Morella (Poe)
Morella is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in 1835 that focuses on the question of the identity of two different people.
action
The nameless first-person narrator found a friend of the highest learning in Morella by chance. For them his soul glows with an ember that is not love. They get married, Morella fully joins the narrator who becomes her student. The German philosophers Fichte and Schelling are at the center of Morella's studies, she deals with the question of identity. In the course of time the initial, if only mental, affection turns into dislike, the narrator begins to long for Morella's death, and in fact it begins to deteriorate increasingly, the symptoms (the red patches on the cheeks) suggest tuberculosis . When Morella feels her death approaching, she tells the narrator: “I'm dying. But in me there is a pledge of the inclination - oh, what a lesser one - that you showed me. And when my spirit leaves me, the child will live, your child and mine! ”When she dies, she gives birth to a daughter whom the first-person narrator lets grow up unbaptized. Day by day she becomes more like Morella, and when the ten-year-old is finally baptized, the first-person narrator only has one name for her: Morella. As soon as the daughter hears her mother's name, she replies: “Here I am!” She does not survive this moment for long, and when the first-person narrator carries her into the crypt, he finds no trace of her mother's body there.
interpretation
The story describes the disturbing re-emergence of one identity in another, to an extent that goes beyond the (genetic) similarity between mother and daughter: the mother is the daughter. Why Poe not only composed this story skillfully and effectively, why he had to write it, can only be seen from his biography. While he was writing it, his 10-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm sat next to him and appeared to him, the young orphan, as the reincarnation of his mother, the actress Elizabeth Poe, who died young, the first Morella he loved with a love that was not sexual was allowed to be, which is why it turns into hatred.
How the narrator's first Morella is supposed to have become pregnant without sexual love is a secret that the narrator (and Poe) keeps to himself. Of course, this hook in the plot again supports the absolute similarity between mother and daughter, because the latter appears to have been created by parthenogenesis , not to say: like cloned .
In Morella , the philosophical relationship of Poe to German idealism is also reflected on another level of meaning . The first-person narrator expressly emphasizes that Morella, who was born in Pressburg, made him familiar with the “ mystical writings” of the German philosophers, especially with Fichte's pantheism and Schelling's theory of identity . At first, however, the narrator tries to free himself from the “confused realms of her world of thought”, but cannot prevent “some dark, profound words glimmer out of the ashes of a dead philosophy”, the strange meaning of which is burned into his memory. He never loved Morella; his alienation begins on the first day of their relationship, which ultimately leads to Morella's death - and it is precisely this death that the narrator longed for. In the form of their daughter, Morella in the perception and imagination of the first-person narrator inevitably rises again like the phoenix from the ashes after her death .
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Morella. In: Edgar Allan Poe: Master narratives , ed. by Günter Blöcker, German Book Association, Berlin a. a. 1960, pp. 93-100, here pp. 93-96. See also the notes on this interpretation from Karl Heinz Göller : Poe · Ligeia. In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American short story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 78f.
