a less serious mode in which disfiguration or repulsiveness usually signals satirical purpose. Of course he sometimes used deformity to make a character seem dangerous (“Hop-Frog”) or horrifying (“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”). But as if mocking his own anxieties about death, decay, living entombment, mutilation, or dismemberment, Poe created a number of farces in which grotesque transformations become laughably outrageous. In an early satire—not included here—a protagonist’s “loss of breath” causes him to be thrown from a coach (fracturing his arms and skull), jolted by an electrical charge, hung as a robber, and buried alive. In another tale, a hapless fellow loses his head—literally—in a wager with the devil. Poe’s comic imagining of unthinkable atrocities perhaps sustained an illusion of authorial control over human frailty. Yet his grotesque tales sometimes point to deformities in the nation itself. Poe’s first truly “American” tale, “The Man That Was Used Up,”
What do You think about The Portable Edgar Allan Poe?
