Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe's tales repeatedly return to a dying woman whose vitality seems to intensify as death approaches. Much scholarship has treated her as a symbol—of the narrator's unconscious, of male fear and domination, or of cultural decay—and in doing so has looked past the figure herself. This paper argues that Poe's dying women produce terror not by symbolizing anything, but by refusing to occupy any stable category. Through close reading of "Berenice," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Morella," and "Ligeia," it traces three unsolvable oppositions in which each heroine is suspended. First, trance and catalepsy blur the boundary between life and death, so that neither the narrator nor the reader can tell whether she lives. Second, a wasting body coexists with an indomitable life force: the teeth survive the decaying frame, the buried body keeps breathing, and the will outlives the flesh. Third, she oscillates between presence and absence, appearing and vanishing at the whim of narrators who are diseased, superstitious, or opium-ridden, so that her existence cannot be verified. Because language and category cannot fix her, the reader can neither classify her nor locate her, and the tale sustains an unsettled terror that never resolves. The dying woman is terrifying, the paper concludes, precisely because she cannot be placed.

Keywords: Edgar Allan Poe; Gothic fiction; the dying woman; terror; unreliable narration

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