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Katherine Bonny – The Failed Gothic of Poe. 

The Failed Gothic of Poe.

An evaluation and correction of “M.S Found in A Bottle”

By Katherine Bonny


This article will follow the rules dictated by myself and Mr. Jerrold E. Hogle in his “Introduction: the Gothic in Western Culture” and assesses Edgar Allen Poe’s “M.S Found in a Bottle” and its success in the genre of Gothic literature—or more so, its failure.

–Gothic editor and writer, Katherine Bonny.

MS. Found in a Bottle

——

Qui n’a plus qu’un moment à vivre

N’a plus rien à dissimuler. — Quinault — Atys.

——

OF my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no common order, and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to methodize the stores which early study very diligently garnered up. — Beyond all things, the works of the German moralists gave me great delight; not from any ill-advised admiration of their eloquent madness, but from the ease with which my habits of rigid thought enabled me to detect their falsities. I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious. Indeed, a strong relish for physical philosophy has, I fear, tinctured my mind with a very common error of this age — I mean the habit of referring occurrences, even the least susceptible of such reference, to the principles of that science. Upon the whole, no person could be less liable than myself to be led away from the severe precincts of truth by the ignes fatui of superstition. I have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the incredible tale I have to tell should be considered rather the raving of a crude imagination, than the positive experience of a mind to which the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and a nullity.

Edgar Allen Poe isn’t even mentioned until the third page of Mr. Hogle’s essay. For someone considered the current face of Gothic literature, shouldn’t he be mentioned first and foremost—certainly not mentioned after numerous female writers?

After many years spent in foreign travel, I sailed in the year 18—, from the port of Batavia, in the rich and populous island of Java, on a voyage to the Archipelago of the Sunda islands. I went as passenger — having no other inducement than a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me as a

fiend. 

Missed Opportunity #1:

This is a perfect moment to introduce the fear that haunts our protagonist, but Mr. Poe fails to do so. The Gothic haunting is vital to a Gothic story. In his essay, Mr. Hogle explains: “These hauntings can take many forms…that rise from within the antiquated space, or sometimes invade it from alien realms, to manifest unresolved crimes or conflicts that can no longer be successfully buried from view.”[1] Though, as you too will soon see, this feature never successfully arrives in Mr. Poe’s story. If thought through, Mr. Poe may have incorporated the protagonist’s deep fear of normalcy and stagnancy which in turn would have ironically haunted him through the chaos of the ocean he continues to endure. (See point 3 in Why the Gothic? and see end of article). This feature is noted a second time in Mr. Hogle’s essay as he discusses the importance of “hyperbolically verbalizing contradictory fears and desires over a possible “base” of chaos and death.”[2] Clearly this feature is vital to a successful Gothic story.

Our vessel was a beautiful ship of about four hundred tons, copper-fastened, and built at Bombay of Malabar teak. She was freighted with cotton-wool and oil, from the Lachadive islands. We had also on board coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoa-nuts, and a few cases of opium. The stowage was clumsily done, and the vessel consequently crank.

We got under way with a mere breath of wind, and for many days stood along the eastern coast of Java, without any other incident to beguile the monotony of our course than the occasional meeting with some of the small grabs of the Archipelago to which we were bound.

One evening, leaning over the taffrail, I observed a very singular, isolated cloud, to the N. W. It was remarkable, as well for its color, as from its being the first we had seen since our departure from Batavia. I watched it attentively until sunset, when it spread all at once to the eastward and westward, girting in the horizon with a narrow strip of vapor, and looking like a long line of low beach. My notice was soon afterwards attracted by the dusky-red appearance of the moon, and the peculiar character of the sea. The latter was undergoing a rapid change, and the water seemed more than usually transparent.

