Text: Glen A. Omans, “Poe's ‘Ulalume’: Drama of the Solipsistic Self,” Papers on Poe, 1972, pp. 62-73

[page 62, unnumbered:]

Glen A. Omans

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY

 

Poe's “Ulalume”:
Drama of the Solipsistic Self

 

ADMIRERS OF Poe's poetry owe a debt of gratitude to Professors T. O. Mabbott, James E. Miller, Jr., and Eric W. Carlson for restoring meaning and significance to “Ulalume” after the charges of obscurantism and mystification brought against it by Yvor Winters, and Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren.(1) The poem is now generally taken as a debate between the narrator, who is tempted toward a new love by the “sinfully scintillant” planet Venus-Astarte, and his Psyche, who strives to keep the narrator faithful to the memory of his dead beloved. Several commentators have noted the autobiographical significance of the poem, written in the year after the death of Poe's wife, Virginia, at a time when Poe was tempted to console himself with a new love affair.(2) Professor Mabbott has even noted that the poem was conceived after a walk from Fordham, where Poe was living at the time, to the nearby cemetery in Mamaroneck where he regularly visited Virginia's grave.(3) But most critics stress the more universal meaning of the poem embodied in its tension between an immediate and appealing physical reality and an abstract, disembodied ideal. Yet this universal meaning, expressed, for example, by Professor Quinn as “the tragic conflict in a human soul which has lost without knowing it, its spiritual integrity,”(4) remains unsatisfying to readers captivated by the impact of the poem. For one thing, a loss of spiritual integrity does not justify the despair expressed by both narrator and [page 63:] Psyche at the end of the poem. In that the narrator has remained essentially true to the memory of Ulalume after being only momentarily attracted to Astarte, he has not lost a significant amount of spiritual integrity, certainly not to any tragic extent. But even if he has, such a loss does not seem to explain his shocked question: “what demon hath tempted me here?” Perhaps more important, a loss of spiritual integrity does not account for the fact that “Ulalume” is a disturbing poem which stirs the reader's deeply-buried fears. The poem seems to be about more than a partial loss of faith.

Professor Miller has correctly focused our attention on the poem as the record of the narrator's intense emotional struggle and collapse. Miller particularly notes that the narrator's state of mind is “non rational.” He is at “a point midway ... between sanity and insanity” where “the real and the unreal intermingle and become indistinguishable.”(5) This strikes one as a more accurate account of the narrator's psychological state than that offered by Professor Quinn. Yet Miller's identification of the cause of the narrator's condition as frustration resulting from his “inability to achieve sexual fulfillment because of its inevitable association with death”(6) seems as limited, or partial, as Quinn's struggle for spiritual integrity. The full and precise nature of the conflict which causes such trauma has yet to be made clear.

Some of Poe's best-known poems are concerned with the existence of a supersensuous world of immortal and immutable ideas. These ideas are above adequate human conceptualization because man's consciousness is imprisoned in space and time. However, objects in the material world may be said to be emanations of these ideas. The ideas, then, are embodied in and expressed by these objects, though imperfectly and in mutable form. The objects are, in effect, symbols of the ideas. Poe's “Israfel” is itself a symbol of this concept. The immortal spirit Israfel dwells in “Heaven.” No human can ever hope to “sing so wildly well” as this ideal poet, for ours “is a world of sweets and sours,” in which the brightest sunshine is a mere “shadow” of the perfect bliss of Heaven. As Nesace expresses the idea in her second song in “Al Aaraaf,” the beauties of earthly existence are merely “modell’d, alas!” after the perfection of the ideal realm. However, by contemplating such “shadows,” or symbols, one may achieve an imperfect moment of insight into the nature of such ideas. “Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multi form combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain [page 64:] to eternity alone.” Since reason deals only with “truth,” or the facts or material existence, it is the human imagination that allows us such moments of insight. It follows, then, that the artist, the man of imagination, is best suited to achieve such moments of vision and to lead others toward an awareness of them by embodying, or symbolizing, the ideas, particularly ideal Beauty, in his art. Thus, it is the human poet-singer who imitates, though sadly and imperfectly, the impassioned, Heavenly song of Israfel for the imperfect delight of his earthly listeners.

