Death and Love in Poe's and Schwob's Readings of the Classics

In their article "Death and Love in Poe's and Schwob's Readings of the Classics," Ana González-Rivas Fernández and Francisco García Jurado propose that although Gothic literature usually relegates the theme of love to the background, devoting most of its attention to the supernatural and to darkness, there are also literary texts in which love is mixed with life beyond the grave. This is the case, for example, of Théophile Gautier's La Morte amoureuse (1836), the story of a vampire who comes back to life in her "undead" condition in order to seduce a priest. The theme of love and death awakened great interest among the Romantics, but this is not unique to modern literature: GrecoRoman writers had already dealt successfully with this topic and modern authors used this to create their own fictions. González-Rivas Fernández and García Jurado analyze how modern authors of Gothic narratives read certain ancient texts regarding love and death and how they use them in their own narratives: they establish a complex relationship between ancient and modern texts that transcends mere imitation or inspiration. González-Rivas Fernández and García Jurado discuss the case of Poe, whose texts "Berenice" and "Ligeia" are based on particular readings of previous narratives of ancient as well as mysterious origin and they analyze the re-reading of Poe by Marcel Schwob. Ana González-Rivas and Francisco García Jurado, "Death and Love in Poe's and Schwob's Readings of the Classics" page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4 (2008): Thematic issue New Studies on the Fantastic in Literature. Ed. Asunción López-Varela Ana GONZÁLEZ-RIVAS FERNÁNDEZ and Francisco GARCÍA JURADO Death and Love in Poe's and Schwob's Readings of the Classics Edgar Allan Poe's work represents a turning point in the evolution of Gothic literature: the passage from the object to the subject, from fear caused by the outside world to the terror that emerges within oneself, from the depths of the psyche. This shift in focus was to be taken up by authors such as Oscar Wilde and Henry James. In "Berenice" (1835) and "Ligeia" (1838), Poe develops a literary topos common in his narratives, that of the dead beloved who rises from her grave and comes back to life. These two stories are connected with his other literary works such as "Morella" (1835), "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), or poems such as "The Sleeper" (1831, 1836, 1845), which share the same range of themes. On the other hand, in order to understand Poe's obsession with this motif, we must go back to his biography and to the deaths of his wife and cousin Virginia, his mother, a friend's mother, and his stepmother, all dear to Poe. In the first part of this article, we analyze the general characteristics of "Berenice" and "Ligeia," as well as the dialogue that they maintain with classical literature. This theme has, in part, already been examined by other scholars who have analysed Poe's interest in Greco-Roman literature. But none of these previous studies have considered the classical as part of Poe's Gothic facet and so none of them has defined the system of intertextuality between the two elements which transcend the particularity of Poe's case. Darlene Harbour Unrue made a step in this direction when she stated that "Edgar Allan Poe's affinity with classical values has not been properly noted by critics and other readers who have interpreted the romantic and Gothic elements in his fiction and poetry as proof of Poe's predilection for the subjective, macabre, and fantastic, as well as transcendental" (112). However, Unrue analyzes the presence of the classical in Poe's work by separating him from the romantic tradition, which again implies a priori an approach that maintains the apparently irreconcilable opposition between classical literature and the Gothic. The tale of "Berenice" is one of the most horrific stories Poe ever wrote, a fact that many scholars have noticed and that Poe himself recognized. It tells the story of two cousins, Egaeus and Berenice, who, after spending their childhood together, fall in love and decide to get married. At this time, each of them begins to change: Berenice fells ill and slips little by little towards death. Egaeus, on the other hand, becomes more and more affected by a mental illness diagnosed as "monomania," obsessions with certain details which lead to his absorption in reverie. One day, he becomes fixated on Berenice's teeth, and after she dies, he begins to think about them obsessively. Suddenly, one of the servants bursts into the library and tells Egaeus that Berenice's grave has been profaned and that the girl has been found bleeding and still alive. Egaeus realizes then that he is covered in mud and blood and he fixes his gaze on a small box with a strange Latin inscription on it. He opens it and sees Berenice's teeth, which, in his delirium, he had himself extracted from the young woman while she was still