Missed Opportunity #2:

In highly notable (mentioned in the first paragraph of Mr. Hogle’s essay) Mary Shelley’s  flashy hit Frankenstein, the Gothic feature of gender provides layers of symbolism that lingers in the horror and terror of this genre. According to Hogle, the femininity that is presented in Frankenstein, is the trigger “that most crystallizes all of his many fears and abjections.”[3] By turning the ocean into a female character, this story will achieve this same symbolism. If Poe was clever enough, he would project his own fears of women as we see so often in his writing onto the ocean as it is the character his protagonist seems to fear in the first place. This missed opportunity is a subtle one, yes, but a devastating one for what is supposed to be considered a gothic piece of literature. These changes will be visible in red henceforth.

Although I could distinctly see the bottom, yet, heaving the lead, I found the ship in fifteen fathoms. The air now became intolerably hot, and was loaded with spiral exhalations similar to those arising from heated iron. As night came on, every breath of wind died away, and a more entire calm it is impossible to conceive. The flame of a candle burned upon the poop without the least perceptible motion, and a long hair, held between the finger and thumb, hung without the possibility of detecting a vibration. However, as the captain said he could perceive no indication of danger, and as we were drifting in bodily to shore, he ordered the sails to be furled, and the anchor let go. No watch was set, and the crew, consisting principally of Malays, stretched themselves deliberately upon deck. I went below — not without a full presentiment of evil. Indeed, every appearance warranted me in apprehending a Simoom. I told the captain my fears; but he paid no attention to what I said, and left me without deigning to give a reply. My uneasiness, however, prevented me from sleeping, and about midnight I went upon deck. — As I placed my foot upon the upper step of the companion-ladder, I was startled by a loud, humming noise, like that occasioned by the rapid revolution of a mill-wheel, and before I could ascertain its meaning, I found the ship quivering to its centre. In the next instant, a wilderness of foam hurled us upon our beam-ends, and, rushing over us fore and aft, she swept the entire decks from stem to stern.

The extreme fury of the blast proved, in a great measure, the salvation of the ship. Although completely water-logged, yet, as her masts had gone by the board, she rose, after a minute, heavily from the sea herself, and, staggering awhile beneath the immense pressure of the tempest, finally righted.

Story of the Week: Edgar Allan Poe, “MS. Found in a Bottle” - Library of America

These images from Library of America[4] provide great focus and characterization of the ocean that further emphasizes the success in my revisions of Mr. Poe’s story.

By what miracle I escaped destruction, it is impossible to say. Stunned by the shock of the water,

This line is boring. Mr. Poe has failed to incorporate any of the aspects that make a story Gothic and therefore interesting. Thus, this story remains uninteresting to a reader like myself. This line: “Stunned by the shock of the water” holds no significance in Mr. Poe’s version of this story. It could be completely omitted and no aspect of the story would miss it. When write a story, every sentence needs to hold meaning and effect the story with such significance that its omission would be a detrimental sacrifice to my work. In my new version, this line itself holds much more significance as the protagonist is interacting with the ocean, who holds many of his fears in an intricately layered concoction of metaphor and symbolism. 

I found myself, upon recovery, jammed in between the stern-post and rudder. With great difficulty I gained my feet, and looking dizzily around, was, at first, struck with the idea of our being among breakers; so terrific, beyond the wildest imagination, was the whirlpool of mountainous and foaming ocean within which she engulfed us. After a while, I heard the voice of an old Swede, who had shipped with us at the moment of our leaving port. I hallooed to him with all my strength, and presently he came reeling aft. We soon discovered that we were the sole survivors of the accident. All on deck, with the exception of ourselves, had been swept overboard; — the captain and mates must have perished as they slept, for the cabins were deluged with her water. Without assistance, we could expect to do little for the security of the ship, and our exertions were at first paralyzed by the momentary expectation of going down. Our cable had, of course, parted like pack-thread, at the first breath of the hurricane, or we should have been instantaneously overwhelmed. We scudded with frightful velocity before the sea, and her water made clear breaches over us. The frame-work of our stern was shattered excessively, and, in almost every respect, we had received considerable injury; but to our extreme joy we found the pumps unchoked, and that we had made no great shifting of our ballast. — The main fury of the blast had already blown over, and we apprehended little danger from the violence of the wind; but we looked forward to its total cessation with dismay; well believing, that, in our shattered condition, we should inevitably perish in the tremendous swell which would ensue. But this very just apprehension seemed by no means likely to be soon verified. For five entire days and nights — during which our only subsistence was a small quantity of jaggeree, procured with great difficulty from the forecastle — the hulk flew at a rate defying computation, before rapidly succeeding flaws of wind, which, without equalling the first violence of the Simoom, were still more terrific than any tempest I had before encountered. Our course for the first four days was, with trifling variations, S. E. and by S.; and we must have run down the coast of New Holland. — On the fifth day the cold became extreme, although the wind had hauled round a point more to the northward. — The sun arose with a sickly yellow lustre, and clambered a very few degrees above the horizon — emitting no decisive light. There were no clouds apparent, yet the wind was upon the increase, and blew with a fitful and unsteady fury. About noon, as nearly as we could guess, our attention was again arrested by the appearance of the sun. It gave out no light, properly so called, but a dull and sullen glow without reflection, as if all its rays were polarized. Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power. It was a dim, silver-like rim, alone, as it rushed down the unfathomable ocean.