“To Helen” records a successful vision of the ideal. Biographers tell us that three women whom Poe idealized in his youth may have inspired the poem — his own mother, his foster mother, Frances Allan, and Jane Stith Stanard, whom Poe referred to as “the first purely ideal love of my soul.” Meditating on the beauty of these real women, Poe fuses them all into the figure of Helen of Troy, symbolic of feminine beauty in all times. Helen, in turn, evokes the beauty of Greek sculpture — of hyacinth hair and classic face — and the “grandeur that was Rome” until Helen becomes Psyche herself, the “soul” of beauty. Thus Poe, as well as the reader who has responded imaginatively to the symbols of the poem, has been progressively elevated from material and temporal beauty to the “agate lamp,” symbol of immortality, and ultimately to the ‘”Holy-Land.” The voyage metaphor is carried throughout the poem to emphasize that the narrator, and hopefully the reader, has indeed been transported from the “desperate seas” of reality to ‘his own native shore’ of the ideal realm. Yet the voyage was initiated by and apparently could not have occurred without the material existence of feminine beauty. The tone of the poem is gentle because the experience has been totally reassuring. The speaker senses a series of relationships between all the symbols in the poem which manifest the same idea of beauty, and between each of the symbols and the ideal. The speaker senses his own place and function in this universal and permanent structure and so achieves a sense of unity and harmony. Moreover, time and space have been bridged by the experience. The beauty of the present has been linked with that of the past. History has assumed continuity and meaning. Thus, each stanza of the poem moves from images of flux and turbulence to those of calm and stasis until the shortened final line arrests all movement.

Professor Richard Wilbur finds that “Ulalume” dramatizes a similar experience. In the notes to his Laurel edition of Poe's poetry he observes: “The dead Ulalume is an Eleonora to whom the hero's soul [page 65:] owes eternal fidelity; the hero's heart, however, desires to forget Ulalume and devote itself to a ‘maiden of the outer and everyday world.”(7) Professor Wilbur refers, here, to his analysis of Poe's story “Eleonora” as an “account by a ‘mad’ hero of how ... he has managed — at least momentarily — to blot out all consciousness of his environment and retrieve a state of mind unconditionally visionary.”(8) Eleonora, herself, represents “the principle of beauty and [universal] harmony” or Psyche. The death of Eleonora indicates the destruction by Time and physical passion of the hero's ability to communicate with Psyche. After her death, the hero abandons the paradisal valley, the realm of imaginative vision, for the city, the “outer and everyday world” of reality. Eleonora's periodic spiritual visitations to the hero can be taken as indicating his momentary recovery of the imaginative power, while his faithfulness to her memory indicates his continued allegiance to the ideal world. Ermengarde, however, is a young woman of the real world whom the narrator subjectively transforms into Eleonora, just as the narrator of “Ligeia” transforms Rowena. In so doing, the hero indicates that he “has regained his complete imaginative independence of the world.” He has, in effect, recovered his ability to transcend the objects of reality and return imaginatively to the ideal realm.(9) Professor Wilbur's analogy between Eleonora and Ulalume suggests, then, that Ulalume is again Psyche, or ideal Beauty embodied in human form. Her death represents the narrator's temporary loss of visionary power. But in the course of the poem, the narrator's “Psyche,” his imaginative faculty or “Soul” (named “Psyche” to identify it directly with the visionary ideal realm), succeeds in “transforming” the suggestion provided by Venus-Astarte into a vision of Ulalume. In so doing, the narrator's imaginative power has successfully, if momentarily, recreated a vision of the ideal and reaffirmed his wavering allegiance to it. At the end of the poem, then, “heart and soul are united in mournful recognition of their dedication to an ideal love who can only be reclaimed in death.”(10)

It strikes one that much of what Professor Wilbur says about “Eleonora” is perceptive and accurate, but that his analogy between this prose tale and “Ulalume” is greatly misleading. For “Eleonora” ends on a note of hope, with the promise of an eventual reunion “in Heaven,” but “Ulalume” ends only on a note of despair. And there is no hint at all that Ulalume, any more than Lenore of “The Raven,” will ever escape from the grave.

