Abstract
Poe’s well-known fictional comments seem to mirror the events and obsessions of his own life: notoriously psychoanalyzed by Marie Bonaparte, student of Freud, in her critical biography, Poe married or became amorously (not necessarily sexually) involved with consumptive women who suffered the fate and disease of his own beautiful but terminally ill mother. Bonaparte reads Poe as an individual psychoanalytic case study, but she ignores the fact that Poe’s age took its cue from the Romantics and their culture in attributing pleasure to certain types of disease. This essay discusses the idea that illness—an often painful phenomenon and negatively construed experience—can paradoxically give pleasure to the beholder and even to the sufferer.
The beautiful Lady Mary! How could she die?-and of consumption! But it is a path I have prayed to follow. I would wish all I love to perish of that gentle disease. How glorious! To depart in the hey-day of the young blood-the heart all passion-the imagination all fire-amid the remembrances of happier days-in the fall of the year-and so be buried up forever in the gorgeous autumnal leaves!
—Edgar Allan Poe, “Metzengerstein” 20
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© 2010 Thomas H. Schmid and Michelle Faubert
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Lawlor, C. (2010). “It is a Path I have Prayed to Follow”: The Paradoxical Pleasures of Romantic Disease. In: Schmid, T.H., Faubert, M. (eds) Romanticism and Pleasure. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117471_6
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