What’s Up With Poe? Love Loss, and Frustrating Pyrrhic Feet: An Analysis of “A Dream Within A Dream” (Natasha)

Edgar Allan Poe was a deeply disturbed man. Abandoned by his father and orphaned by his mother at an early age, the young Poe was adopted by his godparents, John and Frances Allan. He struggled with a lifelong addiction to alcohol, and was discharged or left almost every school or institution he entered. The catalyst for Poe’s writing was when he was expelled from West Point; his adoptive father refused to give him any more money that would be spent on gambling or drink, and Poe turned to writing to support himself. At 26, he married his 13 year old cousin, Virginia Clemm, who passed two years before his own death. Throughout his life, Poe enjoyed brief periods of contentment and productivity truncated by addiction and familial loss. After he published his magnum opus, The Raven, he became internationally successful for nearly a decade before succumbing to alcohol and dying at the age of 40, found in a Baltimore gutter.

Edgar Allan Poe

 

His writing, particularly his poems, follow similar motifs, love, loss, the Gothic, and the darkly romantic. But one poem manages to transcend these norms while at the same time embracing them: A Dream Within A Dream.

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Though the two stanzas a first seem dissimilar, they join together to form a lasting portrait of the impossibility of immortality and the pain of holding onto something not yours to keep. The poem begins with a person standing, desolate and mourning, on a “surf-tormented shore”, (in the absence of any other clues, we assume it is Poe), bemoaning the loss of a lover. He writes, “You are not wrong, who deem/That my days have been a dream;”) That is, he’s accepting that what he had with the woman could never last, and that it is nothing but a dream to think it could. But, this doesn’t matter to him. “If [the love] has flown away….in a vision, or in none/is it therefore the less gone?” To Poe, it doesn’t matter if his love was real or not, doesn’t matter that it wasn’t pearmanent and could never be so. What matters is that he loved her and now he is in pain because what he loved is gone. He ends the stanza with a statement: “All that we see or seem/ is but a dream within a dream.”

Poe‘s “surf-tormented shore”.

The second stanza encompasses and expands the first, broadening the focus from one brooding, grieving man (or woman), to all of humanity as we know it. The man holds “Grains of the golden sand,” falling through his fingers. The sand represents time, slipping away even as he tries desperately to hold on to it. The man is reduced to helplessness, pathetic, weeping, pleading to God to save just one grain from the “pitiless wave”. But he is not answered, and the man knows that, despite all his hubris, he is unable to extend his life and, like everyone before him, must simply wait in the dark for his candle to gutter out.

The stanza ends with a question. “Is all that we see or seem/ But a dream within a dream?” The answer to this question is yes. The smaller dream is us, our loves and hates and desire, our happiness and misery and small moments of divinity that we clutch onto like precious stones for as long as we can remember them. The smaller dream is his lover, who he cannot have and never really had in the first place. Our dreams are everything that we experience.

And then the larger dream is life itself. What’s death but the “Big sleep?” the “long rest?” When someone is dead, they’re “sleeping with the fishes.” What is death but a very long nap, and life but the briefest inconsequential flicker of a dream in the middle of it? We strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and no matter the quality of our performance, we all eventually bow out. Poe realized this, and that is what A Dream Within A Dream is about; loving something so much that you cling to every moment of it, even as you know it will eventually be taken away from you.

Woman in Black: The Mythos and Its Connection to Jamesian Tales- Natasha

The story of the Woman In Black has gone through several iterations and mediums since the publishing of the novel, by Susan Hill, in 1983. Since then, the original manuscript has been adapted to successful stage, radio and, most recently, movie versions, most met with widespread critical and commercial success. Though the plot has evolved through the years, the basic premise has not. Essentially, a young solicitor in the Victorian Era, Arthur Kipps, travels from London to the North of England for work, meeting at the town a mysterious woman dressed in black that petrifies the locals and wreaks havoc wherever she goes. Arthur spends a few nights at her dwelling place, Drablow Mansion, and neither he, nor his family, are ever the same. Many have commented on the similarity of The Woman in Black to a classic Gothic novel, and the author herself has acknowledged being inspired by the genre. Others are interested in how the story fits into the template of the classic Jamesian Ghost Story, named after the popular Victorian Horror writer, M.R. James. There’s a blurring of the line between the physical and the psychological that lends itself to both, and spices up an otherwise ordinary horror story. 

Susan Hill, author of The Woman In Black.

 

M.R. James (1862-1936), was as renowned for his ghost stories, which shed many of the gothic cliches that had clung to the genre, obsolete carryovers from the previous century. He was interested in creating a story that functioned almost as a sort of stage; the actors, or characters, would be seen going about their ordinary business as the malevolent presence began to make itself known. This particular aspect of a Jamesian story is not, in my opinion, present in The Woman In Black, in either the book or the movie. When Arthur Kipps arrives at Crythin Gifford, no one is going about as usual. They are terrified. Before the story even starts, the “ghost” has made herself known. Another characteristic of James’s stories was a “character-full” setting; that is, well described, realistic, and full of named and interesting characters. Both versions of The Woman In Black (henceforth referred to as TWIB), have definitely filled this requirement. The gloom of Crythin Gifford is almost palpable, and among the townsfolk there are several named characters that we come to learn more about as the story progresses. A third requirement is some sort of naive, inquisitive scholar as a protagonist, the classic Victorian middle-class gentleman. Someone quite like James himself. This is another requirement easily met by both the book and movie. Arthur Kipps is very much a gentleman as well as a white-collar working man, curious and unfailingly polite. It is on the last tenet of a Jamesian tale that TWIP diverges from James. Monty James almost always included some sort of antiquitarian object in his stories, some musty old tome that would be dredged up by the protagonist and provoke the ghost. There is no such object in TWIB. 