Professor Wilbur's theory of the “transformation” of the real [page 66:] Ermengarde-Astarte into the ideal Eleonora-Ulalume is based on Poe's concept of the origin and nature of the universe as presented in Eureka. God was originally unified as a single particle of “spiritual” matter. This particle, however, radiated outward in concentric circles to form the universe. In so doing, the original unity was sacrificed to diversity. The universe, however, having reached the point of maximum expansion, is now contracting back toward the original unity, annihilating the material universe in the process. Since the poet is the only human who “can glimpse the original harmony in the present diversity,” it is his job to “contribute, through the motive power of imaginative thought, to the reassembly of God.” In an act of “creative destructive ness,” or ‘’destructive transcendence,” the poet's imagination “must utterly repudiate the things of this diseased Earth; must approach the ideal, not merely through the real, but by the negation of the real.” “Straining after a supernal beauty which might restore the unity of the diffused universe ... the poet begins with earthly things, ... sub verts their identities and accomplishes their imaginative destruction.”(11) Thus, says Wilbur, in a number of Poe's stories and poems, particularly “Eleonora,” “Ligeia,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “MS. Found in a Bottle,” and “Ulalume,” the narrator re-enacts the creative role of the artist by annihilating or transforming reality in order to escape into the visionary state.

Professor Wilbur seems essentially correct in his description of the process which Poe's narrators use to glimpse the ideal, and which Poe uses in his own poetic technique.(12) But he seems incorrect in assuming that this process inevitably results in a successful and valid vision of supernal beauty. Success seems to be indicated in tales such as “Eleonora’ and “The Domain of Arnheim,” in which the tone remains optimistic, at least in a melancholy way. But in several tales and poems, the narrator's experience of the transformation of reality results in terror and despair. Throughout his “Introduction,” Professor Wilbur plays down this terror as “delightful terror” or “‘psychal’ excitement appropriate to the mock-destruction of this world and the dim glimpsing of another.” And he quotes Poe's “The Lake,” which defines a terror that “was not fright/ But a tremulous delight.”(13) But surely such phrases do not describe the experience of Roderick Usher, who died with a shriek, or of the narrator who “fled aghast” from the tottering house. Yet Wilbur is correct in expecting that a moment of valid insight into the ideal realm, no matter how fleeting, should yield considerable [page 67:] pleasure. Apparently, Roderick Usher and other of Poe's characters are not having such an experience.

In the Kantian epistemology, to which Poe adhered at least some of the time, the descendent world offers the only available route to the transcendent, at least for limited human perceptive powers. Extensive and intimate experience of the material world is the necessary starting place for the imaginative voyage. By sensually perceiving a number of material symbols which all manifest the ideal, the mind is able to move upward to the rational level to generalize about what these symbols share. The imagination, in turn, makes use of several similar generalizations to arrive at imperfect yet genuine insight into the true nature of the idea of which the original sensory objects and experiences were symbols. In other words, one can only achieve a vision of ideal Beauty after extensive contemplation of beautiful material objects and experiences. As Professor Davidson has noted, the “way” through ostensible reality to “a world of Idea that lies beyond ... must always begin with some determinable, sensory experience.” (14) When this method is followed in “To Helen,” the resultant glimpse of Psyche is ultimately pleasurable and reassuring. But any “vision” of the ideal which is not anchored in reality would amount to an hallucination, a purely subjective fabrication having nothing in common with immortal and immutable existence. To annihilate the real is to cut oneself off from any external reality.

Professor Wilbur rightly notes that “what insanity, drug-addiction, myopia or drunkenness signifies in Poe's fiction is the ascendance of imagination over intellect.” And he describes this experience as “the mind's withdrawal into itself”(15) What he does not take into account is that such “insulation” of the mind may not be an “escape from corrupt mundane consciousness into visionary wholeness and freedom,”(16) but rather a withdrawal into the genuine, rather than symbolic mad ness of solipsism. When the real is annihilated, the mind loses all touch with anything outside itself. The careful network of external relation ships between perceiver, symbolic objects, and the ideal itself is destroyed. The perceiver stands alone in terror and despair, hopelessly locked within himself. This seems to be the significance of the many images of enclosure, entrapment, and plunge downward that pervade so many of Poe's tales and poems. These are the opposite of the images of extension and fusion one finds in “To Helen.” They seem to indicate that if the imagination is the power that enables one to move from [page 68:] reality to the ideal, it is possible for the imagination to become diseased and create hallucination rather than vision. In fact, several of Poe's stories suggest that a vision of the ideal occurs only when the imagination is diseased.

