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Despite his otherwise unconventional ways, in his personal life Edgar Allan Poe held the most conventional early nineteenth-century views about the subordinate place of woman in man's world. As Ernest Marchand concludes, "in all matters touching women, sex, marriage, 'morals,' no more conventional-minded man than Poe ever lived" (35). Poe makes explicit his assumptions about women's subservience in his remarks about their proper education:
The business of female education with us, is not to qualify a woman to be head of a literary coterie, nor to figure in the journal of a traveling coxcomb. We prepare her, as a wife, to make the home of a good, and wise, and great man, the happiest place to him on earth. We prepare her, as a mother, to form her son to walk in his father's steps, and in turn, to take his place among the good and wise and great .... Her praise is found in the happiness of her husband, and in the virtues and honors of her son. Her name is too sacred to be profaned by public breath. She is only seen by that dim doubtful light, which, like "the majesty of darkness," so much enhances true dignity. (Complete Works 8:14-15)
In his writings as critic and journalist, Poe assails powerfully intellectual women who esteem the "head" and ignore his orthodox strictures: according to Burton R. Pollin, Poe routinely mocks the "successful, professional woman," and thus derides Margaret Fuller, for example, as "absurd," a victim of a "fine phrenzy" (49-50). Ashby Bland Crowder observes in "Poe's Criticism of Women Writers" that Poe considered female writers in America "at best a mediocre lot" (111) and quotes his complaint that "'literary women ... are a heartless, unnatural, venomous, dishonorable set, with no guiding principle but inordinate self-esteem'" (118 n26). In his own poetry and fiction, as readers have long noted, Poe often depicts the suppression or annihilation of women who because of overpowering beauty, intellect, or wealth depart from the conventional and threaten man's superior position. As Eliza Richards succinctly puts it, "Poe's male characters enact violent revenge on women because of their enthralling power" (10). Reviling signs of her autonomy, Poe understands woman as essentially subordinate to man, in Margaret Fuller's proto-Sartrean terms, "for...