SOURCE: “Poe's Re-Vision: The Recovery of the Second Story,” in American Literature, Vol. 59, No. 1, March, 1987, pp. 1-19.

In the following essay, Jordan focuses on Poe's treatment of crimes against women, comparing his writing to that of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Jordan proposes that Poe's women-centered tales allow him to explore issues that go beyond the imaginative limits of male-authored fiction, and that “The Fall of the House of Usher” marks the beginning of this style of storytelling for Poe.

I

While the longstanding debates over Hawthorne's treatment of women characters have been reinvigorated and refined by feminist critics in the last fifteen years or so, feminist criticism has as yet had little to say about Poe's women-centered fictions.¹ This lack of attention might have surprised—or more probably, annoyed—the egotistical Poe, since he himself suggested the terms by which his treatment of women characters might be compared with Hawthorne's...