Professor Davidson, in his excellent study of Poe, notes that:

Although the speakers in several of Poe's early poems, especially “Tamerlane,” hope to dispel this impression by attempting to shape reality into whatever they wish and so establish a relationship between it and themselves, their attempts are largely failures. They result only in the realization that objective reality has no “actuality whatsoever, and the only meaning to existence is what the protagonist reads into it.”(17) Thus, by 1845, Poe portrayed in “The Raven” the drama of the mind's loss of any hold on reality or the steps toward imaginative madness.”(18) Davidson finds, then, that several of Poe's poems and tales of horror are “studies of stages in consciousness when the real world slipped away or disintegrated and the mind found itself fronting the ‘horror’ of its own loneliness and loss.”(19) That Poe found such studies of the terrors of solipsism more than academic is indicated by his own life-long failure to find a subject matter other than himself, at least in his poems,(20) and by the progressive withdrawal of his poetic language from the language denotative of sensible reality.(21) What Poe seems to have desired, psychologically, philosophically, and artistically, was a sense of a reality outside himself. Several of his best poems and tales record his inability to find it. In them, the principal characters successfully destroy existing reality and create a substitute reality. But the result is not “a glimpse of the visionary universe.”(22) Instead, it is often the realization that the substitute reality is no more than the hallucinatory product of a diseased imagination spinning fancies within itself.

Roderick Usher, whose physical appearance, at least, is Poe's, has put several barriers between himself and external reality. He has secluded himself in a dark but lofty room, deep within a gloomy and decaying house surrounded by a “black and lurid tarn.” Poe makes it clear in the story that we are to take both the house and the room as symbols of Usher's mind. The narrator notes that the house is already cracked, and Usher himself admits to “a mental disorder which oppresses him,” [page 69:] “a constitutional and a family evil.” Within these enclosures, Usher paints “pure abstractions” in his state of “excited and highly distempered ideality.” One such picture is, indeed, the symbol of Usher's mind and the visions which haunt it, a “long and rectangular vault or tunnel” which “lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth.” There is “no outlet” from this vault and no external light source; “yet a flood of intense rays ... bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendour.” Small wonder then that Usher conceives of Psyche in terms of his identical twin sister, compounding incest with solipsism. In a mad attempt to prove that she is truly Psyche, pure spirit completely free of matter and time, he wills her death, seals her in a vault (vault, painting, “The Haunted Palace,” and Usher's mind are by now completely interchangeable), then waits for her escape. Usher has indeed left “behind him the waking physical world and [journeyed] inward toward ... his inner and spiritual self,” allowing his imagination the freedom to destroy existing reality and reshape it according to its own will. But the result is not “a triumphant report by the narrator that itis possible for the poetic soul to shake off this temporal, rational, physical world and escape, if only for a moment, to a realm of unfettered vision.”(23) When Madeline does return, she returns in vengeance, not triumph. And Usher is struck to the floor by his realization of the true nature of his vision. He has willed his sister to death and back to life again, all in the confines of his own mind. Moreover, the contagion of his madness has temporarily affected the narrator as well.(24) Nor is the experience merely “ostensibly horrible.”(25) Usher dies “a victim to the terrors he had anticipated,” while the narrator barely escapes from the now totally disintegrated “house.”(26)

The realization of the solipsistic nature of his vision surely explains the narrator's terror at the end of “Ligeia.” The opening paragraphs of the story emphasize the narrator's search, under Ligeia's tutelage, for transcendent vision. Ligeia herself is an already partially spiritualized symbol of ideal Beauty. Thus, her physical death again brings forward the question whether the disembodied ideal does exist.(27) Again, the narrator wills her return, and to accomplish it he destroys the flesh-and-blood Rowena. And again that return occurs within an enclosed space, this time richly decorated with elaborate tapestries and a huge censer which indicate the fantastic nature of the narrator's imagination.(28) But again, the successful return of Ligeia-Madeline Psyche brings no triumphant joy. Instead, the narrator, in “mad disorder,” shrieks aloud at the apparition of Ligeia which shrinks from [page 70:] his touch. That the last sentence of the story seems to circle back to the opening sentence suggests that the narrator has not glimpsed a transcendence which proceeds outward from himself through material reality to pure ideal. He has seen exactly the reverse. The imagination envisions an immortal existence only when it circles within itself.

