Tales of burial alive, such as The Casque of Amontillado, The Black Cat, etc., are also characteristic of Poe.
What is the significance of Poe's interest in the subject of burial alive and in people who are guilty of burying others alive? Very few people would probably accept Freud's theory, but that master psychologist as a rule bases his theories on facts, and hence I will quote his views on the subject. In a footnote of his book on The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 244, he says: "It is only of late that I have learned to value the significance of fancies and unconscious thoughts about life in the womb. They contain the explanation of the curious fear felt by so many people of being buried alive, as well as the profoundest unconscious reason for the belief in a life after death, which represents nothing but a projection into the future of this mysterious life before birth. The act of birth, moreover, is the first experience with fear, and in this the source and model of the emotion of fear."
Would Freud's theory not also account for Poe's great gift of the analysis and depiction of the emotion of fear?
Morbid fear or anxiety is well depicted by Poe, especially in his Fall of the House of Usher. As we learn from psychoanalysis, morbid fear is inhibited sexual desire; it is a reaction against the libido. The individual's sexual impulses incapable of being repressed strive for forms of wish fulfilment, and these when repugnant are treated like something hostile, and provoke fear. Morbid fear differs from normal fear in being continuous and attributed to a source which is not the real one, the actual source being unconscious. If a woman, for example, is very much in love with a man who turns out to be a vile criminal, her love may become incapable of being fulfilled any longer because of the part played by her moral sense; shrinking from contemplating her love's fulfilment with the man she really still loves, she may develop an anxiety. This is only one of the innumerable cases of misdirected desire that may cause anxiety. Then there are physiological factors responsible also. Dr. Brink has made a study of the subject.
Poe had himself suffered from a damming of the libido. He is Roger Usher, and is describing his own morbid fear. One feels that the narrator of the tale presents a case of psychosis, for he sees impossible things happen. He imagines the house had a pestilent vapour about it. He tells us that Roger's condition infected him, and that the wild influences of Roger's fantastic and impressive superstition crept over him. He must have been deranged, for he imagines that he sees Roger's dead sister, whose coffin had been screwed down by them, come out of the vault and drag Roger to death. He also thinks he sees the house crumble into fragments and sink into the tarn. Either his whole narrative is a hallucination or only these few parts of it are.
Roger himself, however, is the real type of sufferer from morbid fear. He has inherited a peculiar disposition, and no doubt suffered from repressions, though nothing is said about this. He attributes his disease largely to anxiety about his sick sister, Lady Madeline. But the cause is in his unconscious. Those who are acquainted with the theories of psychoanalysis and the life of Poe will feel that Roger, like Poe, must have lost a mother early, then the mother of a friend, then his foster-mother. He also, like Poe, was no doubt thrice disappointed in love, and probably also drank. His symptoms were such as afflict neurotics. He was in constant terror and felt that he must die soon in some struggle with fear; he dreaded the future. He read strange books and imagined queer things. His sister died, and, with the aid of the narrator of the story, was buried in a vault in the house. He soon entertained fancies that he had buried her alive, and he was in mortal fear that she would wreak vengeance on him. When the teller of the story read to Roger some pages of a romance, Roger interpreted various unrelated actions described there as a rending of her coffin and the grating of iron hinges on her prison. He imagined she stood outside, and then that he was being crushed to death by her. And he died in fear. The vision of his sister was imaginary with him and the narrator as well, for Lady Madeline could not have escaped from the screwed down coffin and the vault, and having lain many days without food, would not have had strength to crush her brother to death. Usher died because of morbid fear.
Poe was a good delineator of the neuroses. Here we have a picture of his own life and know that he must have experienced some sort of anxiety, as the tale is so true to life. He was only thirty when the story was published, and the main character here, as in Berenice and the Assignation, is a neurotic. Behind it all one sees the mourner for the lost Lenore, the orphan, the victim of love through Stella Royster, Elizabeth Herring and Mary Devereaux.
Poe had also another trait, and that was a sadistic one. This accounts for his tales of people torturing and being tortured, as The Pit, and the Pendulum, and the Cask of Amontillado. He was sadistic as any one can see by his delight in writing critical articles calculated to cause writers intense pain. He punished his enemies by venting his hatred upon them in his essays. He had an unconscious instinct to cause pain for the mere sake of pain. He hints at this in his Imp of the Perverse, where he lays down a theory which is undoubtedly true, but which moralists try to shun. "I am not more certain that I breathe than that the assurance of the wrong or error of an action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us and alone impels us to its prosecution." He was also masochistic, he unconsciously liked to cause pain to himself. In his The Black Cat he calls perverseness one of the primitive impulses of the human heart, and he speaks of it as "the unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature, to do wrong for the wrong's sake only." Poe, as a child, had the sadistic and masochistic instincts. He is fascinated by contemplation of suffering, and in his Premature Burial speaks of the pleasurable pain we get from reading of terrible catastrophes.
His sadism and masochism figure considerably in his art. He could not carry out his desires to punish in life, and hence found a refuge in literature. We often carry out in imagination what we cannot actually do; and we wreak punishment and revenge that way; if we are authors we make books with such ideas. A very simple illustration will serve in Poe's case, yet it has never been noted. In Poe's tale The Cask of Amontillado the motive is revenge. The narrator vowed vengeance upon Fortunato, who had added insult to injury. He buries him in a vault. In his fancy Poe was punishing a real enemy, and though he had several, he hated none more than the author of Alice Ben Bolt, Dr. Thomas Dunn English. It is related he once sought the doctor, saying he wanted to kill him. The tale was published in Godey's Lady's Book for November, 1846, and was written probably a few months before. In July of that year Poe published the savage and violent letter to English in retaliation for English's reply to a very hostile article about him by Poe in the Literati. Poe's hatred for Dr. English is almost murderous. It is plausible to assume that a writer would unconsciously have his most bitter antagonist in mind while writing a bitter tale of revenge at the time of his most intense hatred for him. Poe was not satisfied with his own savage reply, and instituted a suit of damages for defamation of character, which was rewarded with a verdict several months after the publishing of his tale. In the story Poe wrote: "I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser." He calls Fortunato a quack in painting and gemmary, as he had called Dr. English a charlatan in literature, who did not know the rules of grammar. So this is an illustration of how sadism made him unconsciously write at least one tale of punishing an enemy by burying him alive.