Franklin and Poe: The Self Made and Unmade
‘I celebrate myself, and sing myself’ (Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’).
Explore the representation of the self in American literature.
America’s Puritan settlers ‘created a legacy of self-scrutiny,’[1] that was inherited and adapted by generations of writers to come. This legacy ‘shaped’ both ‘that famous gospel of the American Self, the autobiography of… Benjamin Franklin,’[2] and the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Franklin depicts the self as fundamentally flawed, but also capable of immense positive change. Likewise, Poe’s self is flawed, though here the change is chillingly negative. In this essay, I will analyse the representation of the self in their work from a Freudian perspective[3].
The autobiography is a ‘form… in which… individuals constitute themselves in writing,’[4] and Franklin’s is the archetype of this form. ‘A tale of adventures tending ever upward,’[5] it constructs the self as a journey towards unattainable actualization in which the ego must logically ‘conquer’[6] the ‘perpetual Temptations’[7] of the id, along with the superego’s notions of morality (‘Custom’[8]), in order to make decisions that lead to self-growth[9].
Franklin ‘struggle[s] between the ‘reality principle’ and the ‘pleasure principle’, postponing pleasure and accepting unpleasure[10] to facilitate self-growth. He travels from Boston to Philadelphia by boat,[11] and we see the obstacles that impede his growth, the unpleasure of adherence to the reality principle. He writes that ‘the Spray beating over the Head of our Boat, leak'd thro' to us, so that we were very soon almost as wet as’[12] a Dutchman that had fallen into the water. Consequently, he becomes ‘very feverish,’[13] but this obstacle is overcome by the ego, which ‘represents… reason,’[14] as he recounts that ‘having read… that cold Water… was good for a Fever, I follow'd the Prescription… my Fever left me, and in the Morning… proceeded on my Journey...’[15] This episode marks the beginning of a structural pattern within in the text: he is faced with an obstacle, overcomes it through reason, then faces another obstacle. After the fever, Bradford’s son cannot hire him in Philadelphia, so he finds employment elsewhere[16], then he struggles to open a public library due to the jealousy of his neighbours, so he ‘put[s] himself as much as he could out of sight’ and his ‘Affair [goes] on more smoothly.’[17]
Later, he compares the failure of his order scheme to a man whom, upon discovering the difficulty of sharpening an axe, decides that he likes ‘a speckled Ax best.’[18] The speckles mirror the marks on the little book he uses to record his faults; both ‘flawed… surfaces’ are ‘evidence of the struggle against’[19] the pleasure principle. He teasingly suggests that the reason for his failure is that ‘a benevolent Man should allow a few Faults in himself,’ to avoid ‘being envied and hated,’ though he admits that this is only ‘something that Pretended to be Reason.’ [20] ‘This tentative concession to a hard truth’ is ‘a dramatic embodiment of the ethical dialogue’[21] within him, as the ego rationalizes the id’s desire to avoid unpleasure, emphasising the difficulty of suppressing these desires in the pursuit of growth.
On top of the id, Franklin grapples with the ‘religion, morality and… social sense’[22] encompassed by the superego, which gives ‘permanent expression to the influence of the parents.’[23] His ego is hard at work to dismiss some of the more dogmatic teachings of Presbyterianism which ‘Appear'd to [him] unintelligible,’ as ‘their Aim [seemed] to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good Citizens.’[24] However, at times, the superego intervenes productively, as we see when Franklin recounts that his ‘Father… frequently repeated a Proverb of Solomon, “Seest thou a Man diligent in his Calling, he shall stand before Kings…”’ and that he had since ‘stood before five’ kings.[25] Furthermore, on his arrival in Philadelphia, he is ‘led into the great Meeting House of the Quakers,’ where he falls ‘fast asleep,’ making it ‘the first House [he] was in or slept in,’ in the city[26]. Here, his journey is literally founded on faith, as religion becomes the starting point for self-growth.
Yet, in a manner typical of Franklin, this episode carries another significance. He falls asleep, indicating the casual nature of his faith, a tongue-in-cheek poke at what society might consider a flaw in his character. Franklin adopts this witty style throughout to convey the imperfection that is so fundamental to his conception of selfhood. Famously, he tells of how he ‘conciev'd the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection,’[27] through, among other things, imitating Jesus and Socrates[28]. Critics have extensively debated the significance of this assertion. Sayre suggests that ‘of the pretentiousness and vanity of such an aim, the young Franklin was sublimely unaware,’[29] while Anderson argues that it ‘expose[s], in the most challenging and painful way, the gap between intention and execution that is the mark of human life.’[30] My interpretation aligns with neither critic; Franklin is keenly aware of the vanity of his aim, and it is this vanity that reflects his imperfection. There is no pain in this realisation, it is a cheerful acceptance of the flaw that constitutes his selfhood.