“Ulalume” goes one step further. The introverted imagination can no longer experience even a hallucination of the ideal. Instead it denies the existence of any reality outside itself and so confronts the alter native — death. The setting of the poem again suggests that the action occurs within the mind, “the ghoul-haunted woodland” and “misty mid region of Weir.” Psyche seems to represent the imagination, since “Soul” is the term Poe uses to indicate the creative faculty in “Longfellow, Ballads and Other Poems” and in “The Poetic Principle.” The narrator, then, seems to represent the self as perceiver. The usual images of inversion are present in the cypress-lined alley, the tomb, and, again, the “dark tarn.” Professor Carlson notes that the “ghoul haunted woodland” suggests “the archetypal image of the dark forest, symbolizing the buried self.”(29) Thus, all objects in the landscape have a purely subjective symbolism for the narrator. He imposes his own interpretation on reality, so that he sees the normal astrological configuration of a rising crescent Venus and moon(30) as personally significant. And in interpreting this significance, his mind constantly circles in the same groove. Whatever objects present themselves to his senses ultimately suggest the lost Ulalume, no matter how forgetful the narrator has temporarily become. In this instance the luminescence of Venus-Astarte seems to promise something enlightening and elevating, perhaps even a glimpse of the ideal. The narrator speaks with excitement of the warm and “miraculous crescent’ which seems able to dry his tears and “point us the path to the skies.” But ultimately Astarte recalls only the memory of the dead Ulalume. This is why Psyche distrusts this (and any other) portent. She does not fear that it will lead the narrator to a new interest; she knows it will lead inevitably back to the tomb. The narrator feels “we safely may trust,” but Psyche knows that “memories [are] treacherous and sere.” New symbols inevitably provoke old subjective responses. In “To Helen,” time and space are bridged in a moment of vision. In “Ulalume,” time endlessly repeats itself. The narrator and Psyche had the same experiences “on this very night of last year.” In both poems the narrator is taken on a journey, but in “Ulalume” the voyage is circular. It ends where it began. [page 71:]

Such a state is a living death. There are no new beginnings, no outward movement. Both sense and the imagination find only the tomb. This time there is no return, not even a false vision of the ideal, as occurs in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia.” As in “The Raven,” the narrator discovers that there are no “glories beyond the grave” and that even this life is empty if one cannot reach beyond the self. This is “the secret,” “the thing,” “the dread burden” which the narrator sensed but failed to recognize at Ulalume's death. His cry, “Well I know now,” marks his moment of recognition, and with the recognition comes terror.

In the final stanza, both the narrator and Psyche agree that they misinterpreted Astarte, offered by “the pitiful, the merciful ghouls” as a possible new beginning. But immediately, both plunge once more into a subjective explanation in blaming Astarte (reality) for their own failings. She is “scintillant” because she seems to promise a vision of the ideal but “sinful” because she does not produce it. She comes from Hell because she denies Heaven. Yet the fault lies with the narrator and Psyche who can no longer maintain adequate contact with reality. Or does it, perhaps, lie in the nature of existence in which there is nothing, indeed, outside the self? Even Astarte is no more than a “spectre” from “limbo.”

Professor Miller has noted that the action of “Ulalume” is set in the distant past, “perhaps even an imagined past,”(32) as it is in so many of Poe's tales of mental crisis. As usual, Poe does not tell us where his narrator is now (that is, at the time of his writing the poem) or in what mental condition he finds himself. Perhaps, then, we can see the poem as a report of one of Poe's moments of insight into the intro version of his own search for “glories beyond the grave.” This assumption is encouraged by Poe's attempts to hide the autobiographical origin of the poem.(33) Moreover, Poe has totally separated some of the images and language of the poem from the world of fact and assigned them purely subjective meanings. The names of Daniel Francois Auber and Robert Walter Weir become the names of tarn and woodland. The adjective “scoriac” is Poe's private version of “scoriaceous,” and the meaning of “immemorial” is so personal that a host of commentators still have not been able to agree on it. Poe's imagination, then, has destroyed reality and replaced it with a personal substitute, an act of ultimate solipsism. In an attempt to mask this subjectivity and even to escape his own dilemma, Poe creates a narrator and an action. But the [page 72:] narrator is still Poe, for the situation he confronts is one Poe has wrestled with in many poems and stories. Thus, in “Ulalume” we witness a grim situation in which a skeptical Poe, outside the poem, has created an optimistic narrator-Poe inside the poem. The author then forces his narrator-self to attempt to escape his personal dilemma. However, the skeptic believes in advance that the idealist will fail, and so he does. Yet Poe the idealist must suffer the agony of that defeat. In a very few poems and stories, Poe allows his narrator-selves to escape from the prison-house-tomb-whirlpool and succeed in the “wild effort to reach the beauty above.” But these few works are overshadowed by the force and power of those which end “by the door of a tomb.”

