Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) was a prolific author whose work was heavily inspired by the gothic, and his titular works like “The Raven” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” impact gothic literature even today. The gothic genre is characterized by “its focus on the supernatural, the macabre, and the exploration of human emotions and psychology, often set against dark and foreboding backdrops” (Agarwal 2024). Its use of supernatural and psychological elements to explore the fears and uncertainties of the time remains a hallmark of the genre today, now most prominent in the horror movie genre. In Poe’s gothic tales, the recurring motif of dead or ghostly women reveals deep-seated societal anxieties about gender and power that were present at the time. First-wave feminism was picking up in the 1820s-30s, as women began to gather and fight for the right to vote, among other privileges they were not afforded. Thus, in Poe’s writing, the power of the feminine dead not only fuels the male narrator’s descent into violence and madness but exposes the psychological instability underlying rigid gender roles and recognizes that the domineering male control of the time was unnatural.

In Poe’s gothic tales, the female characters who are objectified heavily in life transform into ethereal, haunting figures in death, demonstrating the freedom they gain in death. In life, the women are performing gender as expected of them, while in death, philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler explains that “the very notions of an essential sex… are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination” (Butler 2501). In the poem “To Helen,” Poe depicts the idealized and glamorized version of a woman that society valued, inspired by Helen of Troy from The Iliad: ““Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche / How statue-like I see thee stand” (Poe lines 11-12, 608). She is silent, inanimate and objectified, her beauty paramount: he only ever describes her looks, with phrases like “thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face” (Poe line 7, 608). In another poem, “Annabel Lee,” the woman, who in life “lived with no other thought / Than to love and be loved by me,” becomes ethereal and undefinable in death, compared to the natural world around her: “For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; / And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee” (Poe lines 34-37, 619). These stories lack any meaningful exploration of these women’s inner lives or personal narratives outside of how they serve the narrator because the women did not have the space in life to express their desires safely, reinforcing the sense that they exist purely as objects of male desire. However, in death, Poe begins to blur these boundaries, altering women like Annabel Lee or Lenore in “The Raven” into more undefinable, haunting pieces of the narrative and demonstrating the change in how they perform femininity.

Poe’s tendency to depict women as passive, idealized figures reflects a wider anxiety about female power and autonomy that becomes evident in their depiction in death. Poe tells us nothing about Lenore, yet she haunts every moment of “The Raven” as the narrator cries out “Respite—respite and Nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore! / Let me quaff this kind Nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!” / Quoth the raven, “Nevermore”” (Poe lines 83-84, 614). In death, Lenore speaks through the raven louder than she ever did in life, refusing to let the narrator forget her or give up the power that she has gained. Death becomes an equalizing factor, where women have just as much power as men and can exert power in death to ensure they are not forgotten or erased from the narrative as they were in life. In Ligeia, the titular Ligeia becomes supernatural within the narrator’s memories once she is dead, turning from human into something more: “She came and departed like a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study save by the dear music of her low sweet voice, as she placed her delicate hand upon my shoulder. In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her. It was the radiance of an opium dream—an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos” (Poe 620). Thus, Ligeia is haunting the narrator, like a drug-induced fantasy instead of a real person. Lenore and Ligeia are both examples of women in Poe’s narratives who evoke a sense of the uncanny that the male narrators find profoundly unsettling, drastically different from their descriptions in life—objectified and silenced.  This allows them to rewrite the narrative, to a certain extent: they make the choice to be feared rather than loved, but it is a choice they have the freedom to make in death. While one could argue that men are simply scared of the unnatural like ghosts, the fear stems not from the ghost itself, but what the ghost represents: the unpredictable, foreign version of the women they once knew.

