Essay: Hawthorne and Poe

The Week 5 reading assignments for my online class on Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World were Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s short stories “The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,”  and “The Artist of the Beautiful,” found in Mosses from an Old Manse, and “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” found in Twice-Told Tales; and Edgar Allan Poe‘s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Oval Portrait,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Bells,” “The Raven,” and “Annabel Lee,” found in The Portable Poe.

The best known of these is undoubtedly “The Raven.”   It is the first poem I fell in love with in English.  I was the right age, a brooding teenager, when I found a volume of poems for some long-forgotten class on the early 20th century.  The old textbook had a faded dark blue cloth cover and was tucked with other books in a box found by my uncle in an old house he had bought.  He was going to throw the books away, but I thumbed through a few and decided to salvage them.

I remember standing there in front of his garage, reading “The Raven” and feeling my brooding teenager soul, lately fed on J.R.R. Tolkien, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Charles Dickens, gasp with delight.  The gloom!  The pathos!  The supernatural!  If we’d had Romantic Goths back then, that would have been my tribe, at least that year.  I didn’t like Hawthorne, I didn’t care to read his musings on sin.

Now I’m older, and I find that while I still like Poe, I don’t love him as much; and I got much more interested in Hawthorne than I did long ago.  I guess I’ve grown up despite my best efforts!  Like many others on the class forum, I particularly enjoyed Hawthorne’s tale “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, an interesting reversal of the Grimm Brothers’ “Rapunzel.”

Anyhow, here is my 300-word essay on one aspect of the tales (we were free to focus on only one or a few tales.)

Pop Culture Hawthorne and Poe

To go with my online class Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World, I started a series of posts listing companion materials in pop culture, preferably ones that are a little forgotten, have not received the attention I think they deserve, or take an unusual angle.  All the better if they are available online, double-plus for free.

These are the ones I propose to accompany this week’s readings: Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s short stories “The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,”  and “The Artist of the Beautiful,” found in Mosses from an Old Manse, and “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” found in Twice-Told Tales; and Edgar Allan Poe‘s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Oval Portrait,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Bells,” “The Raven,” and “Annabel Lee,” found in The Portable Poe.

Hawthorne

I’ll be honest, I’ve never enjoyed Hawthorne; he worries way too much about sin for my taste.  Besides, I like the writings of Poe, Mark Twain and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and all three were critical of Hawthorne’s writings.  Nowadays, there just aren’t many references about Hawthorne in pop culture; in fact he was rather, uh, prophylactic to pop culture.

• Thankfully, Kate Beaton of the webcomic Hark, A Vagrant has us covered (“The Scarlet Letter”, middle of the page.)
• There is also a Tumblr tag with Hawthorne pop references.
• Here is Edgar Allan Poe himself, giving Hawthorne mixed praise in a review in Godey’s Lady’s Book, November 1847.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings and related articles on Unz.org.

Poe

There is, on the contrary, a lot of Poe pop references to comic books.

• The Atlantic has an interesting article on the topic, “Pop Culture’s Undying Obsession with Edgar Allan Poe.”
• Tumblr tag for Edgar Allan Poe
• Poe also appears on Kate Beaton’s Hark, A Vagrant, with Jules Verne.
• Poe’s poem “The Raven” was featured in The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror on the show’s second season (and the Treehouse of Horror would become an annual feature.)
• Wikipedia has pages on pop culture, on television and movies, and even on music that were influenced by, or based on, Poe’s writings.
• Vincent, a Poe-inspired short animation by Tim Burton, with narration read by, who else, Vincent Price (1982).
• Musical interlude: several of Poe’s poems have been set to music.  Here are “Annabel Lee” as sung by James Johnston and by Joan Baez; Phil Och’s version of “The Bells”; and Basil Rathbone reciting “The Raven” to music by Olivier Messian.
• Christopher Walken reads “The Raven.”
• There are two opera versions of “The Fall of the House of Usher”: one in French by Claude Debussy, “La Chute de la maison Usher”, unfortunately left unfinished (ignore the spelling on the YouTube, the poster obviously doesn’t speak French), and one in English by Philip Glass — here is an excerpt.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s writings and related works on Unz.org, including short films.

By the way, Poe died in mysterious circumstances at the age of 40.  Given that he was a pedophile (hey, he even married his 13-year-old cousin when he was 29), I don’t care how good a writer he was — I don’t mourn his early death.