The Anthropocentric Vision: Aesthetics of Effect and Terror in Poe’s “Hop-Frog”

Abstract

In 1996, Gabriele Rippl wrote a seminal essay on the connection between Edgar Allan Poe and anthropology, formulating an unusual approach to Poe's fiction. Re-examining Poe's aesthetics, specifically through tales dealing with the body or the essential physicality of the characters, Rippl argues, would demonstrate that it is the readers who are indirectly the author of these tales. In other words, one can generate meaning from these texts provided one is able to discern Poe's vision as directed towards a reader-centric anthropology, whereby the author's aesthetics of terror are but a measure of his readers' responsiveness. As Rippl puts it, "[a] discussion of the anthropological impact of Poe's literary texts shows that his real interest is not so much in representing current conceptions of man, but rather the anthropology of the reader," and "it is not the examination of the body as such that interests Poe but the aesthetic effects to be achieved by this detailed presentation." (1) In addition, Rippl observes that just as Poe's protagonists become victims of their self-generated terrors, the readers are "victims" of Poe's aesthetics of the unity of effect, something that has been termed "aesthetics" of terror. Herbert Grabes points out that "[t]he growing interest in culture, or rather cultures, speaks for ... cultural anthropology," and "in this case, literature will be considered mainly as a cultural product providing evidence of the particular features of the culture within which it is produced." (2) What Grabes observes about "cultural anthropology" is traceable in Poe's fiction because it generally projects narrators into extreme conditions/states of being in the context of their immediate socio-cultural surroundings. Poe engaged in probing the essentials of mind-body dichotomy pointing to larger concerns affecting the human psyche. Whether satires, hoaxes, "arabesques," or "grotesques," Poe envisioned and revealed the minds of men possessing various degrees of sanity, intelligence, physical characteristics, and the like to highlight Man's existential crisis. As readers, we can understand and appreciate Poe's anthropocentrism by re-evaluating his fiction with respect to his essential ideas of the human being, both as a social animal and a cultural trope. Gabriele Rippl uses four tales from Poe's oeuvre--"Ligeia" (1838), "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842), and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845)--to demonstrate how Poe exploited his readers' anthropology to generate meaning and achieve his aesthetic of unity and terror. Graves' concept of the reader-centric anthropology is particularly suitable for Poe's fiction. "The anthropology of the reader" in Poe's fiction would mean that the readers' reactions and attitudes towards specific tropes of horror or cruelty are directly proportional to and built upon their inherent tolerance or repugnance towards such visions of atrocity. This concept is similar to the reader-response theory of criticism, but with more emphasis on the readers' emotional constitution; their preconceived and deep-seated reactions to terror and violence impute significance to the goings-on in a particular tale and accordingly render it terrifying/grotesque. In these tales, Rippl sees various dichotomies (ideal-real, mind-body, natural-supernatural) that work their way through the respective narratives to reveal, at every turn, disturbing images of potential violence, terror, and grotesquerie aimed to shock and surprise the readers. This essay demonstrates how Poe's "Hop-Frog" (1849) not only fruitfully yields an anthropological examination of the aforesaid aspects of the author's fiction, but also fittingly generates a heightened texture of horror, violence, and aesthetics of terror by literally visualizing the psycho-social evolution of a semi-anthropoid figure, which encapsulates in itself the extremities of physical deformity and mental acuity, a combination that was both popular and feared in nineteenth-century America. …