Moreover, we have explored Franklin’s structure of progress and set-backs, but in his Virtues, a meta-structure emerges. He emphasises the importance of both ‘Sincerity’ and ‘Humility’[31], but in the process of examining these Virtues, he deconstructs them. Under Sincerity, he writes ‘Use no hurtful deceit’[32], but the list itself is loaded with deceitful irony, and we have seen how he demonstrates his pride. This meta-textuality continues as he relates his desire to ‘break a Habit... Of… Punning and Joking,’[33] whilst engaging in these things. Even in planning his Project of Moral Perfection, he undermines it with characteristic self-awareness, creating a meta-structure which blends set-back and progress, further illustrating the futility of the task he is in the process of outlining.
Yet, the primary message of the text is not lost in this acknowledgement of imperfection, as the themes of progress and self-growth ultimately dominate. Progress is primarily shown through juxtapositions between his ‘unlikely Beginning [and] the Figure’[34] of ludicrous success the reader is familiar with, which paint ‘the young Benjamin Franklin as a hero,’[35] of American self-making. His ‘famous arrival in Philadelphia,’[36] ‘with a Roll under each Arm’[37] ‘is recognized to have enormous emblematic value, and he does all he can to bring out the contrast,’[38] between the ‘penniless waif’[39] and the elder Franklin that lists his enormous achievements, including the ‘Aquisition of his Fortune’ and the ‘Confidence of his Country.’[40]
Like Franklin, Poe is a poet of change, of ‘mental adventure,’[41] though these adventures do not ‘[tend] ever upwards’[42], but downwards. ‘His poems... record adventures of the imagination, tales in which… his… narrators press… beyond the world of reason toward a dark melancholic beauty close to death.’[43] According to my interpretation, two of Poe’s poems form an extended narrative: the events of “Annabel Lee” take place in “The City in the Sea”. In the former, Poe explores the desires of the id that lead to this dark descent. The latter renders the setting of “Annabel”[44] (‘a kingdom by the sea’[45]), as the gothic space of the city becomes a mindscape of former’s speaker, crumbling into melancholy as a result of his desire.
The speaker in “Annabel” is a child fixated on a female other[46], connoting the pre-Oedipal self, which Freud tells us lacks a superego[47], making it, according to Eagleton ‘remorselessly pleasure-seeking’[48]. The super ego does appear in “Annabel”, its religious morality manifest in the ‘The angels in heaven above’ that kill her[49], though it is ineffective, as they cannot ‘dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabel Lee’[50]. In fact, the interference of the superego (Annabel’s death) facilitates an even greater transgression in the end. Furthermore, the superego is entirely absent in “City”, a place ‘Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best// Have gone to their eternal rest,’[51]; morality and notions of social hierarchy are non-existent.
Consequently, in the poems, the id emerges entirely unrestrained. It is first evoked in terms of its ‘radical otherness,’[52] in the uncanny that dominates “City”. The ‘strange city’[53] reflects the ‘extreme strangeness of the unconscious’[54]. ‘There shrines and palaces and towers... Resemble nothing that is ours’[55]; the ordinary is made ‘far from familiarity’[56] here. This is only emphasised by the bizarre AABBBCDCEE rhyme scheme employed in the first stanza, which seems relatively familiar at first, due to the simplicity of the rhymes, but on closer inspection is revealed to be uncannily irregular. The self, like the city, becomes ‘time-eaten’[57], worn down by the paradoxically familiar yet incomprehensible unconscious.
The id wholly overwhelms the ego, and the speaker enters a ‘condition of psychosis’[58] in which he is ‘'lived' by unknown and uncontrollable forces’[59]. These forces lead him to ‘[love] with a love that was more than love,’[60] with the repetition implying obsessive compulsion. Furthermore, Poe repeatedly rhymes ‘Lee’ and ‘me’[61], tying the pair together with an aural bond. In the final stanza, Poe foregrounds the site of the unconscious, as the speaker begins ‘For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams// Of the beautiful Annabel Lee’[62]. This evocation of dreams, when partnered with the darkness of the ‘moon’, foreshadows the revelation at the end of the stanza that the speaker’s obsession has led him to commit necrophilia, something even he seems to consider unspeakable, as he euphemises the act, saying: ‘I lie down by the side of my darling.’[63]
The poems, much like Franklin’s work, convey an overwhelming sense of progress or change, though this progress is not a growth, but a descent from innocence into depravity, it is a sense of ever-approaching melancholy and death, which looms heavily over us. ‘Lo! Death has reared himself a throne,’[64] begins “City”, as this embodied figure of Freud’s death drive[65] casts a structural shadow over the poem. Poe writes that ‘from a proud tower in the town// Death looks gigantically down,’[66] with the adverb ‘gigantically’ emphasising his oppressive presence. What’s more, ‘The melancholy waters lie,’[67] below the City, crushing it between these two dark forces.
