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| Karen Lee Street |
In
2018, the Australia-based writer Karen Lee Street published her second book on
her series on Edgar Allan Poe: Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru.
Continuing with the adventures the American writer and his friend Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin experience,
Street moves the tale on this occasion to Philadelphia in 1844, when the real
Poe lived in the city, and develops a plot in which the influential Gothic
author investigates the deaths of some acquaintances he made during his stay in
London in Street’s previous novel Edgar
Allan Poe and the London Monster (2016), Andrew and
Jeremiah Matthews. Poe’s investigation begins as a request by his benefactress
Helena Loddiges, an ornithologist and enthusiast of ornithomancy, who sends Poe encrypted
messages through ravens and a diorama. Consequently, as it can be observed,
birds play a vital role in Street’s story. 
Cover of Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru
This blog post will analyse the use of birds Street gives following Poe’s example of including an ominous feathered creature as in “The Raven” (1845)in its last part, although Street employs a wider variety of birds from the very beginning of her novel, when Poe goes for a walk near the Schuylkill River and witnesses a fight between a hawk and an owl (4) to portray the atmosphere of battling powers the novel will depict as my post will explain. Besides the birds, my text will focus on different subjects: the Nativism present in the United States at the time and the regular discussions on Poe’s religion, and the female characters in Street’s novel, including Poe’s cousin and wife, Virginia. As my previous blog post showed, Poe’s tales and poems will be studied alongside Street’s narrative.
Nativism in Philadelphia and Poe’s Use of Religion
Nativism is “the policy of protecting the interests of native-born or established inhabitants against those of immigrants” (Oxford Dictionary). Although it also emerges in other countries besides the Unites States, this section of the blog post will focus on the movement in Philadelphia in the 1840s.
Eric Kaufmann states that “the first European group to “imagine” the territory of the United States as its homeland and trace its genealogy back to New World colonists who rebelled against their mother country” (3-4) were the Anglo-American Protestants. In his essay, which explains the development of the policy against immigrants, he analyses the political movement from a sociological approach.
Thomas Nast, "The American River Ganges"
Street’s novel depicts the fights between these “Nativists”
or “Patriots” and the Catholics in Philadelphia several times. The period she
presents crashes against the ideals maintained by William Penn
when he founded the city “on principles of tolerance” among “the earliest
settlers of Philadelphia” such as “English, Scots Irish, and German
immigrants.” (Kopaczewski)) Street focuses on the issues against the Irish
Catholics, though there were other nationalities attacked at the time as well.
In Street’s novel, Poe befriends the Augustinian friar Father Keane, “born near the banks of the Shannon River in the west of Ireland and washed up in the port of Philadelphia” (10), and who “was also an amateur ornithologist and taught natural philosophy to the students at St. Augustine Academy” (10). Poe’s association with Father Keane in the novel reflects Poe’s friendship with the Jesuit priests who lived near him when he resided in Fordham, New York. According to Poe, “They were highly cultivated gentlemen and scholars . . . smoked, drank, and played cards like gentlemen, and never said a word about religion.” (The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore)[i] One of the most relevant moments of the Anti-Catholicism presented in the novel is when both Poe and Keane head to the quarters of the police to report Miss Loddiges’s disappearance and possible abduction, and the lieutenant and captain of the office treat them as if they were criminals, especially when addressing to Father Keane, to whom Lieutenant Webster clearly states that “I do know what an ornithologist is…Philadelphians receive a free education. We have no need here for papist academies” (95).
