ABSTRACT
The aged, often dark and dreary, settings of Edgar Allan Poe have long been appreciated for creating a consistent narrative atmosphere, establishing, as Poe put it in Island of the Fay, “one vast animate and sentient whole.” Poe’s sentient settings are also typically remote and labyrinthine, enacting a gradual estrangement from reality and retreat into dream. This chapter considers a related phenomenon of Poe’s narrative environments: their dense profusion of eclectic objects, the ensemble effect and strange agency of which urge readers and researchers to reconsider their own imaginative involvement with multivalent settings of inhabitation and study. How can historians and researchers investigate and understand the influence of decorative objects in architectural spaces, through these descriptions?
Like the museum interiors of Sir John Soane or the imaginary vistas of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, several of Poe’s narratively concise but evocatively expansive settings are palimpsestically packed with curios: exotic, antique, and fantastic elements drawn from different times and places. As for Soane and Piranesi, such artifacts for Poe were less emblems of loss than means of invention—stimuli to memory and imagination, revealing how the entirety of past and distant worlds might act upon and within fragmentary presents. This chapter interprets the agency of such settings in two tales of Poe, The Assignation (1834) and Ligeia (1838). In each of these stories an architect-like protagonist intentionally configures a “medley architectural embellishments” to powerfully revive capacities of memory and wonder. Reading these descriptive tales in relation to selections of Poe’s other fiction and cultural criticism (including his architectural criticism), reveals the potency of imaginative description in establishing an efficacious scene, while also giving reason to fear unlimited powers of imagination.
