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