Short story written in 1832.
SYNOPSIS
“Metzengerstein” contains many of the standard devices found in such 18th-century GOTHIC thrill-ers as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, pub-lished in 1764, as well as the warning at the outset that “horror and fatality” have existed throughout
“all ages.” Following the conventions of the genre, the story includes dark and brooding castles, hints at secret obsessions and sins, foreboding prophe-cies, family rivalry, a nightmarelike atmosphere, and horrible conflagrations. Poe’s contribution to this standard fare is the introduction of an unusual phenomenon, the psychic transmigration of a soul from a human to a horse. The following epigraph, taken from a hexameter by Martin Luther and directed to the papacy, prefaces the story: Pestis eram vivus—moriens tua mors ero. (“Living I have been your plague, dying I shall be your death.”)
The young Baron Frederick Metzengerstein inherits his family’s vast possessions at the age of 18 and immediately “the behavior of the heir out-Heroded Herod. . . . Shameful debaucheries—fla-grant treadcheries—unheard-of atrocities—gave his trembling vassals quickly to understand that no servile submission on their part—no punctilios of conscience on his own—were thenceforward to prove any security against the remorseless fangs of a petty Caligula.”
On the fourth day of Metzengerstein’s celebra-tion of his inheritance, the stables of his family’s rival Berlifitzing burn, taking with them the life of the “infirm and doting old man.” During the fire, the young baron sits in his private apartment
and stares at a tapestry that pictures an epic battle between the two families, and his eyes are drawn to
“an enormous and unnaturally colored horse” that belonged to an ancestor of his rival. Metzenger-stein looks away, and when his gaze returns to the tapestry he sees that the head of the gigantic horse appears to have moved, and the eyes “now wore an energetic and human expression.” He staggers out of his room and learns that his rival burned to death trying to save his horses. His grooms have with them
“a gigantic and fiery-colored horse,” which bears the initials W. V. B. on its forehead but which no one at the Berlifitzing stables will claim, so the grooms assume that it belongs to the young baron.
The baron soon develops “a perverse ment to his lately acquired charger . . . an attach-ment which seemed to attain new strength from every fresh example of the animal’s ferocious and demonlike propensities.” From this point, the baron begins to isolate himself from all social events, and lives “utterly companionless” aside from his unusual attachment to the strange stallion with its
“human-looking eye.” One night, while the young baron is out riding, a raging fire spreads throughout the Palace Metzengerstein. When he returns to the castle, the strange horse he is riding plunges into the castle, “far up the tottering staircases of the palace,” and into the flames. As the white smoke rises above the flaming Castle Metzengerstein, the onlookers see a cloud of smoke “settled heavily over the battlements in the distinct colossal figure of—a horse.” The reader is left to believe that Count Ber-lifitzing has returned to wreak his revenge on the sole remaining bearer of the name Metzengerstein.
COMMENTARY
This tale was Poe’s first to appear in print. Because this story is the earliest of Poe’s horror tales, critics have questioned if the tale is a spoof or a hoax of the very popular hair-raising German gothic thrill-ers that were prevalent in the magazines of the period, or if it is a “serious imitation of the German”
as the subtitle proclaims. Whichever it is, “Metz-engerstein” confirms Poe’s early and longstanding attraction to the elements of gothic fiction, which he later tempered with extensive psychological insight.
ADAPTATIONS
The tale was filmed as one segment of the French-Italian film titled Tales of Mystery and Imagination, directed in 1968 by Roger Vadim and starring Jane Fonda and Peter Fonda. Although the segment is entitled “Metzengerstein,” the plot bears little resemblance to Poe’s story.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
The story first appeared in the January 14, 1832, issue of the Philadelphia Saturday Courier.
CHARACTERS
Berlifitzing, Count Wilhelm An “infirm and doting old man,” he is “loftily descended” and
“remarkable for nothing but an inordinate and inveterate personal antipathy to the family of his rival” Metzengerstein. He participates daily in the chase, despite his age and the danger of the sport.