[page 72, continued:]

NOTES

1 T. O. Mabbott, “Poe's ‘Ulalume,”“ Explicator, I, No. 25 (Feb. 1943); James E. Miller, Jr., “‘Ulalume’ Resurrected,” Philological Quarterly, XXXIV (April 1955), 197-205; and Eric W. Carlson, “Symbol and Sense in Poe's ‘Ulalume,’” American Literature, XXXV (March 1963), 22-37. Miller and Carlson both discuss these charges and give a general survey of criticism of the poem to the time of their writing.

2 Arthur H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York, 1941), p. 533.

3 Mabbott, Explicator, 1, 25.

4 Quinn, p. 532:

5 Miller, pp. 201-202.

6 Miller, p. 203.

7 Richard Wilbur, Poe (New York, 1959), p. 146.

8 Wilbur, p. 19.

9 Wilbur, pp. 14-16.

10 Wilbur, p. 146.

11 Wilbur, pp. 11-12, 16-17 and 19.

12 Wilbur, pp. 34-39.

13 Wilbur, pp. 37-38.

14 Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 34.

15 Wilbur, pp. 16 and 22.

16 Wilbur, pp. 23-24.

17 Davidson, pp. 9-10.

18 Davidson, p. 93.

19 Savidson, pp. 121-122.

20 Davidson, pp. 78 and 97.

21 Davidson, pp. 103-104, and Wilbur, pp. 35-37. [page 73:]

22 Wilbur, p. 23.

23 Richard Wilbur, “The House of Poe,” Anniversary Lectures (Washington, D.C., 1959), pp. 29-30.

24 Note that the epithet “Madman!” which Usher screams twice, is intended both for himself and the narrator.

25 Wilbur, Poe, p. 27.

26 One is tempted to interpret the narrator as representing reason in the story. He was once closely associated with Usher in boyhood, but as Usher's imaginative powers developed, the two grew apart. On the brink of insanity, Usher recalls reason to him in an attempt to check his morbid imagination. Instead, reason falls under Usher's spell, once it enters the cracked house, and participates in the death, burial, and resurrection of Madeline. Yet some semblance of its former health enables it barely to escape destruction in the final, most insane moment of Usher's life.

27 Note Poe's insistence, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” that the death of a beautiful and beloved woman is “the most poetical topic in the world.”

28 Wilbur, Poe, p. 24, and “House of Poe,” p. 23.

29 Carlson, p. 30.

30 T. O. Mabbott, “The Astrological Symbolism in Poe's ‘Ulalume;”“ Notes and Queries, CLXI (July 1931), 26.

31 The interpretations of psycho-analytic critics seem to support this reading of “Ulalume.” Roy Basler sees several of Poe's works as revealing “the power of the psychical over the physical,” and Ulalume in particular as “an ideal image ... separated long since from its objective reality.” (Roy P. Basler, Sex, Symbolism and Psychology in Literature [New Brunswick, N. J., 1948], pp. 143 and 184-85.) Marie Bonaparte sees “Ulalume’ as one of Poe's many works which reveal his incestuous love for his mother and the terror and impotence resulting from it. (Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe [London, 1949], pp. 146-153.) Incest can be taken as the psychological equivalent to philosophical solipsism. This is certainly suggested by Roderick Usher's choice of his identical twin sister as symbol of the ideal.

32 Miller, pp. 201-202.

33 Quinn, p. 534, and Davidson, pp. 78 and 93.