breathing. Further, in the story of "Berenice" there are two aspects related to the classical world that play an important role in the axis of the narrative: the name of the characters and the Latin quotation attributed to a medieval Arab writer, Ebn Zaiat. Firstly, the names of Egaeus and Berenice have clear classical evocations. Egaeus was the king of Athens who threw himself into the sea when he believed that his son Theseus had been killed by the Minotaur. Berenice was the wife of Ptolomeus the Third. Worried about her husband's leaving for war in Syria, she promised her hair to Aphrodite if he came back alive and safe. On her husband's return, Berenice gave her hair to the goddess, who transformed it into a constellation. In the first case, the resemblance between Poe's Egaeus and the king of Athens probably lies in the rashness that leads both men to the misinterpretation of the deaths of Theseus and Berenice and, therefore to the final tragedy. As far as Poe's Berenice is concerned, she has in common with the queen of Egypt the sacrifice which they both make for the beloved man; a sacrifice the price of which is a part of themselves (the hair and the teeth). With the choice of the names of Ana González-Rivas and Francisco García Jurado, "Death and Love in Poe's and Schwob's Readings of the Classics" page 3 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4 (2008): Thematic issue New Studies on the Fantastic in Literature. Ed. Asunción López-Varela Egaeus and Berenice, Poe manages to raise his characters to the category of ancient royalty, transposing a family matter onto an epic level. The other motif that brings the classical literature and themes into Poe's work is the Latin quotation that heads the tale, and which is attributed to the Arab poet Ebn Zaiat: "My mates used to tell me that if I visited my loved's sepulchrum, / my sorrow will relieved a bit" ("Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, / Curas meas aliquantulum fore levantas") (for the attribution of this quotation, see Beard). The quotation is repeated within the narrative itself, but this time as part of the tale itself: it is the inscription on the box in which Egaeus unconsciously hides Berenice's teeth. The repetition of the initial quotation in the body of the narrative is a phenomenon that García Jurado has called "double quotation" and this plays an important role in the intertextual relationships (see "Las citas grecolatinas"). It should be highlighted that in this case the relationships between the Classics and the Gothic are established through a translation into Latin, probably written by Poe himself. This use of a classical language in modern literature shows the importance of antiquity. The two mechanisms that are activated through Zaiat's quotation (the "double quotation" and the use of Latin) reveal Poe's position as a reader of Gothic literature, where both strategies had already been used to establish intertextuality with Greco-Roman literature. It can be argued that the phenomenon of the "double quotation" in the literature of terror began intuitively in works such as Melmoth, the Wanderer (1820), by Charles Maturin, where this device reveals the specific transcendence of certain ancient texts in modern ones. As García Jurado points out, Poe was not slow to notice the great possibilities of this mechanism and he uses them in "Berenice," where the quotation takes on its full sense only when it appears written on the box in the library (see "Las citas grecolatinas"). Poe had already experimented with the Latin quotation in other accounts such as in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" or "The Purloined Letter" but, as regards the "double quotation," Poe forms the link between Maturin and modern authors such as Schwob, who also uses this device in the tale called "Béatrice" (see García Jurado, "Las citas grecolatinas"). In this way, Poe and Schwob manage to conceptualize a technique that in our times is still an important influence for authors such as Stephen King. The use of Latin in Gothic literature, however, was a common strategy in the very first novels, such as The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole or The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis. Latin evokes the Roman Empire, but also the Catholic Church, and Latin, therefore, is the common denominator in the fight between paganism and christianity, a theme that often underlies Gothic literature, at least in its early stages. As a religious language, Latin is also a way to enter into contact with the great beyond, which, in the Manichean terms of the Gothic means heaven as well as hell. On the other hand, Latin is the language of terror, of the Inquisition, of Maria Tudor, and of so many other people and institutions with horrific connotations in the collective mind of the English people. In short, Latin is the language of horror and this explains its use in the Gothic novel. Poe knew all these connotations and took advantage of them, and years later, Schwob too did not