Street clarifies the “Bible issue” of the period, as Father Keane explains to Poe:
Bishop Kenrick wrote to the Board of Controllers of Philadelphia’s public schools to request permission for Catholic children to read the Douay version and for the children to be excused from any religious teachings while at school, which was agreed, but the Nativists complained that this was an attack against the Protestant Bible. (96)
The tension between the Irish Catholics and the Nativists increased as Keane claims: “those born in this country who mistrust newcomers, believing they will bring unwelcome change by introducing new faiths and customs…And then violence follows.” (96-7)
Street’s setting is remarkable as scholars have always struggled to define Poe’s own religious views and his attitude towards Nativism. Shelby Spears states that “Poe wrote in a white, Protestant America for a white, Protestant audience dealing with a mounting wave of Catholic immigrants that disrupted the illusion of a homogenous land of liberty, and that, as a result, often held Anti-Catholic beliefs.” (5) and exemplifies this approach through the examples of “The Cask of the Amontillado” (1846) and “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1840). With the former, Spears examines how Poe’s use of the Italian setting of his story during the Carnival (a Catholic period before Lent) and the cruel walling up by the Catholic Montresor of the Freemason Fortunato could be Poe’s attempt to reach a Protestant public, as “Poe’s original readers would have had great antipathy towards both parties in “The Cask of Amontillado” and would have expected inhuman behavior on their behalves” (5)
With the latter, Spears focuses on the aristocratic connotation of the story, and, consequently, on its alleged setting in Great Britain, and the inbreeding the narrator depicts in Usher’s family. Spears clarifies that Nativists would enjoy a tale which presents “Brits (who had invaded the USA less than thirty years before Poe wrote the story in 1839, little enough time that almost all his readers would have either experienced the war firsthand or be the immediate descendants of those who had) and aristocrats (who represented the antithesis of the American ideal) in an unfavorable light.” (8)
Street’s novel depicts Poe surrounded by Catholics, yet
does not directly specify whether Poe shares their religion or not. Following
the study of Poe’s life, it can be seen that he was raised up in an Anglican
environment, and he had some knowledge of Catholicism, although religion in
Poe’s writing is not a common feature analysed among scholars. The first one to
do so was Michael Burduck with his paper “Usher’s Forgotten ‘Church’?” (1994),
and, as Stephen Mirarchi states, Poe
uses Catholic eschatology, Mariology and liturgy in specific ways, although
perhaps Poe employed them simply for literary goals. Mirarchi focuses on Poe’s “Morella” (1835)
and “The Raven” to exemplify his views, and, although Street does not emphasise
religion in her novel, it is significant to illustrate how echoes of Poe’s tale
and poem are present in her text. When analysing “Morella”; Mirarchi explains
how “in the published versions of the story published between 1835 to 1839,
Morella first prays to Mary “in a low undertone which trembled with fervor some
words of a catholic hymn””(188). After this prayer,
Illustration for "Morella" by Harry Clarke
Morella hints to the
resurrection of her body. When the narrator decides to baptise his daughter and
name her Morella after his deceased wife, the child dies and he cannot find the
body of her mother. The story, thus, shows the narrator’s horror when he
realizes about “his own free and willing participation in a demonic ritual that
precisely inverts the eschatological and necessarily Eucharistic signs of
Christ.” (Mirarchi, 190)
Similarly, “The Raven” warns of the danger triggered from “idolatry, despair, and the apparent loss of a maiden precious to the generation of life itself.” (Mirarchi, 194) Street, as abovementioned, is influenced by both “Morella” and “The Raven”, yet she highlights a feature present in more tales and poems by Poe, which the following section of my blog post will develop: the death of a beautiful woman. In this case, my text will not only focus on two women: Mrs. Reynolds, the wife of Poe’s nemesis in the trilogy, and Edgar Allan Poe’s real wife, Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe, but it will also briefly comment on other female characters of the plot: Muddy and Miss Loddigges.
The Female Characters of Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru
In Street’s novel, there are four main women: Poe’s wife Virginia, Virginia’s mother Muddy, Mrs. Reynolds, and Miss Loddiges. All the characters echo either real ladies in Poe’s life or characters he depicted in his narratives. This section will analyse how they are portrayed in Street’s text and the diverse approaches scholars have given to Poe’s female characters.
To begin with, I will focus on
Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe, the author’s cousin and wife. Virginia unfortunately
died of tuberculosis when she was only twenty-four years old. Poe lived with Virginia
and her mother Maria, and Virginia’s passing besides his own mother’s death
when she was young as well are considered to be the major influences for Poe’s
concept of the death of a beautiful woman as “the
most poetical topic in the world” (Poe, “The
Philosophy of Composition”). Virginia is usually regarded as
the inspiration for
“Lenore”
(1843), “The Raven” (1845), “Ulalume”
(1847), and especially “Annabel
Lee”
(1849), all of them focusing on the narrator’s loss of his beloved and an
idealisation of an otherworldly female figure. Nonetheless, one of the most
remarkable features Street emphasises is Virginia’s intellect. Street
illustrates Virginia’s brilliance and curiosity towards learning throughout her
text, yet one of the most interesting moments is when Virginia helps Poe and
Dupin in their investigation when Miss Loddiges is kidnapped and they study different types of birds and the enigmatic Peruvian gods who allegedly kept a
treasure: “The drawing looks fantastical and might be easily dismissed as such,
but what if it too has something of importance hidden in plain sight? Some
valuable clue? Might it represent an actual location of significance that is
disguised by these elements of fantasy?” (Street, 181) While Poe seems proud of
his wife’s intelligence, he observes that Dupin is “not completely comfortable
with Sissy’s (Virginia’s) involvement in our quest” (144), though he does not object,
and therefore “it would be up to me to ensure that my wife was kept out of
harm’s way” (144). By depicting Virginia as interested in knowledge, Street
echoes Poe’s “Dark Ladies”, that is, Berenice,
Morella, Ligeia
and Madeline Usher, all from stories with their names, bar the last character
from “The Fall of the House of Usher”.