The downfall of the self into melancholy and Death is foreshadowed throughout “City”, as its simple, unrelenting rhymes, and the rhythm created in the first stanza by the polysyndetic listing,[68] push us ever nearer to the conclusion, which is we know, from the allusion to ‘Babylon’[69] (a city destroyed in the Old Testament), to be devastating. In the final stanza, the sea stirs; melancholy becomes destructive to the self, as waves force the towers to sink beneath ‘dull tides’[70]. ‘Down, down that town’[71] goes, as the speaker’s sense of self is ultimately overcome by the looming desire for Death that weighs down on the city from above, plunging it into all-consuming depression. Again, in ‘Annabel’, this downfall is literalized. The speaker concludes:
—my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding sea.[72]
The phrase ‘my life’ is ambiguous. On the surface it refers to his body, but the speaker may also be equating ‘his life’ to ‘his bride’, reflecting the total consumption of the self by the object of its dark desire. The self, ‘tortured in this gloomy and unreal world, reaches its own collapse, caught up in the… claustrophobic environment of… darkness, feverish fancy and delusion.’[73] The feverish fancies of Eros, the sexual drive, and Thanatos, the death drive ‘are fused, blended, and alloyed with each other,’[74] in the speaker’s unthinkable act of necrophilia, which demonstrates the potential for tragic downfall when the self is consumed by the id.
In conclusion, the writers inherit the Puritan turn to self, as both examine the limits of self-making and unmaking. Franklin sees a masterful self/ego, capable of balancing the desires of the id and the morals of the superego through Enlightenment reasoning, in order to realize the heights of self-actualization, even in spite of human flaw. Poe, however, sees a self overcome by ghastly unconscious temptation, doomed, like the city, to collapse into inescapable ‘Hell.’[75]
Endnotes
[1] Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury, "The Puritan Legacy", in From Puritanism To Postmodernism A History Of American Literature (New York: Penguin Group, 1992), pp. 3-32. p. 18
[2] Ruland and Bradbury, “The Puritan Legacy”, p. 18
[3] Sigmund Freud, "The Ego And The Id", in On Metapsychology (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 351-388.
[4] G. Thomas Couser, "The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin: Self-Constitutional Conventions", in Altered Egos : Authority In American Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 28-51. p. 28
[5] Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury, "Awakening And Enlightenment", in From Puritanism To Postmodernism A History Of American Literature (New York: Penguin Group, 1992), pp. 33-60. p. 45
[6] Benjamin Franklin, "The Autobiography", in The Norton Anthology American Literature Beginnings To 1820, 9th edn (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), pp. 467-530. p. 522
[7]Franklin, p. 525
[8] Franklin, p. 522
[9] Elizabeth Wright, "Classical Psychoanalysis: Freud", in Psychoanalytical Criticism (Oxon: Routledge, 2002), pp. 9-36. [‘the 'id'… the instinctual drives that spring from the constitutional needs of the body’; ‘the ego… an agency which regulates and opposes the drives’; ‘the 'superego'… representative of parental and social influences upon the drives’] p. 11
[10] Wright, p. 10
[11] Franklin, p. 481 [‘Philadelphia was 100 Miles farther. I set out, however, in a Boat for Amboy’]
[12] Franklin, p. 482
[13] Franklin, p. 482
[14] Freud, p. 364
[15] Franklin, p. 482
[16] Franklin, p. 484-485 [‘he did not at present want a hand’ ‘there was another Printer in town lately set up, one Keimer’; ‘Keimer... Set me to work’]
[17] Franklin, p. 520 [‘the Impropriety of presenting oneself as the Proposer of any useful project that might be suppos'd to raise one's Reputation in the smallest degree above that of one's Neighbours’]
[18] Franklin, p. 528
[19] Anderson, p. 29
[20] Franklin, p. 528
[21] Anderson, p. 29
[22] Freud, p. 377
[23] Freud, p. 374
[24] Franklin, p. 521
[25] Franklin, p. 520-521
[26] Franklin, p. 484
[27] Franklin, p. 522
[28] Franklin, p. 523
[29] Sayre, p. 27
[30] Anderson, p. 35
[31] Franklin, p. 523
[32] Franklin, p. 523
[33] Franklin, p. 525
[34] Franklin, p. 483
[35] Sayre, p. 8
[36] Sayre, p. 19
[37] Franklin, p. 483
[38] Sayre, p. 19
[39] Sayre, p.19
[40] Franklin, p. 529
