Religious Satire and Poe’s “Angel of the Odd”

Religious Satire and Poe’s “Angel of the Odd” MICHAEL McGEHEE I n his 1844 tale “The Angel of the Odd,”1 Edgar Allan Poe tells the story of the drunken narrator’s visitation from an “Angel,” who proceeds to torment him with a series of odd incidents that upset his expectations of ordinary life. Conventionally read as an attack on the reign of reason,2 the tale also contains numerous references to the Christian tradition. Cataloging the biblical references in the Poe corpus, William Forrest establishes in Biblical Allusions in Poe that “The Angel of the Odd” indeed contains several allusions to the Old Testament, but he ignores any to the New Testament.3 As the present essay will show, however, connections to the New Testament and Christian institutions abound as part of the tale’s interest in satirizing both. Like the New Testament, “The Angel of the Odd” tells a story of unbelief versus belief. While the biblical text concerns itself foremost with how its characters respond to Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah, Poe’s tale describes how the narrator responds to the antics of the Angel of the Odd. Although he exhorts the narrator to stop drinking alcohol so heavily, the Angel’s real interest lies in trying to arrest the narrator’s reason in order to make room for the incredible, or the “odd”; yet the manner in which the Angel inculcates these lessons colors them in hues common to the Christian tradition.4 “The Angel of the Odd,” then, functions on two levels: On its upper level, the tale parallels the New Testament; its characters, images, and motifs, by way of analogy, evoke certain features of that text while also probing its implications for human life. On an underlying level, the grotesque qualities of “The Angel of the Odd”—its comedic and profane suggestions—twist and destabilize the religious parallels. Thus, the analogues become satirical comments on religion, at first lighthearted then progressively more serious. Many writers of Poe’s day, responding to the broad spirit of reform that suffused antebellum American society, sought to correct human behavior by representing the grave consequences of profligacy, but they did so in stylistically restrained prose that maintained a safe distance from the vices they condemned. However, other reform writers, David Reynolds observes, “described vice in such lurid detail that they themselves were branded as dangerously immoral or sacrilegious.”5 Poe was not a reform writer in the sense C
2008 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 41, 2008 65 M I C H A E L M c G E H E E that his contemporaries would have understood it: he had little belief in the efficacy of attempts to improve society, and his anti-didacticism is well known. But, like Reynolds’s “immoral” reform writers, Poe had a talent for describing vice in lurid detail; indeed, the darkness of many of his stories outdoes that of the darkest reform literature.6 Taking greater chances than the “immoral” reform writers, Poe had to suffer some of the same consequences they did, including attacks from more conventional moral reformers.7 If Poe continually risked becoming a target, then interpreting the story as a critique of reform, as Gerald Gerber does in “Poe’s Odd Angel” (1968), seems natural. However, understanding that the movement went beyond personal preferences about “what should and shouldn’t be done,” Poe identified its ideological underpinnings as religious ones. Indeed, in the early nineteenth century the connection between, for instance, the temperance movement and the Apostle Paul’s injunction in Ephesians 5:18 to avoid getting drunk with wine was plainly stated.8 As the tale’s satire will show, the fact that reform often had a religious basis did not escape Poe. Reading “The Angel of the Odd,” then, as a satire of religion penetrates below the surface of the reform movement and deepens our sense of the tension between Poe’s work and the Christian tradition. Critics generally acknowledge that Poe’s work demonstrates a broad knowledge of the Bible. Forrest credits the abundance of biblical allusions in Poe chiefly to the Judeo...