Illustration for "Ligeia" by Harry Clarke
All these women are described by their male lovers as intellectuals or reveal against a patriarchal order in traditionally male settings such as a library. Morella and Ligeia can be incorporated in the first category, as Morella’s “erudition was profound” and “her powers of mind were gigantic” (Poe, 21), and the narrator of “Ligeia” refers to her “rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language” (Poe, 26). The second group of female characters, Berenice and Madeline Usher, though speechless in the tales, “appear at dramatic moments, confronting their lovers at reading-room or library door, as though threatening entrance into a traditionally male sphere of intellectual advancement” (Johanyak, 69).
Poe’s views of women have been studied in depth throughout the years. As Debra Johanyak states, “as feminism took root and sprang up in this country in the 1820s and ‘30s, the issues of women’s rights and equality with men emerged as controversial concerns.” (62) Poe’s intellectual women are destroyed by their male partners in his tales, as the latter ones fear them.
Poe was divided between “the domestic and the intellectual edges of feminism” (Johanyak, 62), as Poe was in contact with female poets such as Frances Sargent Osgood. Street does not mention Poe’s alleged flirtation with the author yet emphasises his family lifestyle with Sissy (Virginia) and Muddy, her mother, who is always depicted working in the house and who Poe confesses rescues them “from the brink of penury far too often, whether though taking in washing and sewing, gathering edible wild plants to supplement our meals or her tenacious bartering at the market.” (Street, 5)
Another completely different
character Street depicts is Mrs. Reynolds, Poe’s ancient enemy when her name
back in London was Mrs. Fontaine. An actress, Reynolds embodies vanity, and
Street wisely combines two incredibly opposite tales by Poe to illustrate her:
the comedy “The
Spectacles” (1844) (mentioned in Street’s novel), a
short story in which a man’s refusal of wearing spectacles makes him marry his
82-year-old great-great-grandmother, and “The Oval Portrait”
(1842), a horror story in which an artist becomes so obsessed while painting
the portrait of his wife that he does not even realize that
"The Oval Portrait" by Jean-Paul Laurens
she is dead by the time he finishes the artwork. In Street’s novel, Poe and his wife go to see
Mrs. Reynolds perform, and, as they speak in her dressing-room after the play,
Street intertwines both tales by the American writer: in the novel, Poe
remembers how Mrs. Reynolds was painted by Robert Street, an artist who also
makes a portrait of Poe, shortly after she comes from London. Poe’s horror while looking at the actress’s
beauty so diminished echoes Poe’s macabre tale, yet the comedy is perceived a
couple of pages before when Poe claims:
Mrs. Laird removed the last of the face paint, and I saw Mrs. Reynolds unembellished face with a sense of horror I did my best to hide. Her unadorned skin was the color of rancid butter and had the texture of a child’s worn-out leather boot. When Mrs. Laird removed her mistress’s luxuriant wig to reveal a recessed hairline and gray locks that were considerably thinned, my shock was palpable (18).
Although Street omits the humour of Poe’s tale in this moment, she introduces it with the figure of Miss Loddiges, a charismatic ornithologist whose dresses with hummingbirds make her grotesque: “Miss Loddiges stood very still, staring up, completely oblivious to the pedestrians forced to skirt around her on the footpath; they, however, gawped unashamedly at her, betraying their polite Philadelphian upbringings.” (70)
Interestingly, Street also introduces Miss Loddiges as an incredibly clever woman, who, although not believed by Poe at first, gives him illuminating clues for his investigation and sends him encrypted messages through taxidermy and a diorama. Although at first Loddiges may echo Poe’s hysterical narrators of “How to Write a Blackwood Article” (1838) and “A Predicament” (1838), she is perceived as a strong woman who is clearly relevant for the last section of this blog post: Street’s employment of birds, ornithology and ornithomancy in her text.
Women as Birds in Cages, Ornithomancy and Hummingbirds
Birds play a vital role in Street’s novel both to illustrate her characters, and also as part of her plot. To begin with, this section will analyse women as birds, following a feature which was common during the Victorian time, it will focus on ornithomancy, as various events in the novel are predicted through birds, and it will briefly study hummingbirds in connection to the Peruvian culture.
Animals constantly emerge in Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru. Professor Renelle, who went to the expedition of Peru with Jeremiah Matthews, grins “wolfishly” (273), and when in danger surrounded by the Nativists, Virginia trembles “like a deer surrounded by wolves” (286). Nonetheless, birds are significant to portray women’s lives and their lack of social freedom, especially Miss Loddiges, who before being kidnapped, claims that “her father was holding her prisoner at home” (209) when she states that she wants to go to the police in London so that they investigate who murdered Jeremiah. Miss Loddiges embodies the so-called “bird in the cage”, a term which for the Victorians became “a physical and metaphysical metaphor for women’s place in society” (Shefer in Stevenson). As Stevenson claims, “women’s domestic confinement was seen as natural rather than punitive and repressive”, and if a woman “ventured beyond the home”, she was condemned. It was common that artists depicted an image of a “woman at the window”, in which a woman is represented outside her own cage, and “women playing with birds were viewed as the pets of male guardians.” (Stevenson) Artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti or Walter Deverell painted this vision of women.
"A Pet" by Walter Howell Deverell
Nevertheless, by escaping to the
United States in search of Edgar Allan Poe without her father’s permission, Miss
Loddiges appears as a rebel, and she echoes Mary Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which Wollstonecraft critiqued
that a woman “roaming round [her]gilt cage, only seeks to
adore [her] prison.” By breaking
that birdcage, Miss Loddiges breaks a barrier as well. She becomes independent
although she reckons that her father will seek her and her time is limited, and
trusts Poe to find a culprit for Jeremiah’s death through the help of a
journal.
Loddiges introduces Poe into the investigation by the use of three mummified crows cut into pieces, a diorama and “a message from Grip” (39), Charles Dickens’s pet raven who died and she had immortalized for him through her skills as a taxidermist. All this first meeting of Miss Loddiges and Poe in Philadelphia is about birds: Poe and Miss Loddiges chat about the raven while Miss Loddiges tilts her head and scrutinizes Poe “much as a robin might stare at the ground before plucking an earthworm from it” (41) and before she explains to him that “the boundary between life and death is but a shadow—who may say for certain where one ends and the other begins? Somehow the birds communicate to me, whether alive or gone to the other side.” (41) Consequently, she reckons that Grip has spoken to her to solve the deaths of Andrew and Jeremiah Matthews. All this scene is introduced by Virginia, who considers that, as she has seen a robin in their home before, they would be having a visitor, in this case, it results in being Miss Loddiges.
Ornithomancy is “the ancient Greek term for augury,
the method of divination by the flight or song of birds. For the Romans, it
became a part of their national religion and had a distinct priesthood.”
(Encyclopedia.com) Street employs it later on through a dream that Poe has with
Grip which echoes his own poem “The Raven”: “With a flutter of wings, Grip the
raven swooped down from a bookshelf and landed on a chair next to me. The bird
observed me with its gimlet eye. ‘I told her (Miss Loddiges),’ it said. ‘I told
her and warned her.’” (206) Apart from being Dickens’s real pet raven, Grip
appeared in his novel Barnaby Rudge (1841), and scholars acknowledge
Dickens’s influence on Poe when writing 
Gustave Doré, "The Raven"
about his black bird; some of them as
Matthew Redmond, even consider it as
plagiarism. Nonetheless, it is significant to emphasise that Dickens was fond
of comparing his characters to birds and in narratives such as Bleak House (1852)
or Great Expectations (1861), they echo avian characteristics. [ii]
Miss Loddiges is a friend of Dickens in the Street’s story and he is delighted by her “father’s hummingbird collection” (40)[iii]. Loddiges is constantly connected to this bird, as she fancies wearing hats of hummingbirds as well. Yet the connection to these birds with the plot is deeper, since there is a journal in which diverse types of birds are drawn and some of them are hummingbirds. Besides, the plot narrates expeditions to Peru and the birds the ornithologists and other travellers encounter there. Although Street focuses on the Chachapoyas or the “Warriors of the Clouds” and the chronicles of the Spanish conquistador Pedro Cieza de León, the hummingbird is clearly an outstanding symbol of the Peruvian culture in general as it can be seen from one of the Nazca Lines which were created in Southern Peru between 500 BC and 500 CE.
In conclusion, this blog post has analysed Karen Lee Street’s Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru taking into account several ideas: first of all, the Nativism present in the plot, then, the female characters depicted throughout the novel, and, finally, the use of birds Street has in her text following the traditions already set by Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe, but also introducing a new approach by connecting birds with an ancient Peruvian civilization in a Gothic novel.