After he dies in a stable fire, his spirit returns to Earth and inhabits the body of a horse to become an agent of supernatural revenge against the rival family.
Metzengerstein, Baron Frederick His parents die when he is young, and he inherits vast proper-ties at the age of 18. After four days of debauch-ery and celebration, he sets fire to the stable of the longtime family rival, Count Berlifitzing. His strange attachment to a horse that appears on the night of the fire leads to his isolation and, eventu-ally, to his death.
Metzengerstein, Lady Mary She is Baron Fred-erick Metzengerstein’s mother, who dies shortly after her husband’s death, leaving the baron an orphan at the age of 18.
FURTHER READINGS
Hirsch, David H. “Poe’s ‘Metzengerstein’ as a Tale of the Subconscious.” University of Mississippi Studies in English 3 (1982): 40–52.
Lee, Maurice S. “Absolute Poe: His System of Tran-scendental Racism.” American Literature 75, no. 4 (December 2003): 751.
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Soule, George H., Jr. “Byronism in Poe’s ‘Metzenger-stein’ and ‘William Wilson.’ ” Emerson Society Quar-terly 24 (1978): 152–162.
Thompson, Gary R. “Poe’s ‘Flawed’ Gothic: Absurdist Techniques in ‘Metzengerstein’ and the Courier Satires.” Emerson Society Quarterly (supplement) 60 (1970): 35–58.
“Morella” (1835)
Short story written in 1835.
SYNOPSIS
“Morella” is related by the unnamed narrator who marries Morella (1) with a soul that “burned with fires it had never before known; but the fires were not of Eros, and bitter and tormenting to my spirit was the gradual conviction that I could in no manner define their unusual meaning, or regulate their vague intensity.” His new wife’s “erudition is profound. . . . [H]er talents were of no common order—her powers of mind were gigantic,” and the narrator enters into study with her, including her studies “over forbidden pages.”
As the two delve more deeply into mysti-cal writings, the narrator states, “I found a for-bidden spirit kindling within me.” He becomes weary, “when the mystery of my wife’s manner oppressed me as a spell.” He soon can no longer bear her touch, and Morella (1) appears to sense the narrator’s “consuming desire for the moment of [her] decease.” As she is dying in childbirth, she warns the narrator, “thy days shall be days of sorrow—that sorrow which is the most lasting of impressions.” She vows to return and predicts
“her whom in life thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore.” As Morella (1) dies, their daugh-ter is born and becomes the reincarnation of her mother. The narrator refuses to name his child, who “was the perfect resemblance of her who had departed,” and he grows to love her “with a love more fervent than I had believed it possible to feel for any denizen of earth.”
When the child is an adult, she is so much like her mother that the narrator becomes frightened
“at its too perfect identity—that her eyes were like Morella’s.” He determines that he will have her baptized as “a present deliverance from the ter-rors of my destiny.” During the ceremony, when he must provide the young woman a name, some
“fiend spoke from the recesses of my soul,” and he whispers Morella’s name to the priest. The reac-tion is immediate, and his daughter “turned her glassy eyes from the earth to heaven, and, falling prostrate on the black slabs of our ancestral vault responded—‘I am here!’ ” The narrator watches his daughter convulse and die. When he inters Morella (2) in the family tomb, he laughs “a long and bitter laugh” as he finds no traces of his dead wife. She appears to have wreaked her revenge for his hatred toward her during her first physical life, as Morella (1).
COMMENTARY
The tale is one of metempsychosis, the passage of the soul from one body to another, with which Poe also dealt in “METZENGERSTEIN,” “LIGEIA,” “A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS,” and “The BLACK
CAT.”
“Morella” relates the theme of the psychic sur-vival of a malign spirit that transfers from the dying mother to the daughter at the moment of birth. An epigraph taken from Plato’s Symposium and adapted by Henry Nelson Coleridge, who placed it in his 1831 Introduction to the Study of the Greek Clas-sic Poets, where Poe found it, precedes the story:
“Itself—alone by itself—eternally one and single.”
The theme of one entity eternal reverberates throughout the story, which relates the domination of one malign spirit over those bodies it inhabits.
