The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

(1845)

In this disturbing and gruesome tale, Poe casts his two favorite protagonists, death and human will, against each other in a struggle for supremacy. Poe’s psychological vehicle takes the form of an experiment in mesmerism, a technique in hypnosis named after the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1733–1815). It was purported to be a healing technique based on the idea of animal magnetism. Part of Mesmer’s theory was that all animated bodies including those of humans were affected by a magnetic force that also mutually influenced the celestial bodies and Earth. That Mesmer’s treatments ever really helped anyone remains debatable. Poe seems to take his cue about treating M. Valdemar’s impending death as just another experiment susceptible “to the magnetic influence” from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), an archetype of a scientist’s overweening pride in first creating, and then unsympathetically denying, a creature fashioned from the dead by the scientist’s own hands. Here the scientist’s obsessive desire to see “death... arrested by the mesmeric process” leads to a sickening recognition that he has manipulated forces beyond his power to control.

Poe’s “The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar” is another rare instance in which we can identify a distinctly American sense of place: M. Valdemar “has resided principally at Harlem, N.Y., since the year 1839.” Valdemar, like the protagonist of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Roderick Usher, is a distinctly neurasthenic, or nervous, type, a disposition that “rendered him a good subject for mesmeric experiment.” Like Hawthorne, in his tale “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” and Goethe, in his ballad “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, ” Poe always presents a moral price to be paid for vain efforts to penetrate the secrets of nature. Valdemar proves a willing subject, permitting the narrator to utilize Valdemar’s approaching death, his phthisis (wasting away), as a means to subdue “the encroachments of death” within 24 hours of Valdemar’s demise. We discover that the narrator had kept Valdemar in a state of “arrested mortality” for seven months prior to the monstrous dissolution he goes on to describe.

Poe’s tale is rife with elements of black magic, such as the symbolic reference to midnight and the fact that the narrator made his mesmeric passes by “directing my gaze entirely into the right eye of the sufferer.” Optical penetration is a recurrent motif in Poe, and its equally grim effects drive the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” to distraction. After he had been “subdued, ” it would seem that M. Valdemar died: “A very deep sigh escaped the bosom of the dying man.... The extremities were of an icy coldness.” The narrator calls Valdemar a “sleepwaker” and continues, “the manipulation vigorously, and with the fullest exertion of the will, until I had completely stiffened the limbs of the slumberer.” By three o’clock in the morning, we find Valdemar’s “limbs were as rigid and cold as marble.” Has the scientist converted Valdemar into a work of art? If the narrator is Pygmalion, Valdemar is an unlikely Galatea: His skin “generally assumed a cadaverous hue... the circular spots... put me in mind of nothing so much as the extinguishing of a candle by a puff of breath.” The abundance of un prefixes, together with the analogy of the candle, consign the narrator’s “scientific” ambitions to the darker purposes of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who in his despair at a wasted life utters, “Out, out, brief candle! ”. What appeared at first an admirable attempt to defy death becomes a horrid commentary (as in Macbeth) on proud and morbid ambition, a defiance of the natural order of the universe. The various images of marbled “solidity” and aesthetic rigor into which the scientist cast Valdemar will eventually yield to a primordial ooze, an “out-fl owing of a yellowish ichor” that parodies the blood of the gods and, finally, “a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity.”

The nature of the human will fascinated romantic, especially German, philosophical speculation, as witnessed by the writings of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Could humanity resist death purely by exertion of will? We have the question put to us again in “Ligeia, ” but here Poe sees only hubris in the undertaking to retard or to neutralize physical death by mental applications. When Valdemar’s “tongue quivered, ” and the terrible words “dead! dead! ” absolutely burst from “the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, ” we wonder into what kind of moral universe the scientist has fallen. We recall Hamlet’s words, “For Murder, though it hath no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ” (Hamlet).