A reversal of these events occurs in Poe’s last published tale about women. “Eleonora” incorporates moments of sadness, when the narrator’s wife, the lovely, delicate Eleonora, dies. The narrator and Eleonora were blissful in the Edenic Valley of Many-Colored Grass; but paradise is temporal, and so, after their sexual experience, she dies because Edenic innocence has passed. The narrator’s memories of what followed became clouded for some time, an understandable rendering of his grief, comparable with that of the bereaved lover in “The Sleeper.” Ultimately he comes out of his dream state, which has not been wholly pleasant, finds himself (a telling phrase as regards his psychological state, and one recurrent in Poe’s fiction) in a city, a direct counter to the idyllic rural environs he had shared with Eleonora when they were youthful innocents, ignorant of many aspects of life. In his new surroundings, which suggest greater reality than the valley had offered, he is tempered by sadness. He meets Ermengarde; their marriage will be one of mutuality and more maturity than his union with Eleonora. Eleonora’s spirit blesses the new marriage and perhaps reincarnates in Ermengarde, although such revivification remains ambiguous. Eleonora’s name has the same root as “Helen” and “Lenore,” and so her effect upon the narrator is dazzling. But dazzle ment does not suffice to make an entire life, and so he progresses into greater maturity.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” commands special status among tales of a beautiful woman whose death brings woe to the survivor-male. For many readers, “Usher” epitomizes all that Poe did best in Gothic horror. The precise nature of the tale’s success, however, has been debated. While terrors in the tale derive from legitimate sources, those in the soul, the tale may in another reading stand as a fine parody of literary Gothicism. Just as in “The Assignation,” Poe goes beyond the trappings of popular horror fiction in “Usher.” As in the earlier tale, too, the narrator in this tale interprets the Usher twins’ relationship through a distorted lens, “seeing” it through imperfect vision. Consequently, discrepancies between appearance and reality abound; they enrich the psychological undercurrents of meaning that are seminal in this and other Poe tales. The “Usher” narrator’s sojourn in the “house” of Usher may symbolize a journey into depths of his own self, where he confronts psycho-sexual-artistic elements that horrify him by the far greater negative than positive possibilities they raise. As in some of the poems and in Pym, this tale notably renders a symbolic entering into the human head to find masculinity and femininity in dreadful imbalance—a Poe trademark, as we have seen, of terror “of the soul.”

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” often distinguished as a separate species of fiction from Poe’s horror tales, is often held up as the invention of the detective story. It may indeed be his invention—it is at least far more his invention than the Gothic horror story, which he merely adapted to his own purposes. “Rue Morgue,” indeed, is not swathed in the same extravagant prose as some of the earlier tales, but its expression does not disguise its Gothic heritage. Baffling, atrocious murders without a clear-cut motive, committed in a seemingly locked room; confusion over the killer’s language; signs pointing to some supernatural agency at work—all are eventually clarified by the awe-some mind of the amateur sleuth Dupin. His disdain of professional police methods, the wordplay in his name (“Dupin” sounds like “dupe-ing”) and in the name of the prime police suspect, Le Bon (“the good”), the name of the locale (no “Rue Morgue,” or “Mortuary Street,” ever existed in Paris); an ape imitating human behavior—all attest to Poe’s having his own type of joke in this tale. So does the entire “false start” method employed—leading readers to expect supernaturalism at work, but then disclosing realistic, if unusual, conditions related to the deaths.7 Just so, in “The Purloined Letter” we find that Dupin and the Minister D may be twins, a relationship that makes it possible for Dupin to outwit the criminal and surpass the police. Furthermore, and perhaps humorously, Dupin comments on the value of balancing within the self mathematical and poetical elements—that is, reason and imagination. Because D considers his own, strictly mathematical, mind to be far more astute than that of a poet, and because Dupin is a poet (as is Poe), the poet (or intuitive part of the self, perhaps) is accorded superiority. Poe seemingly could not resist parodying what he himself did well, and so in “ ‘Thou Art the Man”’ he spoofs the tale of detection, again using as part of the plot what is seen by some as supernaturalism at work, although clearer wits disbelieve (using ballistics to identify a criminal is a first of its kind in a detective story). Similar confusion of supernaturalism and madness informs “The Gold-Bug.” And Poe’s subtle balancing of natural and supernatural—chiefly by use of demon tropes in “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—may plausibly, as in many of his other tales, allow shallower readers to be fooled into reading these as simple stories of the otherworldly. 8

IV

Much in the foregoing pages also applies with equal validity to Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which continues to defy readers’ efforts at interpretation. When Poe enlisted acclaimed American author James Kirke Paulding in a failed effort to get “Tales of the Folio Club” published by the prominent firm of Harpers’, Paulding praised the project but noted that it was too rarified for average readers. He counseled Poe instead to use his talents for a novel featuring realistic, if intermittently comic, treatment of aspects of American life that might benefit from humorous lights being thrown upon them. Although Poe heeded Paulding’s advice by using the timely theme of polar exploration (here to the Antarctic) in Pym and by using comedy, the subtleties and coded nature of that comedy have confounded many readers. The extended title of the book and its preface alert us that truth-versus-fiction or appearance-versus-reality themes are significant.