Morbid Conditions Poe and the Sublimity of Disease

Abstract

Abstract At first glance, Edgar Allan Poe's worldview as presented in his writings seems to deal more with experiences of uncanny horror than sublimity. However, Poe's perversity cannot simply be understood as calling attention to the horror of existence. Through an analysis of “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “Berenice” (1835), this essay claims that accessing the sublime experience in Poe depends on a combination of perverseness, disease, and the uncanny. Because Roderick Usher and Egaeus are able, through their monomania, to dissolve meaning in the objects around them, their contemplation of these newly unheimlich objects gives them access to the inexpressibility and ineffability of the sublime state. I employ Poe's essay “The Imp of the Perverse,” which focuses on “perverseness as a radical, primitive, irreducible faculty or sentiment of the soul, the propensity to do wrong for the wrong's sake,” in my treatment of these stories. Although an obsession with the abyss is what drives these characters over its edge, my analysis reveals that only perverseness makes the sublime experience possible. The result is not the upward transcendence of eighteenth-century philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, but rather a journey downward to a total loss of control and a destruction of the self rather than an affirmation of the individual intellect over natural forces. However, this collapse accords with the cosmology Poe sets forth in Eureka, which posits that all things diffuse and radiate throughout the universe from a common source, eventually dissolving back into oneness.

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