We waited in vain for the arrival of the sixth day — that day to me has not arrived — to the Swede, never did arrive. Thenceforward we were enshrouded in pitchy darkness, so that we could not have seen an object at twenty paces from the ship. Eternal night continued to envelop us, all unrelieved by the phosphoric sea-brilliancy to which we had been accustomed in the tropics. We observed too, that, although the tempest continued to  rage with unabated violence, there was no longer to be discovered the usual appearance of her surf, or foam, which had hitherto attended us. All around were horror, and thick gloom, and a black sweltering desert of ebony. — Superstitious terror crept by degrees into the spirit of the old Swede, and my own soul was wrapped up in silent wonder. We neglected all care of the ship, as worse than useless, and securing ourselves, as well as possible, to the stump of the mizen-mast, looked out bitterly into the world of the feminal ocean. We had no means of calculating time, nor could we form any guess of our situation. We were, however, well aware of having made farther to the southward than any previous navigators, and felt great amazement at not meeting with the usual impediments of ice. In the meantime every moment threatened to be our last — every mountainous billow hurried to overwhelm us. The swell surpassed anything I had imagined possible, and that we were not instantly buried is a miracle. My companion spoke of the lightness of our cargo, and reminded me of the excellent qualities of our ship; but I could not help feeling the utter hopelessness of hope itself, and prepared myself gloomily for that death which I thought nothing could defer beyond an hour, as, with every knot of way the ship made, the swelling of the black stupendous seas became more dismally appalling. At times we gasped for breath at an elevation beyond the albatross — at times became dizzy with the velocity of our descent into some watery hell, where the air grew stagnant, and no sound disturbed the slumbers of the kraken.

We were at the bottom of one of these abysses, when a quick scream from my companion broke fearfully upon the night. “See!” [[sic]]1 see!” cried he, shrieking in my ears, “Almighty God! see! see!” As he spoke, I became aware of a dull, sullen glare of red light which streamed down the sides of the vast chasm where we lay, and threw a fitful brilliancy upon our deck. Casting my eyes upwards, I beheld a spectacle which froze the current of my blood. At a terrific height directly above us, and upon the very verge of the precipitous descent, hovered a gigantic ship of, perhaps, four thousand tons. Although upreared upon the summit of a wave more than a hundred times her own altitude, her apparent size still exceeded that of any ship of the line or East Indiaman in existence. Her huge hull was of a deep dingy black, unrelieved by any of the customary carvings of a ship. A single row of brass cannon protruded from her open ports, and dashed from their polished surfaces the fires of innumerable battle-lanterns, which swung to and fro about her rigging. But what mainly inspired us with horror and astonishment, was that she bore up under a press of sail in the very teeth of that supernatural sea, and of that ungovernable hurricane. When we first discovered her, her bows were alone to be seen, as she rose slowly from the dim and horrible gulf beyond her. For a moment of intense terror she paused upon the giddy pinnacle, as if in contemplation of her own sublimity, then trembled and tottered, and — came down.

