The Oppression Of Women In Edgar Allan Poe's Literature

As the antebellum South approached the end of the white man’s absolute reign, masculine anxiety became a recurring theme within its literature. Across the nation, slavery had become a central debate, yet the future of the institution was no clearer than it had ever been before (Whalen 111). Similarly, the role of women was becoming increasingly unstable. This not only gave a voice to the experience of a select few, but also loosened the constraints limiting them to the private sphere (Cantalupo 49). The complete control that white men had over every other group in America was becoming increasingly precarious causing a spike in tension for those who inhabited the South. Residing here and reflecting this growing anxiety was one of the nation’s

The literary community often reads Poe as idealizing women, obsessing over women, sublimating women, disfiguring women, denying voice to women” (Webb 215). However, the latter appears to overpower the initial more positive sexism that he encroaches on his characters. Poe not only silences his woman narrators, but also has his male narrators in his earlier works violently silence his female characters and makes “their vocal apparatus the apparent target of their attackers” (Jordan 2). Clearly signaling a regular trend within his literary works. This also continues even into his detective pieces, which have recurring depictions of the silencing of women in all three stories. “The Murders in Rue Morgue,” once again depicts a violently beheading, and “The Mystery of Marie Roget” includes a graphic description of a piece of lace so tightly tied around the victim’s neck that it was buried in her flesh and hidden from sight. Even in the one story without physical violence, Poe still gives the final story’s victim “no opportunity to vocalize her experience” and continues to give her “narrative significance through victimhood, violation, and the absence of speech” (Burke 48). Throughout his many works, Edgar Allan Poe either initially denies or violently silences his women characters’ voices. By continually killing them suddenly and seemingly without reason, Poe reinforces his own power of all white women and

Within the first few paragraphs, the narrator introduces her servant in endearing terms: “And Pompey, my negro! – sweet Pompey! how shall I ever forget thee?” This is followed with a grotesque physical description. Hardly an exhausted list of his attributes, she describes him as three feet tall, between seventy and eighty years old, bow-legged and fat with no neck. By prefacing such an illustration with terms of endearment, Poe not only mocks Pompey, but also Zenobia for her mild reaction. In a book examining the influences of the masses and the national literary market on Poe’s writing, Whalen goes so far as to argue that “By combining stereotypical attributes with more absurd qualities, Zenobia impugns not only Pompey, but also her own literary talents and womanly sentiments.” Due to her failure to reflect American society and be racist enough, she fails to be revulsed but rather “the catalogue of Pompey’s attributes provokes an outpouring of passion” (140). It could be debated that Zenobia’s affection for Pompey was meant to be more insulting to her than him simply due to the fact that such racism was readily accepted in America at this