Poe: the first proponent of body horror? (part one)

Body horror is defined by the ever-useful Wikipedia as "horror fiction in which the horror is principally derived from the graphic destruction or degeneration of the body. Such works may deal with disease, decay, parasitism, mutilation, or mutation." It's a term primarily associated with film: David Cronenberg is usually identified as the leader in the field, along with Clive Barker and a few other inferior directors. I think there's a very good case to be made for the Silent Hill video game series as a leading light too, as it revolves around the notion of a space where people's darkest fears and guilts are made literal flesh. The 'otherworld' of the canonical Silent Hill games is an intersection of open, bleeding flesh and rusty metal; the creatures are all human/monster hybrids or gigantic fleshy masses. But more on that in another post: I get carried away when I talk about Silent Hill.

There are definitely elements of body horror in Gothic fiction, which often fetishises the dead body as a location of intense emotions (fear, horror and disgust, but also love, romantic and erotic). It's brought to a pinnacle with the work of Poe, who might as well have taken the Wiki description of body horror as a personal artistic manifesto. I want to look at some of the devices of body horror (the Wiki definition is as good a place as any to start) and how Poe makes use of them.

Disease

There is A LOT of wasting-away going on in Poe's stories: both Madeleine and Roderick Usher are suffering some kind of unspecified debilitative illness; the unholy trifecta of Ligeia, Morella and Berenice seem to have been stricken by the same disease. By most measures the symptoms seem to match closely with tuberculosis, that most poetic of illnesses:

The wild eyes blazed with a too --too glorious effulgence; the pale fingers became of the transparent waxen hue of the grave, and the blue veins upon the lofty forehead swelled and sank impetuously with the tides of the gentle emotion. I saw that she must die --and I struggled desperately in spirit with the grim Azrael (1).

There's an obvious biographical connection here, as Poe's child-bride Virginia died of the same illness (although not until later). What is the meaning of tuberculosis as a device in these stories? Mainly, I think, it`s a sexy illness. It`s debilitating without being disfiguring; the symptoms -- flushed cheeks, rapid breathing -- mimic sexual arousal. Poe's women can die from it and still make beautiful corpses, thereby attaining that "most poetical" (2) of states.

The most obvious, lurid, in-your-face disease in Poe's stories, is, of course, the Red Death.

Blood was its Avatar and its seal -- the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour (3).

It's a spectacularly theatrical disease: in three nice, neat, half-hour acts, with plenty of sturm-und-drang and a good, meaty death scene. The Red Death seems tailor-made for Prince Prospero, who is a stage manager extraordinaire.

Prospero, like his Tempest namesake, is a stand-in for the author. He arranges and plans the masque - authors it - with in exquisite detail. Prospero represents an author trying to subsume Life and Death in a work of fiction, trying to fictionalise every aspect of reality. Prospero, tellingly, like Poe, chooses a lurid Gothicism with a touch of black humour to control his personal demons. Like fiction, however, his Masque is not completely closed off - an intruder is able to penetrate the text and transform it.

To be continued...

(1) Ligeia
(2) The Philosophy of Composition
(3) The Masque of the Red Death