ADAPTATIONS
The story was one of three stories by Poe, with
“The FACTSIN THE CASE OF M. VALDEMAR” and
“The Black Cat,” that were filmed by the director ROGER CORMAN as Tales of Terror (1962), starring VINCENT PRICE, Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, and Debra Paget.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
The story was first published in the April 1835 issue of the SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER and
reprinted in the November 1839 issue of BURTON’S
GENTLEMAN’S MAGAZINE. The first publication of the story contained “HYMN,” a poem of 16 lines first published as a song sung by Morella (1) in the first printing of the story and later published sepa-rately as “A Catholic Hymn” in the August 16, 1845, issue of the BROADWAY JOURNAL. The poem, which consists of 12 lines of rhyming couplets, is a plea by the heroine to the Blessed Virgin, and it is unusual in its hopeful expression of a radiant future.
CHARACTERS
Morella (1) An erudite woman who shuns soci-ety and attaches herself to her husband alone, she has “a Pressburg education”; Pressburg, in Hun-gary, was in 1835 not only the site where kings were crowned and the home of a great university, but was also considered the center for “the Black Arts,” so-called by Poe, whose meaning appears to be the use of magic for evil purposes. Mysti-cal writings are Morella’s “favorite and constant study.” Soon hated by her husband, she dies in childbirth, but on her deathbed she warns that he will love her in death as much as he has hated her in life. She seems to return to life through her daughter.
Morella (2) Born at the moment that her mother dies, she lives her life nameless until she reaches adulthood and resembles her late mother Morella (1) so completely that her father decides that she must be baptized to protect them both from the evil that her mother’s studies had generated. When she and her father stand with the priest at the baptismal font and her father must select a name, he utters her mother’s name, “Morella.” Within moments, Morella the daughter convulses and falls dead to the ground after responding “I am here!”
FURTHER READINGS
Fukuchi, Curtis. “Repression and Guilt in Poe’s
‘Morella.’ ” Studies in Short Fiction 24 (1987):
149–154.
Richmond, Lee J. “Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Morella’: Vam-pire of Volitoin.” Studies in Short Fiction 9 (1972):
93–95.
Rose, Marilyn Gaddis. “ ‘Emmanuele’—‘Morella’:
Gide’s Poe Affinities.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 5 (1963): 127–137.
“MS. Found in a Bottle”
(1833)
Short story written in 1833.
SYNOPSIS
“MS. Found in a Bottle” is similar in setting, char-acterization, and situation to two later sea tales by Poe, “The NARRATIVEOF ARTHUR GORDON PYM” and “A DESCENTINTOTHE MAELSTROM.” The epi-graph that precedes the story is taken from Philippe Quinault’s Ays, I, vi., 15–16:
Qui n’a plus qu’un moment a vivre N’a plus rien a dissimuler.
[He who has but a moment to live / has no lon-ger anything to dissemble.]
Told in the first person, the tale is framed as an account in a journal found in a bottle that has been floating in the ocean. The story tells of a shipwreck and of the strange voyage that the narrator makes aboard the ship that rescues him, “a gigantic ship, of perhaps four thousand tons. . . . Her hull was of a deep dingy black, unrelieved by any of the customary carvings of a ship.” The ship has a spectral crew of ancient mariners: “their shriveled 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.”
The ship appears to be caught in a current that is pulling it toward the South Pole, a phenomenon that leads the narrator to write of the bizarre expe-rience in a journal as the ship moves ever closer to the abyss. Not merely moving passively, the ship is propelled toward the immense whirlpool by nature, in the form of the simoom, tempest, hurricane, and tornado.
The journal gives accounts of the mysterious crew, as well as of the overwhelmingly destruc-118 “MS. Found in a Bottle”
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tive power of nature. The narrator also writes in his journal about the opportunity for knowledge in such a self-destructive moment, noting, “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 onward to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.”
