"The boundries which divide Life from Death, are at best shadowy and vague." (666) In "The Premature Burial," Poe plays with the idea of appearance of death and life. I thought this kind of strange because it is pretty normal to make sure a person is dead before they are buried. He uses the phrase "supposed to be" and similar wordings to describe the people he talks about being "dead." I was wondering how someone does not know that someone is dead? On page 668 the narrator describes a lady, "at least her condition so closely resembled death as to decieve every one who saw her." Are these numerous deceptions just used as an excuse to not feel guilty that people were being buried alive or were they there just to let the reader that these types things happened sometimes and thus creating a preface to what happened to the narrator himself?
I also noticed the introduction of the "Destiny of man." (676) So is being buried alive to be considered the destiny of the person that it happens to. The support that we have on this idea is the narrators very own story. He uses the support that even though he took all the proper precautions so that it would be impossible for him to be buried alive, he was still put in that position. How ironic was it that he got sick while away from home? So my question is do you think that it really is a persons destiny? I don't or else he would have died and so would the rest of them (not just a few). You can't mess with destiny (if you believe in it) becasue it will change the course of the rest of one's life.
PS Audrey we had talked about Poe's short tales containing poetic elements, I wanted to point out the last paragraph of this tale, page 679, is that poetic or what?
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As a primary psychological response to death, man created religion (or religion created man: depending upon whither you accept an academic or theological perspective). Prior to the advent of modern medicine, the extenion of human life, and the empirical scientific method death was an all cosuming presence. The nineteenth century was no exception. People were, in comparison to contemporary times,confronted on a reagular basis with deat (and yes, even buried alive). Aside from the fear of the premature burial, Death aws always an all encompassing fear. Dominant in every day life, Death was always a possibility; because of its emminence, artists, like Poe, began the creation of "Mourning Art." Such iconography of loss (literature, vases, and jewelry) proliferated in the nineteenth century became conventionalized and ubiquitous (5).The experience of dying was a public event. Memorial services were lavish, embalming had begun to "catch on", and the visual medium of the aftermath of death had become increaingly pressing in the culture.
I believe th Premature Burial to be Poe's contribution to the nineteenth century's growing fascination with "Mourning Art." He brings to light the realistic possibility of a "Bad Death"; one that would be implicity feared by the culture. Poe is not only participating in the literature market, but he is writing for a subculture of artistic conceptuality: transcendentalist/psychological meets culture importance.
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