorian era, especially after Queen Victoria continued to have conversations with her beloved Albert over tea long after he had been buried. The widowed often saw remarrying as having an affair. Death also bloomed as beauty in much Gothic fiction. While Though Poe straddles the Georgian and Victorian eras and predates the death of Prince Albert, much of this is evident in stories that read like ink-stained letters to a friend, telling accounts of beautiful women who wilted too soon. 

Gustave Doré, “The Raven” (1883)

If a séance isn’t how you imagine spending a romantic evening, then rotting alone in the shadows and waiting for the specter of your deceased lover to materialize is probably not, either. The wraith of Lenore from The Raven might be the poster child for postmortem romance. She is also an obsession of the narrator, who turns her into some version of herself that would exist in parallel universe, because she has obviously been dead long enough for the memory of her to decay as much as her flesh did in the grave. Why else would one in a long line of Poe’s namelesss narrators spend a dreary night pondering weak and weary about his dead lover? Of course, the obsession kills him. It has to. This is how love-drunk obsessions usually end in Poe.

Not to say that there aren’t some exceptions on the edge of society, but sometimes Poe’s couples are uncomfortably close, as in brother-sister close. But who cares about that when you so drunk with infatuation (and possibly higher than hell on opium)? That would be Egaeus and his cousin Berenice. While she is alive and running around in what is almost unquestionably the type of gloomy Gothic estate that has been the stereotype for a million haunted houses, he shut himself in because he is too enamored with his scholarly pursuits. It is only when she turns corpselike, possibly from consumption—vast generalization since the Victorians called just about everything consumption—that his obsession with books is all but lost to her. 

There is a more disturbing question besides why someone would fall in love with their cousin. Is Berenice is buried too soon because Egaeus is that obsessed with her beauty in death? He thinks she is moldering in the grave when she is actually alive and desperate to break out. Egaeus continues to feed his fantasy of love in death by imagining the noises coming from the crypt are her ghost, and that he was only imagining he saw a slight flush of life when the coffin lid closed on her face. Berenice is not interested in being a corpse for someone else’s sick pleasure. When she finally rises from the grave alive, she crashes into his arms and takes him down with her last breath. 

Speaking of incest, it may be less blatant and more of a suggestion in The Fall of the House of Usher, but no less destructive. Inbreeding may have been going on for generations in that family. No wonder Roderick and Madeline Usher are so frail (unless they also have consumption). You see through the eyes of Roderick’s friend, down to the moment that freezes his blood is the exact moment he realizes that Roderick and this Madeline he is so obsessed with are twins. You would lose your body heat too if you came to the slow and dreadful realization that the friend you thought you knew everything about was into his own sister. For someone that far gone and probably inbred himself, Usher must have seen it as nothing even as his own literal and genetic walls were crumbling around him.

So what even compelled Poe to write about incest at a time when red lipstick was reserved for street whores and it was scandalous for women of virtue to so much as show their bare ankles? It might have something to do with him marrying a 13-year-old when he was 28 himself. They were not related, but that can really explain some things.

Arthur Rackham, “Ligeia,” Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1935)

Because being haunted isn’t enough of a turn-on, Ligeia needs a horror porn subgenre of its own. The unnamed narrator in this story is so taken with his wife Ligeia that he borderline deifies her after death, and even her last name is lost to his memory as he obsesses about her through a haze of opium smoke. What starts with an obsessed widower turns into a phantom love triangle when the corpse of his second wife Rowena seems to reanimate over and over before rigor mortis sets in again. He is torn between wanting her to awaken and Ligeia to return to him as a zombie. He swears Rowena is morphing into Ligeia beneath her shroud. When the corpse stands and reveals herself as Ligeia, does that make her a body snatcher or a hallucination of a deeply obsessed opium addict? We may never know.

However, not every obsession Poe wrote about was living or once-living. One was a bottle of wine.

Doomed oenophile Fortunato of The Cask of Amontillado appears to be more besotted with wine than his own wife (only mentioned as an afterthought). You are less likely to sense a nefarious plot to kill you when you’ve had more than a few drinks and are being further tempted with an elusive vintage, and Montresor is obviously getting Fortunato shiftaced for a reason. Follow them through the vault and really pay attention to what they uncork, because Fortunato is tempted into draining what probably amounts to at least a bottle of wine. It must be much easier to murder someone seduced by alcohol. Even as he is being entombed alive in an underground vault, he keeps crying out about the Amontillado in his final gasps. 

Fortunato’s infinite amore for wine might have been easy to use as his demise, but Poe sometimes merged romance with revenge in a dangerous cocktail. There is something about reluctant court jester Hop-Frog and his sidekick Trippeta that might remind you of a ‘90s Joker and Harley Quinn in Batman: The Animated Series, except it’s less “hey Puddin’” and more hellbent vengeance with a chaser of “a million laughs”. How deranged do you have to be to commit multiple murders disguised as a masquerade show that goes up in flames? They are, in every way, a match made in hell. So is another of Poe’s narrators and his wife Morella. 

Edgar Allen Poe aged 40

Why you would marry someone you despise so much defies most human reasoning, but the man who marries Morella does because he has some strange obsession with her. He seems to be obsessed with his own revulsion. It can’t be that terrible, since she does end up pregnant in a time almost devoid of birth control, but makeup sex is apparently not enough for Morella to see right through her hateful husband. She pulls off body-snatching in an even more horrid way than Ligeia, her spirit entering the body of the daughter she gives birth to in her final breath. She ends up as a mirror of Morella. As much as he is obsessed with his dead wife, her ghost is obsessed with revenge against him. Spoiler: she gets it. 

Whether it takes you to your death in a wine cellar or throws you into the arms of the Grim Reaper, obsessive love as Poe imagined it can be lethal. So don't’ go out for dinner and risk consumption from the virus that must not be named. Be glad you didn't have to pay for that boxed wine with your life, and for the love of all things holy and unholy, make chocolate your drug of choice. Stay in and watch a skin flick. After this infernal holiday is over, you can finally say “nevermore”.