Ed’s Comments (group member since Mar 25, 2020)

Ed’s comments from the UWM Libraries' Book Lovers Short Story Club group.

Was the mask-wearer, the "stranger," alive? How would we know? Is the clock alive, with its "brazen lungs" made of ebony?

I need some serious background on Poe, who's with me? Johns Hopkins' Literary Theory Guide has a brief description of Poe and his work and Gale Literature Criticism has a good, 60ish page collection of some analysis of our short story (both are available from the Literature LibGuide at UWM libraries, here: https://guides.library.uwm.edu/c.php?... search the name of the short story in Gale Lit Crit to find what they call the "work overview").

This gem, which I'll quote at length, comes from The Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865 (https://uwi-primoalma-prod.hosted.exl...

"While the gothic has been a staple of American literature since the Revolution, the works of the country’s most famous gothic author, Edgar Allan Poe, have traditionally been seen as oddly detached from the mainstream of American literature. His works
are more obviously part of the European tradition, making extensive use of the European conventions of castles, debauched aristocrats, and remote settings, such as the Spanish Inquisition. They seem more interested in psychology and esthetics than
in the nationalist and historical concerns that preoccupied such authors as Brown, Crevecœur, Hawthorne, and Melville. And Poe has influenced and impressed European writers, such as Baudelaire, more than he has Americans. But more recent
scholarship, such as Rosenheim and Rachman’s collection (1995), emphasizes Poe’s embeddedness within American culture, his responsiveness to it rather than his alienation from it. Joan Dayan, for example, has argued that Poe’s obsession with characters that die but then come back to life constitutes a meditation upon how the courts defined ‘‘a person’’ when confronted with issues like slavery, which clearly complicated that definition. Poe’s living-dead characters, she argues, can be read as ‘‘legal personalities’’ that probe the distinction between actual and legal existence. She
points to court cases that distinguished between the physical persons of slaves and ‘‘legal personhood,’’ which she defines as ‘‘the social and civic components of personal identity.’’ Such personhood was denied to slaves: ‘‘So far as civil acts are concerned, the slave, not being a person, has no legal mind, no will which the law can recognize,’’ an 1861 court decision asserted (1999: 410). Dayan argues that legal pronouncements
like this one subject slaves to civil death. But since the slaves under discussion are in fact alive, the result is a form of living death, a state of being that Poe explores in stories of the living dead, such as ‘‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’’ ‘‘Ligeia,’’ and ‘‘The
Tell-Tale Heart.’’"