When the end is imminent, the narrator sees the ice open suddenly and the ship begin to whirl in immense concentric circles. He writes his final words, recording that “the ship is quivering, Oh God! and—
going down.” As the ship disappears into “the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre,” the narrator places the manuscript in a bottle, then eagerly goes down with the Discovery, submitting to the force of the whirl-pool, as do Arthur Gordon Pym and the unnamed narrator of “A Descent into the Maelstrom.”
COMMENTARY
Joseph Conrad considered this tale “about as fine as anything of that kind can be—so authentic in detail that it might have been told by a sailor of sombre and poetical genius in the invention of the phantastic.” In 1833, this story won the top prize of
$50 and publication as the best prose tale entered in a contest sponsored by the BALTIMORE SUNDAY
VISITER. The judges declared that Poe’s tale was
“eminently distinguished by a wild, vigorous and poetical imagination, a rich style, a fertile inven-tion, and varied and curious learning.” Critics have characterized this tale as an allegory, seeing mean-ing in the nature of the storm and the treatment of the ship. Daniel Hoffman asserts that the journey in this tale represents the journey of the soul back to its beginnings in the vortex of birth (146), while David Ketterer interprets the tale as providing a journey through life and into death (119). David Halliburton takes the allegory further and argues that the story is a fantasy that represents man as being cut off from both past and future and forced to live forever in a “kind of indefinite present, an eternal moment of terror” (250).
Charles E. May offers a more radical reading of the tale. He notes that the “MS. Found in a Bottle”
begins in a realistic style and offers readers at the
out-set a practical description of the ship and its cargo:
“We had onboard coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoanuts, and a few cases of opium. The stowage was clumsily done, and the vessel consequently crank.” When the simoom hits the ship, the storm rages for five days, after which the Sun rises with a sickly yellow color, only to sink quickly as if “hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power.” After this occurs, the events of the story take on an “unnatural” turn as the remaining men alive wait for relief, and the nar-rator states, “we waited in vain for the arrival of the sixth day—that day to me has not arrived—to the Swede, never did arrive.” Instead of the formerly credible occurrences, a series of incredible occur-rences are described, including the disappearance of the Sun and the appearance of a giant ship with a ghostly looking crew that will lead to the later expe-rience in the maelstrom. The narrator observes that the only food he has eaten during the five days is a
“small quantity of jaggeree, procured with great diffi-culty from the forecastle.” May suggests that this jag-geree, which is similar in appearance to sugar, may have mixed with the carelessly stowed opium and the narrator has ingested the mix. Thus, he notes,
“we perhaps have the immediate answer as to why the narrator’s perception and his description of his experience change radically after consuming small quantities of such a diet” (24).
PUBLICATION HISTORY
The story was first published in the October 19, 1833, issue of the Baltimore Sunday Visiter.
CHARACTERS
captain of the ghostly ship He is described by the narrator but does not speak nor acknowledge the narrator’s existence in his cabin or on the ship.
He is “of a well-knit and compact frame of body, neither robust nor remarkable, otherwise.” The narrator relates that it is not the man’s position as captain that interests him, but “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.” The captain’s cabin contains “obsolete, long-forgotten charts”
and “mouldering instruments of science,” and he murmurs to himself “some low peevish syllables
of a foreign tongue” as he reads a paper which the narrator “took to be a commission, and which, at all events, bore the signature of a monarch.”
The reader does not learn anything more about the captain.
old Swede Crew member on the ship who had shipped with the boat at the last moment before it left port. He and the narrator are the sole sur-vivors of the shipwreck. After the ship is nearly destroyed and the captain and remaining crew are swept overboard, he and the narrator try to steer what remains of the ship toward safety. After six days, the ship enters dark and sweltering waters, and “superstitious terror crept by degrees into the spirit of the old Swede.” He and the narrator secure themselves to the stump of the mizzenmast to pre-vent being washed overboard, but he dies when the ship is battered by huge waves as the dark and mysterious ghost ship verges upon them.
unnamed narrator Surviving crew member who writes his strange account right to the moment in which the ship enters the whirlpool, then places
unnamed narrator Surviving crew member who writes his strange account right to the moment in which the ship enters the whirlpool, then places