[41] Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury, "American Naissance", in From Puritanism To Postmodernism A History Of American Literature (New York: Penguin Group, 1992), pp. 104-139. p. 130
[42] Ruland and Bradbury, “Awakening and Enlightenment”, p. 45
[43] Ruland and Bradbury, “American Naissance”, p. 136
[44] From now on, the titles will be abbreviated to “Annabel” and “City”
[45] Edgar Allan Poe, "Annabel Lee", in The Norton Anthology American Literature 1820-1865, 9th edn (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2017), pp. 618-619. p. 618
[46] Poe, “Annabel Lee”, p. 618 [‘I was a child and she was a child’ ‘loved by me’]
[47] Freud, p. 373 [‘The broad general outcome of the sexual phase dominated by the Oedipus complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of… an ego ideal or super-ego’]
[48] Eagleton, p. 134
[49] Poe, “Annabel Lee”, p. 618 [‘the wind came... Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee']
[50] Poe, “Annabel Lee”, p. 618
[51] Edgar Allan Poe, "The City In The Sea", in The Norton Anthology American Literature 1820-1865, 9th edn (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), pp. 610-611. p. 610
[52] Eagleton, p. 136
[53] Poe, “The City in the Sea”, p. 610
[54] Eagleton, p. 136
[55] Poe, “The City in the Sea”, p. 610
[56] Ruland and Bradbury, “American Naissance”, p. 133
[57] Poe, “The City in the Sea” p. 610
[58] Eagleton, p. 138
[59] Freud, p. 362
[60] Poe, “Annabel Lee”, p. 618
[61] Poe, “Annabel Lee”, p. 618
[62] Poe, “Annabel Lee”, p. 619
[63] Poe, “Annabel Lee”, p. 619
[64] Poe, “The City in the Sea”, p.610
[65] Freud, p. 380 [‘A death instinct’]
[66] Poe, “The City in the Sea”, p. 611
[67] Poe, “The City in the Sea” p. 610
[68] Poe, “The City in the Sea”, p. 610 [‘the good and the bad and the worst and the best’; ‘shrines and palaces and towers’]
[69] Poe, “The City in the Sea”, p. 610
[70] Poe, “The City in the Sea”, p. 611
[71] Poe, “The City in the Sea”, p. 611
[72] Poe, “Annabel Lee”, p. 619
[73] Fred Botting, "Homely Gothic", in Gothic (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 104-127. p. 113
[74] Freud, p. 381
[75] Poe, “The City in the Sea”, p. 611
References
Anderson, Douglas, "The Art Of Virtue", in The Cambridge Companion To Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 24-36
Arch, Stephen Carl, "Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Then And Now", in The Cambridge Companion To Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 159-171
Botting, Fred, "Homely Gothic", in Gothic (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 104-127
Couser, G. Thomas, "The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin: Self-Constitutional Conventions", in Altered Egos : Authority In American Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 28-51
Eagleton, Terry, "Psychoanalysis", in Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 131-169 <https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lancaster/detail.action?docID=827065> [Accessed 6 March 2021]
Franklin, Benjamin, "The Autobiography", in The Norton Anthology American Literature Beginnings To 1820, 9th edn (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), pp. 467-530
Freud, Sigmund, "The Ego And The Id", in On Metapsychology (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 351-388
Poe, Edgar Allan, "Annabel Lee", in The Norton Anthology American Literature 1820-1865, 9th edn (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2017), pp. 618-619
Poe, Edgar Allan, "The City In The Sea", in The Norton Anthology American Literature 1820-1865, 9th edn (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), pp. 610-611
Ruland, Richard, and Malcolm Bradbury, "American Naissance", in From Puritanism To Postmodernism A History Of American Literature (New York: Penguin Group, 1992), pp. 104-139
Ruland, Richard, and Malcolm Bradbury, "Awakening And Enlightenment", in From Puritanism To Postmodernism A History Of American Literature (New York: Penguin Group, 1992), pp. 33-60
Ruland, Richard, and Malcolm Bradbury, "The Puritan Legacy", in From Puritanism To Postmodernism A History Of American Literature (New York: Penguin Group, 1992), pp. 3-32
Sayre, Robert F., "Benjamin Franklin And American Autobiography", in The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin Henry Adams Henry James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 3-43
Wright, Elizabeth, "Classical Psychoanalysis: Freud", in Psychoanalytical Criticism (Oxon: Routledge, 2002), pp. 9-36