At this instant, I know not what sudden self-possession came over my spirit. Staggering as far aft as I could, I awaited fearlessly the ruin that was to overwhelm. Our own vessel was at length ceasing from her struggles, and sinking with her head to the sea herself. The shock of the descending mass struck her, consequently, in that portion of her frame which was already under water, and the inevitable result was to hurl me, with irresistible violence, upon the rigging of the stranger.

As I fell, the ship hove in stays, and went about; and to the confusion ensuing I attributed my escape from the notice of the crew. With little difficulty I made my way, unperceived, to the main hatchway, which was partially open, and soon found an opportunity of secreting myself in the hold. Why I did so I can hardly tell. An indefinite sense of awe, which at first sight of the navigators of the ship had taken hold of my mind, was perhaps the principle of my concealment. I was unwilling to trust myself with a race of people who had offered, to the cursory glance I had taken, so many points of vague novelty, doubt, and apprehension. I therefore thought proper to contrive a hiding-place in the hold. This I did by removing a small portion of the shifting-boards, in such a manner as to afford me a convenient retreat between the huge timbers of the ship.

I had scarcely completed my work, when a footstep in the hold forced me to make use of it. A man passed by my place of concealment with a feeble and unsteady gait. I could not see his face, but had an opportunity of observing his general appearance. There was about it an evidence of great age and infirmity. His knees tottered beneath a load of years, and his entire frame quivered under the burthen. He muttered to himself, in a low broken tone, some words of a language which I could not understand, and groped in a corner among a pile of singular-looking instruments, and decayed charts of navigation. His manner was a wild mixture of the peevishness of second childhood, and the solemn dignity of a God. He at length went on deck, and I saw him no more.

  * * * * * * *

A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul — a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone time are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key. To a mind constituted like my own, the latter consideration is an evil. I shall never — I know that I shall never — be satisfied with regard to the nature of my conceptions. Yet it is not wonderful that these conceptions are indefinite, since they have their origin in sources so utterly novel. A new sense — a new entity is added to my soul.

  * * * * *

It is long since I first trod the deck of this terrible ship, and the rays of my destiny are, I think, gathering to a focus. Incomprehensible men! Wrapped up in meditations of a kind which I cannot divine, they pass me by unnoticed. Concealment is utter folly on my part, for the people will not see. It was but just now that I passed directly before the eyes of the mate — it was no long while ago that I ventured into the captain’s own private cabin, and took thence the materials with which I write, and have written. I shall from time to time continue this journal. It is true that I may not find an opportunity of transmitting it to the world, but I will not fail to make the endeavour. At the last moment I will enclose the MS. in a bottle, and cast it to the sea herself to read.

  * * * * * *

An incident has occurred which has given me new room for meditation. Are such things the operation of ungoverned Chance? I had ventured upon deck and thrown myself down, without attracting any notice, among a pile of ratlin-stuff and old sails, in the bottom of the yawl. While musing upon the singularity of my fate, I unwittingly daubed with a tar-brush the edges of a neatly-folded studding-sail which lay near me on a barrel. The studding-sail is now bent upon the ship, and the thoughtless touches of the brush are spread out into the word DISCOVERY.

I have made many observations lately upon the structure of the vessel. Although well armed, she is not, I think, a ship of war. Her rigging, build, and general equipment, all negative a supposition of this kind. What she is not, I can easily perceive — what she is I fear it is impossible to say. I know not how it is, but in scrutinizing her strange model and singular cast of spars, her huge size and overgrown suits of canvass, her severely simple bow and antiquated stern, there will occasionally flash across my mind a sensation of familiar things, and there is always mixed up with such indistinct shadows of recollection, an unaccountable memory of old foreign chronicles and ages long ago. * * *

Missed Opportunity #3

Mr. Poe’s story lacks the classic Gothic location that is vital to Gothic literature. The boat described in this section may seem like it has the creepy and old, Gothic-like qualities, but it is not a Gothic location itself. Mr. Hogle explains Gothic locations and how “within this space, or a combination of such spaces, are hidden some secrets from the past (sometimes the recent past) that haunt the characters, psychologically, physically, or otherwise at the main time of the story.”[5] For this boat to be considered Gothic, it has to haunt the protagonist. Now, in my revised version, the ocean has become a female character which is constantly poking and prodding at the protagonist, haunting him of a hidden fear of his (as revealed in Missed Opportunity #1). In my revised version, the ocean is the haunting figure in this now Gothic story. This simple change alone shifts the primary setting of this novel: the ship, into a a now Gothic location. This was a very simple and easy addition to the story that has turned it into something actually of the Gothic. While I label this as a “missed opportunity” this lack of addition is simply negligence from Mr. Poe.

