Women in the Life and Works of Edgar Allen Poe
April 19, 2007
Most men begin in the closest of all relationships with women – the strong mother and son bond. However, with Edgar Allan Poe such is not the case. His mother was the first of many women who had a profound impact on Edgar’s poems and short stories. Her impact however, was not of what she did, but rather what she did not do.
In order to properly address the subject matter at hand, one must delve into the intriguing life of Mr. Poe. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809 of David Poe and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins. David Poe drank heavily (a trait which we later see in both Edgar and his older brother William Henry) and eventually abandoned his wife. With the demands of her acting career and the stress of trying to support three young children (the oldest of which was three) she had little time to be a proper mother. Then in October of 1811 she became very sick with tuberculosis and by December 10th she had died at only the age of only 24.
The effect on Edgar of never having known the affection of his parents is described in an 1835 letter to Beverley Tucker, who mentioned to him in a previous letter that she had known Poe’s mother. Poe replied, “In speaking of my mother you have touched a string to which my heart fully responds. To have known her is to be the object of great interest in my eyes. I myself never knew her — and never knew the affection of a father. Both died . . . within a few weeks of each other. I have many occasional dealings with adversity — but the want of parental affection has been the heaviest of my trials”. (Ostrom, 78-79) Here Poe clearly expresses the pain in his soul for his persistent need of female attention and love. It is a theme we see recurring not only in his life but also in many of his literary works.p>
Edgar was taken in, but not adopted by, John and Francis Allan who spoiled him terribly. Francis, the second major woman in Poe’s life, provided for all his material needs but was seldom available to him, partly because Poe was off at various boarding schools, and partly due to the fact that, like his natural mother, Francis too was sick with various ailments. Her absence and diminishing health only added to the grimness of young Edgar’s demeanor.
During this period Edgar is known to have been attracted to Elmira Royster. She became engaged to him, but her father had intercepted Edgar’s letters to her while he attended the university. Not knowing of Edgar’s letters until later, she married another man. (Quinn, 91). She became yet another “lost love” on Edgar’s growing list.
The first important female friend that Poe had (except for his foster-mother, Frances Allan) was Mrs. Jane Stith Stanard (whom he called Helen), the mother of his friend and classmate, Robert Stanard. Mrs. Stanard, who was in her thirties, always lent a kind and sympathetic ear to the 14 year old Edgar. He visited her home frequently and several years later Mrs. Maria Clemm told Mrs. Helen Whitman, in a letter in March 1859, that “when Eddie was unhappy at home” — as she said was often the case — “he went to [Mrs. Stanard] for sympathy, and she always consoled and comforted him . . .” (Quinn, 86).
However, Mrs. Stanard, in keeping with the building trend of the women in his life, was neither in good physical nor mental health, and in the spring of 1824 she suddenly became very sick. On April 28th, with her mind totally deranged, she died. Her death only added to Poe’s already mounting hardship and grief. It was because of the beauty of Mrs. Stanard and his boyhood love for her that her wrote the poem, To Helen, as he explained in a letter to Mrs. Helen Whitman, in October of 1848. Poe said that he wrote this poem in his “passionate boyhood, to the first, purely ideal love of my soul — to the Helen Stanard of whom I told you” (Mabbott, 164).
In 1831 Poe moved to New York and while there lived with his widowed aunt, Maria Clumm, along with her old paralyzed mother and her two children. Then by 1836 he had married his cousin, the daughter of Maria Clumm, Virginia. She was only a few days shy of being 14 years old. Poe most likely had a more spiritual connection to Virginia rather than a physical one at this stage of their relationship. He dearly loved Virginia, and she too "lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by [him]". (Poe in Annabel Lee, 1524)
It was on January 30th, 1847, when Virginia was only 25 that,
"A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulcher.
In this kingdom by the sea." (Poe in Annabel Lee, 1524)
Edgar fell apart; for it was she, like Roderick Usher’s Madeline, which represented his only reason for living. It was in lament of her death that he surely penned Annabel Lee. This poem told of their love, in which nothing could “dissever [his] soul from the soul, Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.” (Poe in Annabel Lee, 1524). Poe never recovered from her young and untimely death, a seemingly recurring macabre event in his life. However, this would not be that last time.
In Poe’s Eleonora, Maria Clumm, Virginia and Edgar are all no doubt the inspiration for the main characters of this allegorical story. In it the narrator, Pryos, tells of “she whom I loved in my youth, . . . the sole daughter of the only sister of my mother long departed. Eleonora was the name of my cousin. We had always dwelled together beneath a tropical sun, in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass”. (Mabbott, 636) Here again we see Poe using the women dear to him in his life to mold his stories.
In the three years after Virginia’s death, Poe had several other romantic involvements, most notably one with Sarah Helen Whitman. She was also a poet, and after developing a fascination with his work she wrote a poem about him entitled, To Edgar Allan Poe. As a response to this, Poe wrote his second To Helen poem which focused on the divine light of Helen’s eyes. Shortly thereafter in September of 1848 he asked her to marry him. Before that marriage could take place however, several drunken bouts, and Poe’s poor reputation changed her mind.
One cannot help being struck by the self-destructive tendencies of Poe. Contradictions are everywhere. For example, he attempted suicide by ingesting opium while courting the lady he claimed to love. He accused his enemies of slandering him, and then confirmed their stories by continuing to drink heavily. Finally, he had become so paranoid that on a stopover in Philadelphia, he told a friend that two men on the train were trying to kill him. (Quinn, 616)
Poe likely could have married Elmira Royster – as he could have also married Ms. Whitman – but instead, in his traditional self destructive pattern, (and evidenced by almost every event of his life) he set a course that would take him back – back to the sorrow and the lost love that he started with. Without a doubt many critics would agree that Poe’s inspiration (or necessity) to write came from his life’s grim experiences. However, I contend that his many poems and short stories were a direct response to, and result of, the many women, and their complementary sorrows, that dominated his life.
The poem To One In Paradise was addressed to Poe’s favorite topic, that of lost love. In it he seems to prophetically sum up his now famous life,
"Thou wast that all to me, love,
For which my soul did pine—
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine, …"
However, for Poe it became a "dream too bright to last" …
"For alas! alas! with me
The light of Life is o’er!"
Works Cited
Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2003.
Mabbott, Thomas Oliver. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978.
Ostrom, John Ward. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols, New York: Gordian Press Inc., 1966.
Quinn, A. Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
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