In death, the male narrators are unable to possess and control the women, and this fear of female autonomy fuels their descent into violence and madness. In The Black Cat, “all black cats [are] witches in disguise,” and the narrator uses this parallel to dehumanize his wife and justify his treatment of her (Poe 671). The independence of the cat is equated to the independence of the wife; when he attempts to kill the cat, he is stopped by his wife, and “Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, [he withdraws his] arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain” (Norton 674). The use of ‘goaded’ and ‘interference’ puts the blame on the wife’s independence and her attempts to control her husband, instead, and the narrator feels “no embarrassment whatsoever” (Poe 675). Similarly, The Fall of the House of Usher reveals the narrator’s fear of losing control in the description of Madeline after she escapes from being buried alive: “There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame” (Poe 641). Similar to how The Black Cat’s narrator’s murderous rage is fueled by the perceived loss of his masculine authority, the description of Madeline Usher’s wraith-like form reflects a deeper unease with the power of the feminine. In a cyclical way, Roderick Usher is responsible for his own death, triggered by burying his own sister alive, and even ‘emaciated’, she has managed to tear out of her coffin. The male character’s reactions of obsession, guilt, and violence towards the women in Poe’s stories reveal the fragility of patriarchal power structures when confronted with feminine power, and the transformation of the women into ethereal figures not only allows Poe’s male narrators to displace their fear of female agency onto the supernatural but how easily patriarchal control is broken, all of which fuels their descent into madness. Harkening back to Butler, the moment the women die, they are not forced to perform gender as they were in life, and a lifetime’s worth of repressed desire and emotion, which only men were allowed to express, turns the women into haunting characters.

In the end, the haunting figure of the dead feminine transforms into nothing more than a vessel for the male narrators’ anxieties, desires, and guilt, revealing the artificiality of binary gender roles and patriarchal power structures. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Roderick dies of guilt over burying his sister, Madeline alive, but this guilt is displaced onto the more tangible figure of her body when she “[falls] heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her horrible and now final death-agonies, [bears] him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had dreaded” (Poe 641). Madeline becomes a vessel for Roderick’s male guilt, and in a way becomes more masculine herself in death, gaining the power to kill her brother with her. In Ligeia, the narrator’s guilt over replacing Ligeia imbues her dead spirit with the power to possess his new bride, literally replacing her in a direct parallel to how the narrator replaced Ligeia. When the feminine becomes masculine, is there truly a difference other than what is imposed? This artificiality is most evident in the corpse of the wife in The Black Cat: “Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb” (Poe 676). The narrative is purposefully unclear—is the wife the monster, or is the cat? The blending of the wife and cat demonstrates how throughout the narrative, the violence the narrator imposes upon the cat parallels domestic violence, down to the excuses the narrator makes for himself, asking “Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not” (Poe 672). At this moment, the cat-woman hybrid represents all the anxiety and guilt the narrator has repressed over his treatment of his wife, and it comes barreling down like a form of divine judgement— neither masculine nor feminine, but simply otherworldly. The monstrosity of the cat-woman hybrid is so blatant that readers cannot help but confront the artificiality of the feminine, wifely role that was enforced upon her by society.

Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic literature used a recurring motif of supernatural feminine power to expose the psychological instability underlying rigid gender roles. In becoming supernatural, the women combine femininity and masculinity into something more. However, this only occurs in death, where the women are free as they never were in life.  Ultimately, the gothic has served as a medium to explore uncomfortable topics such as the artificiality of constructed gender roles for a long time, and this is evident even today in horror and psychological fiction. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, for example, transforms classic fairy tales into gothic feminist stories where women are empowered by the natural world and gain even footing with their male counterparts in the most unlikely of ways. Poe’s literature forces readers to ponder on the construction of gender: if it can so easily be deconstructed in death, were they ever inherent, or simply forced upon society by the power structures in place?

Works Cited

Agarwal, Alka Rani, et al. “Exploration of Gothic Elements in 19th Century Literature.” International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts, vol. 12, no. 8, Aug. 2024, pp. 2320–2882, www.ijcrt.org/papers/IJCRT2408015.pdf.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 2006.

Poe, Edgar Allen. “Annabel Lee.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Robert S. Levine, W. W. Norton & Company, 2017, pp. 618-619.

Poe, Edgar Allen. “Ligeia.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Robert S. Levine, W. W. Norton & Company, 2017, pp. 619-628.

Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Black Cat.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Robert S. Levine, W. W. Norton & Company, 2017, pp. 670-676.

Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Robert S. Levine, W. W. Norton & Company, 2017, pp. 629-642.

Edgar Allen. “The Raven.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Robert S. Levine, W. W. Norton & Company, 2017, pp. 612-615.

Poe, Edgar Allen. “To Helen.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Robert S. Levine, W. W. Norton & Company, 2017, pp. 608-609.