I have been looking at the timbers of the ship. She is built of a material to which I am a stranger. There is a peculiar character about the wood which strikes me as rendering it unfit for the purpose to which it has been applied. I mean its extreme porousness, considered independently of the worm-eaten condition which is a consequence of navigation in these seas, and apart from the rottenness attendant upon age. It will appear perhaps an observation somewhat over-curious, but this wood would have every characteristic of Spanish oak, if Spanish oak were distended by any unnatural means.

In reading the above sentence, a curious apothegm of an old weather-beaten Dutch navigator comes full upon my recollection. “It is as sure,” he was wont to say, when any doubt was entertained of his veracity, “as sure as there is a sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman.” * *

About an hour ago, I made bold to thrust myself among a group of the crew. They paid me no manner of attention, and, although I stood in the very midst of them all, seemed utterly unconscious of my presence. Like the one I had at first seen in the hold, they all bore about them the marks of a hoary old age. Their knees trembled with infirmity; their shoulders were bent double with decrepitude; their shrivelled skins rattled in the wind; their voices were low, tremulous, and broken; their eyes glistened with the rheum of years; and their gray hairs streamed terribly in the tempest. Around them, on every part of the deck, lay scattered mathematical instruments of the most quaint and obsolete construction. * * * * *

I mentioned some time ago the bending of a studding-sail. From that period the ship, being thrown dead off the wind, has continued her terrific course due south, with every rag of canvass packed upon her, from her trucks to her lower studding-sail booms, and rolling every moment her top-gallant yard-arms into the most appalling hell of water which it can enter into the mind of man to imagine. I have just left the deck, where I find it impossible to maintain a footing, although the crew seem to experience little inconvenience. It appears to me a miracle of miracles that our enormous bulk is not swallowed up at once and forever. We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink of Eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss. From billows a thousand times more stupendous than any I have ever seen, we glide away with the facility of the arrowy sea-gull; and the colossal waters rears her heads above us like demons of the deep, but like demons confined to simple threats and forbidden to destroy. I am led to attribute these frequent escapes to the only natural cause which can account for such effect. — I must suppose the ship to be within the influence of some strong current, or impetuous under-tow. * * * *

Why the Gothic?

Features of Gothic Literature that make stories better.

  • Gothic fiction allows us to address and disguise deeply personal and widely social fears, desires, and inquiries.[6]
  • The Gothic haunts its plot and characters with “the guilt of the revolutionary haunted by the past which he has been trying to destroy…”[7] (See end of article.)
  •  “The terror or possible horror that the ruination of older powers will haunt us all, not just with our desires for them, but with the fact that what “grounds” them, and now their usurpers, is really a deathly chaos.”[8]
    • The protagonist’s deep fear for normality and stagnancy is usurped by “a deadly chaos,” aka the ocean in this story.
  • “The hyperbolic unreality, even surreality, of Gothic fiction, as subject to parody and critique as it has been, is in every way essential to its capacity to abject cultural and psychological contradictions for modern readers to face or avoid.”[9] (See end of article.)
    • With the new ending, this story allows a hyperbolic and oddly on-the-nose confrontation of the protagonist’s fears.

