Rather than ameliorating anxieties about death by depicting the female corpse as holy and beautiful, however, Poe assails the reader with repulsive representations of bodily decay and aberrant death-in-life. By refusing to efface the disgusting realities of decomposition and redoubling this revulsion through the figure Morella, Poe undermines discursive constructions of the female corpses as celestially pure that elsewhere reified notions of masculine power and allowed for fantasies of immortality and control over death and entropy. In place of the misogynist idealisation of the consumptive woman predominant in the nineteenth century, the fixation in ‘Morella’ on death-in-life and disgust reorients the text towards a metaphysics of the Absolute.
The narrator writes of the ‘perfect identity’ between mother and daughter, but with a shudder at the reflection of death and horror, ‘the melancholy of the dead’ in her normally ‘holy, and mild, and eloquent face’ (p. 171) – rather than being purified and beautiful in her illness, her beauty and holiness are profaned. Just as Schelling’s Absolute blurs together subjects and objects into a single, monist totality, and just as the cosmos Poe describes in Eureka is ultimately but one quasi-Spinozist divine being, so do matter and spirit blur in ‘Morella’ as death infects life, the terrifyingly precocious development of Morella’s daughter’s ‘mental being’ mirrored by strange, monstrous growth, ‘a rapid increase in bodily size’ (p. 171). The intermingling of the physical and the mental in the girl’s transformation brings about a reaction first of ‘agonising anxiety’ (p. 171) and later ‘consuming thought and horror’ (p. 173) in Poe’s narrator, a horror linked both to the consumptive disease that wracks his nameless child’s body and at the transformation, associated with the ‘mystical writings’ (p. 170) of figures like Schelling, which she undergoes.
Instead of the idealised, feminine paragon of purity and ‘sublime tubercular emaciation’46 to be expected in a sentimental scene of death and mourning, Morella bursts from the tissues of her daughter in a perversely reversed birth with a disgusting array of physical signs and symptoms, repulsively materialised as a force of decay. Her features are ‘convulsed’ by a ‘fiend’ (p. 171) such that the narrator’s ‘pure affection’ is ‘darkened, and gloom, and horror, and grief, swept over in clouds’, leaving his senses ‘appalled’ and his thoughts ‘aghast’ (p. 170). In foregrounding the revolting horror of death-in-life and presenting Morella not as the pale, suffering saint so often the subject of artistic representation but as an entropic vampire cannibalising her own daughter in disgustingly spectacular terms, Poe’s story cuts against the prevailing consumptive aesthetics that made sickliness and feminine sacrifice virtues. He disguised the decay of the wasting female body to sustain a patriarchal fantasy of control and immortality, a fantasy predicated on binary structures of masculine and feminine, body and spirit, and physical and mental, and which thus depends on a Kantian two-worlds metaphysics structured around fundamental divisions between the subject and nature.
‘Morella’ offers a kind of nauseating gyration of the heel of the sort Poe imagines in Eureka, mother and daughter literally blurring together as the story whirls towards its vertiginous conclusion. It is exactly in such amalgamations that Schelling himself claims that art can reveal the Absolute, since for Schelling, art can represent the Absolute in a way that philosophy, ultimately, cannot. Schelling states that the essential nature of all art ‘is the representation of the absolute’ – all art, to one degree or another, serves as ‘a reflex of the infinite’. Or, as he puts it in System of Transcendental Idealism:
It is self-evident that art is at once the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us of what philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely the unconscious element in acting and producing, and its original identity with the conscious. Art is paramount to the philosopher, precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart. The view of nature, which the philosopher frames artificially, is for art the original and natural one. What we speak of as nature is a poem lying pent in a mysterious and wonderful script.47
For Schelling, then, art unveils the original unity of all things, the Absolute union of the subject and the objective world: ‘the ultimate ground of all harmony between subjective and objective could be exhibited in its original identity only through intellectual intuition; and it is precisely this ground which, by means of the work of art, has brought forth entirely from the subjective, and rendered wholly objective’.48 Art, for Schelling, does precisely what the speculative realists aim to do – overcome the correlationist prohibition of thinking the Absolute.
Morella’s consumption and reintegration of her own daughter mirrors the ouroboros-like cyclicity of Poe’s quasi-Germanic cosmos, the originator of things eventually devouring its progeny. As Korsmeyer suggests, part of disgust’s cognitive power is its insistence on the uneasy truth that ‘our corporeal selves will suffer disintegration and putrefaction’.49 While Morella’s triumphant will might at first seem to affirm either a subjective idealism closer to Fichte than Schelling, or an entirely dualist universe in which the spirit lives on wholly independent of the flesh, her persistently disgusting corporeality points rather to the collision and dissolution of opposites, the instability of binaries in the face of category crisis and the collapse of beings, flesh and spirit into a single, awful unity. Morella refuses the possibility of what McGinn calls the ‘charmed sphere’ of the self that we try to preserve from the ‘tincture of disgust’.50 Confronted with the disgusting spectacle of Morella’s metamorphosis, such immaterial purity is foreclosed.
This is not to suggest that disgust in ‘Morella’ transparently leads us to the true state of things while eliding all of discourse: disgust, as any emotion, cannot be neatly disentangled from social contexts, and is shaped by culture as well as shaping it. Doubtless some of the disgust associated with Morella’s body springs from a misogynist abjection of the female body, an association especially strengthened by the links between disease and reproduction in the text. Indeed, some critics have read ‘Morella’ and other texts of the ‘marriage group’ as stories of primal masculine envy, interpreting the mysterious illnesses of Poe’s undead brides as pregnancy. Yet insofar as disgust is predicated on boundaries under threat of collapse, even as the emotion is called on to police such borders it betrays their ultimate arbitrariness and illusoriness, their permeability. The disgust Morella’s categorically confusing, undead body inspires owes some of its loathsome power to patriarchal constructions of the female reproductive body as unclean, but the very anxiety underlying this construction points to its artifice while betraying a glimmer of the Absolute throbbing beneath the story’s discursive skin.
‘Ligeia’, affect and the Absolute
‘Ligeia’ repeats many of the same concepts and images as ‘Morella’ at greater length and with greater complexity. Both of Poe’s diseased, vampiric women have bodies in transformation, occupying multiple states simultaneously: they are what Noël Carroll, in his discussion of monsters as figures of category confusion or crisis, would call fusion figures: ‘single figures in whom distinct and often clashing types of elements are superimposed or condensed, resulting in entities that are impure and repulsive’.51 Like ‘Morella’, the story concerns the death and return of its eponymous character. Ligeia, the scholarly wife of the tale’s unnamed narrator, contracts a wasting illness, writes a strange poem, ‘The Conqueror Worm’ and, cryptically quoting Joseph Glanvill, pronounces the words ‘Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will’, before finally succumbing to the ravages of the disease.52 The narrator remarries a woman named Rowena, who also contracts a horrific sickness. In the paroxysms of her death throes Rowena undergoes a bizarre transformation,