Content area
Full text
Like many of his contemporaries, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an avid reader of travel literature and expeditions into unknown lands, in particular the polar regions. The continent of Antarctica was not mapped or fully explored until well into the 20th century. Up until then, Antarctica was thus a conjectured and almost mythological place, whose deadly and miraculous nature captured the popular imagination as otherworldly, dangerous, and exotic. Antarctica's uncharted geography was conceived as a monstrous, hellish, alien place. The men, who ventured out to explore it, were seen as classic heroes, who in the tradition of Odysseus had to fight almost supernatural conditions to penetrate the mysterious sea- and landscapes of the South Pole. In these hostile regions, they battled with death and madness, the feared destroyers of the human body and mind. In significant ways, they followed the trajectory of the hero's journey, which according to Joseph Campbell is one of the most pervasive monomyths of Western culture. In terms of the Euro-American geocultural imaginary about the South Pole, Poe's short story "Ms. Found in a Bottle" (1833) and his only novel. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), are situated intertextually between Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) and preview Joseph Conrad's modern horror story of colonialism. Heart of Darkness (1902). However, as works of Dark Romanticism, Poe's narratives also deconstruct and interrupt the monomyth of the hero's journey and the privilege of white masculinity.
Keywords: Poe, Antarctica, Pym, Otherness.
Introduction
What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.
- Henry D. Thoreau (214)
Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the...