I have seen the captain face to face, and in his own cabin — but, as I expected, he paid me no attention. Although in his appearance there is, to a casual observer, nothing which might bespeak him more or less than man — still a feeling of irrepressible reverence and awe mingled with the sensation of wonder with which I regarded him. In stature he is nearly my own height; that is, about five feet eight inches. He is of a well-knit and compact frame of body, neither robust nor remarkable otherwise. But it is the singularity of the expression which reigns upon the face — it is the intense, the wonderful, the thrilling evidence of old age so utter, so extreme, which excites within my spirit a sense — a sentiment ineffable. His forehead, although little wrinkled, seems to bear upon it the stamp of a myriad of years. — His gray hairs are records of the past, and his grayer eyes are Sybils of the future. The cabin floor was thickly strewn with strange, iron-clasped folios, and mouldering instruments of science, and obsolete long-forgotten charts. His head was bowed down upon his hands, and he pored, with a fiery unquiet eye, over a paper which I took to be a commission, and which, at all events, bore the signature of a monarch. He muttered to himself, as did the first seaman whom I saw in the hold, some low peevish syllables of a foreign tongue, and although the speaker was close at my elbow, his voice seemed to reach my ears from the distance of a mile. * *

The ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld. The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their figures fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin. * * * *

When I look around me I feel ashamed of my former apprehensions. If I trembled at the blast which has hitherto attended us, shall I not stand aghast at a warring of wind and ocean, to convey any idea of which the words tornado and simoom are trivial and ineffective! All in the immediate vicinity of the ship is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water; but, about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe. * * *

As I imagined, the ship proves to be in a current; if that appellation can properly be given to a tide which, howling and shrieking by the white ice, thunders on to the southward with a velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract. * * * * *

To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge — some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. Perhaps her current leads us to the southern pole itself. It must be confessed that a supposition apparently so wild has every probability in its favor. * * * *

The crew pace the deck with unquiet and tremulous step; but there is upon their countenances an expression more of the eagerness of hope than of the apathy of despair.

In the meantime the wind is still in our poop, and, as we carry a crowd of canvass, the ship is at times lifted bodily from out the sea —— Oh, horror upon horror! the ice opens suddenly to the right, and to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness and the distance. But little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny — the circles rapidly grow small — we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool — and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering, oh God! and — going down!

Her mouth swallows us whole—again. When the jaws hinged shut over us, the calm that ensued is impossibly entire. Everything hung still as if the ocean herself held its breath with me. The ship and its crew were gone; dissipated like a powdery capsule touching the tongue of a child—gone, gone in its entire by the time the throat decides to swallow. By what miracle I escaped destruction once again, it is still impossible to say. Stunned by the warmth in the water, I found myself, paralyzed. Not with fear but in comfort, swaddled and tucked in to the ocean herself. Her darkness was solid and immovable and such were my limbs. The eternal night would continue. It is impossible to say how long I hovered here as the ebony nothing that surrounded me gave no push or pull or indication of my moment. I stayed still.

I had no indication of time passing until presumably the sun came the next morning. I thought of the old Swede and wondered if we shared this moment together. I wondered if horror tickled his stomach as it did mine or if this time he was wrapped in the silent wonder just as I was. Light bled through her layers above us, warming the water as it kissed onto my face. But it did not venture further, lingering there for a moment then slowly passing by and over my shoulder.

It was like a lantern in a fogged glass was placed in front of me. Stuck in the warm gelatin I thought to move towards it, finally understanding the moth’s lust for the light. But as I scooped my arm upwards towards the dull smudge of yellow, I came to the conclusion that it did not move with me. I commanded my other arm to swim upward too, and it too could not hear me. Still, the lantern flickered above, rippling through the break of the surface only ten or so paces above me. This is when the horror trickled in—a sick joke! Wrapped tightly into her abyss I could not explore upwards nor downwards. Truly I am doomed to float as a mandarin would in a tasteless gelatin dessert, begging to be sliced in two and as the left half is lifted from its right, brought to surface, a lick of freedom—oh God! Again, only to be inhaled by the consuming void once again.

When the light finally began to fizzle out, just as brief as it had even occurred, I grew scared of its absence. My lips seemed unable to move either, though I begged and cried for it to stay. It dimmed slowly at first then suddenly as if spooked, a neighbor shutting her shutters and enclosing herself into a soft and comfortable darkness. But as the sun left me, this darkness was not warm nor comfortable but rather cold, cutting, and dreadfully silent.

