- Introduction: The Unfolding Investigation of Edgar Poe
- An Orphan’s Life: 1809-1831
- A Life in Print: 1831–1849
- Poe: A Life in Letters
- Poe’s Lives
- Orientalism in Poe’s Early Poetry
- Echoes of “the Raven”: Unoriginality in Poe’s Verse
- Poe’s Common Meter
- Early Experiments in Genre: Imitations, Burlesques, Satires
- The Perversity of Public Opinion in Poe’s Later Satires and Hoaxes
- Undead Wives and Undone Husbands: Poe’s Tales of Marriage
- Solving Mysteries in Poe, or Trying To
- Deciphering Dupin: Poe’s Ratiocinative Plots
- The Calculus of Probabilities: Contingency in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”
- Counterparts: Poe’s Doubles from “William Wilson” to “The Cask of Amontillado”
- Outing the Perverse: Poe’s False Confessionals
- Poe’s Survival Stories as Dying Colonialisms
- Poe’s Landscapes, Picturesque and Ideal
- Undying Enigmas in “Ligeia”
- “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the Architecture of Unreliability
- Genre, Science, and “Hans Pfaall”
- Rude Representation: Orienting the American Frontier Through the Characters in Pym’s Chasm
- Pym and Unreadability
- Poe’s Novel Explorations
- Conversations on the Body and the Soul: Transcending Death in the Angelic Dialogues and “Mesmeric Revelation”
- Making Sense of Eureka
- Poe the Critic: The Aesthetics of the “Tomahawk” Review
- The Marginal Center: “Pinakidia,” “Marginalia,” and “Fifty Suggestions”
- Poe the Magazinist
- Poe’s Cultural Inheritance: Literary Touchstones and the Cultivation of Erudition
- Ancestral Piles: Poe’s Gothic Materials
- Kindred Contemporaries: Lippard, Bird, Simms, Hawthorne, and Irving
- Edgar Allan Poe and His Enemies
- Bluestockings and Bohemians
- Poe and His Global Advocates
- Poe and Modern(ist) Poetry: An Impure Legacy
- An Unrequited Obsession: Poe and Modern Horror
- Dupin’s Descendants in Print and on Screen
- Poe’s Visual Legacy
- Poe and the Avant-Garde
- Postmodern Poe
- Poe and Science Fiction
- Poe and the Sciences of the Brain
- Temporal Effects: Trauma, Margaret Fuller, and “Graphicality” in Poe
- Unqualified Pleasure: Poe on Forms of Life
- Poe’s Terror Analytics
Abstract and Keywords
Critics have had very little to say about marriage as an institution in Poe’s work, despite a recent historical turn in Poe studies that might lead in that direction. This essay demonstrates that Poe was in fact deeply engaged with the idea of legal marriage—one of the most important social and political issues of his day—and deeply ambivalent about the losses to which marriage subjected both husbands and wives. In the wasted, undead wives featured in such tales as “Berenice” (1835) and “Ligeia” (1838) and the undone, dispossessed husbands in “The Black Cat” (1843) and “The Oblong Box” (1844), Poe considers the profound transformations that legal marriage works upon women and men, and the terrifying unity between husband and wife that marriage demands.
Keywords: Edgar Allan Poe, Berenice, Ligeia, The Black Cat, The Oblong Box, transformation, unity, undead, husbands, wives
The Honors College, University of Southern Mississippi
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- Introduction: The Unfolding Investigation of Edgar Poe
- An Orphan’s Life: 1809-1831
- A Life in Print: 1831–1849
- Poe: A Life in Letters
- Poe’s Lives
- Orientalism in Poe’s Early Poetry
- Echoes of “the Raven”: Unoriginality in Poe’s Verse
- Poe’s Common Meter
- Early Experiments in Genre: Imitations, Burlesques, Satires
- The Perversity of Public Opinion in Poe’s Later Satires and Hoaxes
- Undead Wives and Undone Husbands: Poe’s Tales of Marriage
- Solving Mysteries in Poe, or Trying To
- Deciphering Dupin: Poe’s Ratiocinative Plots
- The Calculus of Probabilities: Contingency in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”
- Counterparts: Poe’s Doubles from “William Wilson” to “The Cask of Amontillado”
- Outing the Perverse: Poe’s False Confessionals
- Poe’s Survival Stories as Dying Colonialisms
- Poe’s Landscapes, Picturesque and Ideal
- Undying Enigmas in “Ligeia”
- “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the Architecture of Unreliability
- Genre, Science, and “Hans Pfaall”
- Rude Representation: Orienting the American Frontier Through the Characters in Pym’s Chasm
- Pym and Unreadability
- Poe’s Novel Explorations
- Conversations on the Body and the Soul: Transcending Death in the Angelic Dialogues and “Mesmeric Revelation”
- Making Sense of Eureka
- Poe the Critic: The Aesthetics of the “Tomahawk” Review
- The Marginal Center: “Pinakidia,” “Marginalia,” and “Fifty Suggestions”
- Poe the Magazinist
- Poe’s Cultural Inheritance: Literary Touchstones and the Cultivation of Erudition
- Ancestral Piles: Poe’s Gothic Materials
- Kindred Contemporaries: Lippard, Bird, Simms, Hawthorne, and Irving
- Edgar Allan Poe and His Enemies
- Bluestockings and Bohemians
- Poe and His Global Advocates
- Poe and Modern(ist) Poetry: An Impure Legacy
- An Unrequited Obsession: Poe and Modern Horror
- Dupin’s Descendants in Print and on Screen
- Poe’s Visual Legacy
- Poe and the Avant-Garde
- Postmodern Poe
- Poe and Science Fiction
- Poe and the Sciences of the Brain
- Temporal Effects: Trauma, Margaret Fuller, and “Graphicality” in Poe
- Unqualified Pleasure: Poe on Forms of Life
- Poe’s Terror Analytics
