Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 17

_H^£ervisua^Standardo£^0£ula^ 15 Here then, at least, can I never—can I never be mistaken—these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes—of my lost love-of the Lady- (1:419) —and WE would go on to say, "Of the Lady, MISS AMERICA!" Not for nothing did Poe repeatedly refuse to accept his critics' recommendation to be more "suggestive" or "psychological" at the tale's conclusion: but like Irving's real pumpkin or Hawthorne's insistence upon the material pink ribbon floating down from heaven to Young Goodman Brown, Poe senses the necessity to keep the literal, visual manifestation—a ghost-busting cinematic realism which American directors today greatly prefer over the more "subtle" European socio-allegory or psycho^rama. Truly, both Poe's terse and demonic/neonic-eyed Raven and Hitchcock's ominously gathering "Birds" remind us of the Emersonian/American caveat that "perception is not whimsical, but fatal"—and perhaps fatally whimsical, as well. To now extend our discussion of popular American "Gothicism" from Poe's macabre ocularity to Emily Dickinson's formally prim New-England verses may seem too great or too incongruous a step to take; but the "Belle of Amherst" can exhibit her own domestic "Little Shop of Horrors" in the minutiae of common, daily existence and the stereotypically re pressed fate of spinsterhood. In fact. The Complete Poems reveals that Dickinson's own "Ghosts" and "Goblins" and "Sepulchres" and "Coffins" and "Assassin hid in our Apartment" (333) and "sorcery" finally become even more terrible for their matter-of-fact association with au courant pop-culture and "the familiar species/That perished by the Door" (215). More p>ertinently for our purpx)ses here, Dickinson's fascination, for example, with the common custom of "laying-out" the corpse in a village vigil or "wake" now begins to reveal her uniquely American orientation to these popular rites: "We noticed smallest things—/Things overlooked before" (497). Here, death itself has been hypervisualized, to the exclusion of questions about heaven or hell or the immortal soul: "The Eyes glaze once—and that is Death" (110); or "Death only nails the eyes" (273); or, in the terror of the final indignity, "I could not see to see—" (224). The psychological/physiological states "of death and dying," as presented in numerous recent popular books, mean nothing to the poet as she finds the real difficulty to be a visionary one: