Disease and Vision: Perspectives on Poe's "The Sphinx"

DISEASE AND VISION: PERSPECTIVES ON POE'S "THE SPHINX" Elmar Schenkel Tübingen University In July, 1849, during a stay in Philadelphia, Edgar Allan Poe seems to have suffered from hallucinations that were probably due to great psychological strain. In a dream he was even told by an evil black bird that he had contracted cholera, of which there was an epidemic at the time.1 About five years before, Poe had written a short story in which he connected the threat of cholera with a peculiar vision. "The Sphinx," published in 1846, has been much neglected by critics who considered it a "slight tale"2 or saw in it mainly the satiric purpose "to call attention to the undue emphasis laid on democracy by those who see it too near them."3 It is true that this story of a man "who thinks he sees a huge animal on a distant hill, when in reality he has been looking at an insect"4 has not much to offer in terms of complexity, technique, and range of allusion if compared with Poe's more famous tales. Yet this should not altogether blind one to its important implications. The very first reading of the story will convince one that Poe's sidecut against democracy is not central to the text; it is just one possible interpretation reflecting the host's mind. That there is more to "The Sphinx" is shown by the manifold links that relate it to Poe's major works and make it, as it were, one more version of his fundamental imaginative matrix. There is the constellation of a narrator and his friend or relative sojourning in a secluded place, both of them inclined towards hypochondria . There is the enigmatic element alluded to in the title of the story, the Gothic horror for which there does not seem to be a rational solution. As in "The Fall of the House of Usher," this horror, like Foucault's "fantastique de bibliothèque," unfolds between a reader and his books: "These were of a character to force into germination whatever seeds of hereditary superstitions lay latent in my bosom." Poe's tale is informed by a characteristic nineteenth-century ambivalence in regard to books, for not only do they exhale unknown horrors which impinge upon reality but they also contain the answer to a riddle in which the host turns out to be a brother of Poe's Dupin and a forerunner of the psychoanalyst, of which Legrand in "The Gold-Bug" is another instance. The characteristic element of "The Sphinx" is to be found in the juxtaposition of a disease with a deceptive vision. The optical illusion, actually macropsia or a deficiency of the accommodation of the eye, from which the narrator suffers, has never been seen in the light of the epidemic he so much expatiates upon in the first half of the story. Yet 98Notes it might be claimed that his subsequent "misadmeasurement of propinquity " is due not only to his hypochondria but also to the possibility of his having contracted cholera himself. The impact of cholera in the nineteenth century is easily under-rated. Hundreds of books and pamphlets were written as a reaction to the various waves of this scourge which raged through India, the Middle East, and the Western world, including the United States, especially in the years 1832, 1848, and 1853, and which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Hastily constructed theories ranged from contagion to miasmatic origins.5 Even if there were numerous doctors who did not believe in its contagious nature, there was a widespread view that one had to avoid contaminated areas. A mass exodus from towns and cities could be precipitated simply by the rumor of an epidemic outbreak.6 Hence the narrator behaves in accordance with popular belief when he retires to the cottage orné on the banks of the Hudson. This belief in contagion is a necessary condition for the pathological atmosphere that surrounds the characters: "The very air from the South seemed to us redolent with death."7 The pathogenic circumstances are given more weight by the fact that the event occurs "near the close of...