Monty James, (Montague James)

 

The difference between the literal and the psychological is a recurring theme in TWIB. Arthur Kipps, scholar though he is, can be an unreliable narrator. Is the rocking chair he sees truly inhabited by a ghost, or is he simply beginning to crack under the pressure. Still, the degree he can be trusted differs in the novel and the movie. Susan Hill seemed to think of The Woman in Black as more an aspect of one’s own imagination than anything, a specter any mother could identify with inhabiting the darkest reaches of our consciousness. Arthur, in the novel, does not see things so much as feel them. He feels the loss of the woman, the grief she feels after the violent death of her child. In the movie, the woman is very much real, and her presence is felt in the village. To take revenge for losing her own son, she appears in front of other’s children and lures them to a violent death. She snuffs out candles, slams doors, shuts windows: she is a physical threat. 

A glimpse of the “woman in black” before she turned homicidal ghost.

 

So, is the movie a faithful adaptation of the book? In some ways, I would even argue most ways, yes. The characters are the same, the plot is left mostly intact, and the ominous, creepy feeling of the novel is left untouched. There are differences, some mentioned above; in the book, the woman in black isn’t directly killing children. Arthur Kipps has a different backstory in both. The endings are also very different. But, at their heart, both are just retelling a familiar horror story: young man is turned prematurely old after an experience with the supernatural that changes him and his circumstances irreversibly. M. R. James would be proud.

 

 

 

White Sanitarium, Joelma House, and the Parallels Between Them-Natasha

Happy Friday the 13th! Today in class we were given the difficult task of picking out to haunted places from a list, researching them, and constructing a blog post analyzing their differences and similarities. A relative novice when it comes to the knowledge of haunted places, I chose two names I had never seen before: White Sanitarium, Texas, and the Joelma building, in Brazil. Though the two are very different geographically and in their intended purpose, the aura of mystery and violence surrounding the two remains the same.

Founded in 1926 by former state asylum superintendent Frank S. White, the sanitarium was originally built to provide a less institutional feel in an effort to preserve the mental health of the patients.Though White retired after only five years, supposedly for health reasons, the asylum continued to exist until 1939, when it closed after severe flooding.Teens and the adventurous explored the sanitarium for decades, until it was bought by an investor and 2002 and converted into a currently empty apartment complex. Widely believed to be haunted by its former residents, inexplicable screams have been heard from the building at night. Locals tell stories about seeing ghosts play cards around abandoned tables, and T.R.I.P.P, a ghost hunting society, reported strange occurrences and an unexplained loss of all power and reception when they visited.Video of their encounter is below.

The other haunted place was the Joelma Building, in Brazil. The São Paulo office building was the scene of a horrific high rise fire, killing 179 people and injuring 300 more. Though a few hundred people were evacuated using elevators, most who survived hid under roofing tiles. Some forty, driven to desperation, jumped off, dying upon impact. Some believe the the building has become haunted since this tragedy. A popular story is of the “13 Souls”, 13 people supposedly found dead together in an elevator. Since no one came forward to identify the 13, they were buried together in St. Peter’s Cemetery. The building has since been renamed, and rebuilt.

Joelma Building

Though at first glance both buildings don’t seem to be related in any way, one can draw an interesting conclusion from what they do have in common. It could be argued that both are prisons of a sort, full of people that have no desire to be there. Employees yearn for the weekend just as the incarcerated look forward to their release date. Both have taken many lives, whether through the gradual deterioration of a fragile mind or the literal incineration of an unsuspecting office worker. Both have an anachronistic quality; neither the flammable and dangerous conditions of the skyscraper of the unethical conditions of the sanitarium would be allowed today. And, of course, both are haunted.

It goes to show that no matter where they may have occurred or who was the instigator, death is death, and something will be left behind in its wake, be it ghost hunters, ghosts, or the structure itself. If walls could talk, it would be interesting to discover what those of White Sanitarium and the Joelma Building would say to us.

Works Cited

Capps, Chris. "The Mystery of the 13 Souls." Unexplainable.Net. N.p., 6 Feb. 2010. Web. 13 July 
     2012. <http://www.unexplainable.net/ghost-paranormal/the-mystery-of-the-13-souls.php>. 
Haviland, Peter. "Peter Haviland of Lone Star Spirits, Texas Top Ten Most Haunted List." Haunted 
     America Tours. Haunted America Tours, n.d. Web. 13 July 2012. 
     <http://www.hauntedamericatours.com/ghosthunting/hauntedcities/LoneStarTexas.php>. 
T.R.I.P.P. Online. T.R.I.P.P., 28 Oct. 2008. Web. 13 July 2012. <http://www.tripp-online.com/ 
     White%20Asylum/investigation%20report.htm>. 
Unknown. "Spooky Places." The Wichitan [Wichita Falls] 27 Oct. 2004: n. pag. Print.