[i] Many thanks to Karen Lee Street for pointing out this link. https://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poerelig.htm
[ii] For further reading, I recommend “Birds and Cages in Bleak House” by Emma Brodey, https://dickens.ucsc.edu/programs/hs-pdfs/emma-brodey.pdf and “Image and Symbol in Great Expectations” by Joseph A. Haynes https://www.jstor.org/stable/2872039?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
[iii] Thanks to Karen Lee Street for this fascinating article about hummingbirds. http://finfeetwing.org/hummingbirds,-heade---hawthorne.html
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Brodey, Emma. “Birds and Cages in Bleak House.” https://dickens.ucsc.edu/programs/hs-pdfs/emma-brodey.pdf Accessed 10th Oct. 2020.
Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, The. “Edgar Allan Poe and Religion” https://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poerelig.htm Accessed 15th Dec. 2020.
Early American Natural History: Realms of Fin, and Feet and Wing. “Hummingbirds, Heade and Hawthorne”, http://finfeetwing.org/hummingbirds,-heade---hawthorne.html Accessed 28th Dec. 2020.
Encyclopedia.com. “Ornithomancy” https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ornithomancy Accessed 10th Dec. 2020.
Haynes, Joseph A. “Image and Symbol in Great Expectations.” ELH, vol. 30, no. 3, 1963, pp. 258–292. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2872039 Accessed 28 Nov. 2020.
Johanyak, Debra. “POESIAN FEMINISM: TRIUMPH OR TRAGEDY.” CLA Journal, vol. 39, no. 1, 1995, pp. 62–70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44322928 Accessed 28 Nov. 2020.
Kauffmann, Eric. “American Exceptionalism Reconsidered: Anglo-Saxon Ethnogenesis in the “universal” Nation, 1776-1850”, Journal of American Studies 33 (3) , pp. 437.457 https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/4211/1/4211.pdf Accessed 10th Oct. 2020.
Kopaczewski, James. “Nativism”. The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/nativism/ Accessed 9th Oct. 2020.
Mirarchi, Stephen. “Edgar Allan Poe’s Marian Consecration: Catholic Escathology, Mariology, and Liturgy in “Morella”, “The Raven”, and “Hymn”” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 16, no. 2, 2015, pp. 184–203. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/edgallpoerev.16.2.0184 Accessed 20th Oct. 2020.
Oxford Dictionary, “Nativism”, https://www.lexico.com/definition/nativism Accessed 9th Sep. 2020.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Edgar Allan Poe Selected Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Redmond, Matthew. “If Bird or Devil: Meta-Plagiarism in ‘The Raven.’” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 19, no. 1, 2018, pp. 88–103. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/edgallpoerev.19.1.0088. Accessed 28 Nov. 2020.
Spears, Shelby. “A Place for Poe: The Foreign in Two Tales of the Gothic”, English Class Publications, Paper 32. 2016. https://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1031&context=english_class_publications Accessed 20th Oct. 2020.
Stevenson, Ana. ““Sitting in Cages”: Imagining Victorian Women in Neo-Victorian Film Musicals” in in Simonetta Falchi, Greta Perletti and Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, eds. Victorianomania: Reimagining, Refashioning, and Rewriting Victorian Literature and Culture. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2015. https://www.academia.edu/20840263/_Sitting_in_Cages_Imagining_Victorian_Women_in_Neo_Victorian_Film_Musicals Accessed 10th Dec.2020.
Street, Karen. Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru: A Poe and Dupin Story. London: OneWorld Publications, 2018.
IMAGES:
Nast, Thomas. “The American River Ganges”. Harper’s Weekly. May 8, 1875. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_American_River_Ganges_(Thomas_Nast_cartoon).jpg Accessed 15th Oct. 2020.
Clarke, Harry. "The Earth grew dark, and its figures passed by me, like flitting shadows, and among them all I beheld only—Morella" (Morella) 1919. https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/harry-clarke-s-illustrations-for-poe-s-tales-of-mystery-and-imagination-1919 Accessed 9th Sep. 2020.
Clarke, Harry. "I would call aloud upon her name" (Ligeia) 1919. https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/harry-clarke-s-illustrations-for-poe-s-tales-of-mystery-and-imagination-1919 Accessed 9th Sep. 2020.
Lauren, Jean Paul. “The Oval Portrait”. Tales and Poems, vol. 2, n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Poe_the_oval_portrait.JPG Accessed 20th Sep. 2020.
Deverell, Walter Howell, “The Pet”, 1853. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/deverell-a-pet-n02854 Accessed 27th Dec. 2020.
Doré, Gustave. “The Raven”, https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/05/gustav-dore-poe-the-raven/ Accessed 27th Dec. 2020.
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