Poe’s horror holds the potential to achieve a representation of the Absolute, apprehended not as a spiritually uplifting totality as it might have been envisioned by the Boston transcendentalists but rather in a putrid, dark Romantic form as an unstable, oozing unity and contradiction, depicting the merging of subject and world through figures like ‘Morella’ and ‘Ligeia’. Rather than sublime fear or terror – the affect more often associated with horror fiction and the gothic generally – Poe’s fiction cultivates a form of perverse affect that aestheticises disgust, calling upon its uniquely visceral metaphysical insights.
The metaphysics of death-in-life in ‘Morella’
In Poe’s stories of the marriage group, such as ‘Morella’ and ‘Ligeia’, the Absolute is represented through an inversion of what Bram Dijkstra calls ‘the consumptive sublime’, an aestheticisation of the sickly woman as holy, pure and saint-like.40 Poe’s tales of unhappy and disease-ravaged marriage foreground conflicting states of being, obsessing over the liminal moment between life and death or death infecting life through scenes of decay, death, revivification and reincarnation. In ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, Poe insists that death is the ‘most melancholy’ of the various ‘melancholy topics’ universal to humanity and claims that death is at its most poetical ‘when it most closely allies itself to Beauty’. For Poe, ‘the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’.41 In several of Poe’s best known stories, diseased women wither and die, sometimes to return from the grave or, in their death throes, to metamorphose into some new, sensually malignant form. All of these stories invite us to witness the dissolution of a whole host of binary oppositions, oppositions that structured many nineteenth-century assumptions about the fundamental nature of the world: spirit and matter, life and death, and, most significantly for a Schellingian reading, the thinking subject and the non-human, mind- independent world. In these texts the normally sacrosanct borders between things become amorphous; categories break down, seemingly immaterial spirits are grotesquely materialised, identities merge and overlap, and decaying bodies become repulsively lively. All this dissolution and decay, this collapse of hitherto stable structures, resonates with a decomposing cosmos, becoming, in its dissolution, an undifferentiated totality. What seem macabre snuff tales about vampires and revenant-brides thus accrue metaphysical significance, foreshadowing a final state of being in which all seeming differences are subsumed by divine oneness, an eschatology difficult to keep fully in view.
‘Morella’ tells the story of Morella, a scholarly woman much dedicated to the study of German philosophers, who acquires a ‘crimson spot’ – suggesting consumption – and eventually dies in childbirth.42 The daughter of Morella and the nameless narrator begins to mature, acquiring an ever more apparent resemblance to her mother till eventually the uncanny similitude between the two becomes a source of horror. The girl’s father has curiously refrained from naming his daughter, and when prompted by a priest at her baptism he names her ‘Morella’, beseeching the reader:
What demon urged me to breathe the sound, which in its very recollection was wont to make ebb the purple blood in torrents from the temples to the heart… what fiend spoke from the recesses of my soul, when amid those dim aisles, and in the silence of the night, I whispered within the ears of the holy man the syllables – Morella? (p. 173)
The story ends with the daughter calling out ‘I am here!’ as she falls upon her mother’s tomb and expires. When her father opens the crypt to bury his daughter, he finds that his wife’s body has disappeared. ‘Morella’ is a ghost story, the spirit of a dead woman returning from the grave to haunt her beloved, but the spirit of Morella is not a disembodied phantom of a more conventional gothic type: rather she is too embodied, her presences materialising and so fusing with, subsuming, and finally replacing the body of her daughter. I want to look closely at Morella’s materialising spirit to tease out the relationship between the affective qualities her transformation arouses and, following Korsmeyer’s theory of aesthetic cognition and McGinn’s conception of disgust, the Schellingian metaphysics such affects might cognise.
‘Morella’ contains one of the few direct references to Schelling in all of Poe’s fiction: he is mentioned in the same sentence as Fichtean ‘wild Pantheism’, as well as Pythagoras, but his ‘doctrines of Identity’ are afforded particular primacy (p. 170). Texts like ‘Morella’ utilise putrescent undead characters to collapse not only a Cartesian dualism of body and spirit, but also the kind of two-world metaphysics that neatly separate the transcendental subject from the non-human world. As Schelling puts it in System of Transcendental Idealism: ‘one cannot say of the self that it exists… precisely because it is being-itself’,43 a part of the Absolute that has become aware of itself through what Poe, in ‘Morella’, calls the ‘principium individuationis’ (p. 170). Morella’s undead liminality undercuts dualism or the integrity of a transcendental subject, but in Poe’s writing this leads us not simply to mechanistic materialism but rather towards something very much like the Absolute: a universal continuum both ideal and real that courses throughout all of nature and unifies the thinking subject and nature, the physical world.
Poe emphasises the horror of Morella’s wasting illness by calling attention to her prematurely decomposing flesh, noting the way that ‘the blue veins upon the pale forehead became prominent’, and to her sinister eyes, exciting in the narrator ‘the giddiness of one who gazes downward into some dreary and unfathomable abyss’ (p. 171). When Morella’s spirit possesses her own daughter, transforming the girl’s body into that of Morella, once again the focus is on the ‘hues of death’, on Morella’s ‘glassy eyes’ turning ‘from the earth to heaven’ (p. 173). Morella’s very name, attached like a parasite to her daughter as ‘a worm that would not die’, represents ‘the memory of the buried dead’ (p. 173). As the ‘shadows of similitude’ grow steadily ‘more full, and more definite, and more perplexing, and more hideously terrible in their aspect’ (p. 171), Morella’s daughter becomes an uncanny figure of the living dead, of death infecting life. Her final death throes and transformation into her cadaverous mother conjures a kind of apocalyptic vision in the narrator’s mind: ‘I kept no reckoning of time or place, and the stars of my fate faded from heaven, and therefore the earth grew dark, and its figures passed by me like flitting shadows, and among them all I beheld only – Morella’ (p. 173). It is as if the strange sickness of Morella threatened to spill from her body and infect the world.
This imagery of spreading darkness, creeping malignity, grave worms and the lure of the abyss stand in contrast to conventional nineteenth- century representations of the consumptive female body, portraying it as heavenly and beautiful, a mask of spiritual purity disguising the physical corruption of death-in-life. It is no coincidence that Poe’s female characters frequently suffer from consumption. Elaine Showalter argues that the consumptive female body constituted a paradigm of ‘wasting beauty’, in which the consumptive woman ‘was spiritualized, incorporeal, and pure’.44 Elizabeth Bronfen similarly contends that in post-Enlightenment patriarchy, aesthetic representations of dead women allowed the masculine, rational subject to confront and conquer death: ‘even as we are forced to acknowledge the ubiquitous presence of death in life, our belief in our own immortality is confirmed’. Aestheticised representations of dead women thus constitute an ‘opium-induced, wish-fulfilling dream representation’ that ‘[soothes] the mourner about his own fear of mortality’.45 For Bronfen, the abundance of art depicting dead women in the nineteenth century not