Forevermore

In his foreword to The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, Scott Peeples claims that he has written “an accessible introduction to Poe studies and a history of a major author’s inception, providing in the process a broad overview of twentieth-century trends” (x). Then he dives into his book, which is neatly divided into five chapters and an afterword, all of which detail Poe scholarship through different critical lenses. It is true that this book is an “introduction” as Peeples states and therefore not designed for someone like me who is more familiar with Poe’s work, but I confess I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it does contain some useful information for those interested in Poe studies, and it presents some unique insights into the history of Poe scholarship as well. It will be especially helpful to those new to Poe. But for seasoned veterans, Peeples’ book persistently swings back and forth between boring and fascinating, and I question just how accessible it is to the modern reader.

Peeples first creates Poe scholarship’s historical context and uses Rufus Griswold’s famous obituary statement to kick off his chapter which delineates the writers and critics who’ve kept Poe’s work alive. Naturally, he details Poe’s conflicts with Griswold, how the French symbolists led by Baudelaire adored him, how scholars such as Cleanth Brooks tried to exclude him from the canon. For readers new to Poe, the information he provides in this first chapter is a crucial foundation. To those already familiar with Poe’s history, this chapter is tedious, chock full of Bible-like Jebidiahs begat Jedidiahs. I fall into the latter category.

If we have the mental fortitude to plod through the first chapter, we are rewarded with psychoanalytic theory. Peeples starts with Freud’s fascination with Poe, and he describes how Freud’s work, in turn, inspired many subsequent generations of Poe psychoanalysts, most notably Marie Bonaparte. According to Peeples, she deduced, and numerous other psychoanalysts agreed, that Poe suffered from a classic Oedipus complex. They speculated that he, who had lost both his mother and foster mother, married his cousin Virginia not out of love, but to use her to get closer to Maria Clemm, his aunt. Clemm, they said, was a mother-figure to him and therefore the object of his desire. To them, Poe could never love Virginia as a wife because he was spiritually unable to. They argued that his strange relationship with her took center stage in his work.

Although interesting, I actually found Peeples’ mention of the debate between Lacan and Derrida more fascinating. According to Peeples, Lacan inadvertently started this argument between the two with his lecture, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’ In his lecture, he tried to explain his theory of repetition automatism using Poe’s story. Derrida immediately countered him with his essay “The Purveyor of Truth.” As the title implies, Derrida criticized Lacan for trying to reduce Poe’s story to pure truth. Unfortunately, we the reader don’t get much more information than that. Peeples apologizes for glossing over this seemingly important debate, stating “because Lacan’s and Derrida’s essays defy concise summary, and because this continuing discussion has more to do with theories of language and writing in general than with ‘The Purloined Letter’ specifically, I will not attempt to summarize their arguments” (55). Given Poe’s love of language theory and his theories of composition, he is especially relevant to Derrida. Peeples should have focused less on Marie Bonaparte’s obsession with Poe’s sexuality and more on this debate which has informed many modern critics’ works.

Although Poe is “regarded as the forefather of critics who emphasized textual unity and whose readings demonstrated how various elements in a poem or short story work together to produce a subtle but ultimately coherent meaning,” New Critics tended to detest him (63). In his chapter on formalism and deconstruction, Peeples easily ticks off the names of all the formalists who hated Poe: Yvor Winters, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren to name a few. For example, according to Brooks and Warren, Poe’s settings are only good for scaring children, his place and character names are meaningless, his rhythms are monotonous, and his effects are superficial. Allan Tate and T.S. Eliot immediately came to Poe’s defense. Peeples explains how both men were impressed with Poe’s afterlife and how both called him a modernist before his time. Eliot acknowledges his experimental style and theory while Tate admires his “uncannily contemporary” subject matter (68).

From there, Peeples returns to the Lacan-Derrida debate to claim it launched a series of story deconstructions that continue to the present day. William Carlos Williams, he then says, in his book A World of Words, “bridges the gap between the old New Critical tradition and the poststructuralists, demonstrating how Poe’s fiction again and again destabilizes logocentrism, and along with it Enlightenment notions of selfhood” (86). The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a deconstructionist’s dream, the “lightning rod text” according to him, mainly because Poe used linguistic playfulness and codes while simultaneously avoiding transcendent truths, but their fascination with his work doesn’t end with Pym. “X-ing a Paragrab,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Morella,” and Eureka are also favorites. Basically, the way Peeples presents them, poststructuralists have received Poe much better than the formalists.

Race and gender are clumped together into Peeples’ fourth chapter. According to him, nineteenth-century Poe scholars tended to ignore the issue of slavery and racism in his work. Peeples argues that the evidence of Poe’s racism has rapidly piled up against him, compiled by critics such as John Carlos Rowe and Joan Dayan, and it is compelling. Not only does much of his work include racist imagery, such as the exaltedness of the color white, but Poe also worked as editor for The Southern Literary Messenger, a journal that occasionally published pro-slavery articles. Critics on the flip side of the coin, Peeples explains, point out that if Poe was guilty of anything, it was of social indifference. A rank opportunist, he refused to make political waves so he could protect his ambitious dreams. Other critics such as Dana Nelson suggest that Poe was more concerned with worldly matters than he let on, and therefore used his work to undermine racist rhetoric and expose the dangers of treating other races as “The Other.”

Gender takes a backseat in Afterlife, using up a grand total of four pages in a thirty page chapter. Once again, Peeples apologizes for glossing over it, saying “if gender has received less attention in Poe studies than race, it might be because a feminist response to Poe seems too obvious: the tellers of Poe’s tales, who are nearly always men, idealize the women in their lives and sometimes kill them…” (108). According to him, critics like Karen Weekes and Nina Baym identify Poe’s feminine ideal in his “gentle, vulnerable, delicate females such as Eleonora or Annabel Lee, [who] pose no sexual or intellectual threat” (109). Ligeia, they say, comes back because her will is strong, and not because her husband’s love and grief pulls her. Peeples seems to imply that they think Poe a misogynist. But again, as with matters of race, critics also argue that Poe was deliberately defying and undermining sexual conventions to expose how women struggle with the idea someone has made of them. Joan Dayan argues, according to Peeples, that Poe was in fact a feminist.

Peeples concludes his book with a chapter on Poe’s cultural significance, detailing the ways Poe has affected society since his death. He traces him through theater and film, spending several pages explicating plays performed in the late nineteenth century, right down to the dialogue between characters. From there, he naturally progresses to film, claiming that Alfred Hitchcock made movies like Psycho and The Birds as a tribute to his beloved Poe. “The Raven,” Poe’s most famous poem, seems to have influenced culture the most, inspiring movies like The Crow, episodes of the T.V. show The Simpsons, and even the name of Baltimore’s football team to highlight a few examples.

My problem with this book is that it is heavy-handed with the name-dropping. True, this is a book tracing the lineage of Poe scholars, but it seems as if there is just too much. Yet I am disturbed that Peeples never mentions modern Poe scholars like Benjamin Fisher and Kevin J. Hayes; how can a book devoted to Poe scholarship slight two of the field’s most important, if not the most important, figures working today? If Peeples had cut out a third of the names he cited and focused more on the modern heavy hitters in each school of theory, I think I still would have gotten a good feel for Poe scholarship according to each doctrine.

The bottom line is that Afterlife reads like a history textbook mostly rooted in turn-of-the-century theory. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if Peeples, having promised us “a broad overview,” had better included more modern critics and ideas as well. To his credit, he shed light on critics and issues that have inspired my own Poe studies, and I’m sure other readers will experience similar insights. But ultimately, I am indifferent towards this book.