Mr. Poe’s ending is the most disappointing as it is the part of the story lacking most of Gothic features. This new ending, as I have provided, features more elements of the Gothic than the entirety of Mr. Poe’s original published story. According to Mr. Hogle: “While it is also concerned with the interpenetration of other opposed conditions – including life/death, natural/supernatural, ancient/modern, realistic/ artificial, and unconscious/conscious – along with the abjection of these crossings into haunting and supposedly deviant “others” that therefore attract and terrify middle-class characters and readers.”[10] Mr. Poe’s features life/death but fails to have an abjection which signifies a higher knowledge of the Gothic. This new ending provides an abjection between life and death as the narrator is literally suspended in between at the end.

In this new ending, I challenge Mr. Poe’s notion of horror, as the speaker does not die in an outwardly grotesque fashion as Mr. Poe’s successful stories oft do.

Mr. Hogle describes “terror Gothic” as a story that ” holds characters and readers mostly in anxious suspense about threats to life, safety, and sanity kept largely out of sight or in shadows or suggestions from a hidden past….”[11] As our protagonist is seemingly stuck with no explanation or solution, the reader has no idea what might come of his fate—will he drown? Or simply remain paralyzed in the same spot for eternity—his greatest fear? This insights anxiety and suspense within the story and those who dare to read it, providing a perfect example of terror Gothic.

On the other hand, “horror Gothic” is explained to “[confront] the principal characters with the gross violence of physical or psychological dissolution, explicitly shattering the assumed norms (including the repressions) of everyday life with wildly shocking, and even revolting, consequences.”[12] As I noted before, I distanced this story from the typical Poe-gore we see, however due to the absurdity and irony of the new ending, the horror aspects of psychological dissolution and shocking consequences are still achieved. With this new ending, this story has become a successful representation of both horror and terror Gothic as well as a concrete example of Gothic literature itself. Perhaps more effort and consideration of the genre will serve Mr. Poe well.

EDGAR A. POE.

EDITED BY KATHERINE BONNY.

Avid readers: I personally thank you for your attention and overwhelming support. Stay tuned into my work as Mr. Hogle and I will soon be publishing a piece together that further admires and dissects Gothic literature. A few unseen pieces from my own collection will be featured in this discussion as well.

Reach my agent via email for any inquiries: gothicwriterandeditorkatherinebonny’sagent@yahoo.org

 


  1. (Hogle, 2-3).
  2. (Hogle, 5).
  3. (Hogle 10).
  4. Two paintings illustrating scenes from Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle.” Left: “Upon the very verge of the precipitous descent, hovered a gigantic ship,” by British artist Byam Shaw (1872–1919), in Selected Tales of Mystery (London, 1909). Right: “The colossal waters rear their heads above us like demons of the deep,” by Irish artist Harry Clarke (1889–1931) in Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London, 1923). https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1477-story-of-the-week-edgar-allan-poe-ms-found-in-a-bottle/
  5. (Hogle, 2).
  6. (Hogle, 4).
  7. (Hogle, 4).
  8. (Hogle, 5).
  9. (Hogle, 14).
  10. (Hogle, 9).
  11. (Hogle, 3).
  12. (Hogle, 3).

License

Tales of Edgar Allan Poe: Critical and Creative Editions Copyright © by Abby Embree; Andrew Burgess; Ann Manley; Bri Brands; Dylan Melchior; Elizabeth Klink; Emi O’Brochta; Emma Grause; Georgia Aduddell; Grace Martin; Iysis Shaffers; Jess Quintero; Kade Cockrum; Karaline Schulte; Katherine Bonny; Kathleen Zeivel; Leah Wegmann; LeDavid Olmstead; Link Linquist; Logan Williams; Lorna Bauer; Maddie Patterson; Madeleine Heath; Matthew Brown; Nathan Peterson; Olivia Noll Reinert; Piper Wiley; Sarah Inouye; Sona Xiong; Spencer Cooper-Ohm; and Trick Lucero. All Rights Reserved.