Poe and Carroll: Contrasting Relationships with Women and Girls

Introduction: Two Writers, Two Relationships

Edgar Allan Poe and Lewis Carroll are two writers whose relationships with women, and especially with young girls, have been questioned. The main issue with Poe is his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia. For Carroll, the issue is the strong relationships he had with young girls. For both writers, suggestions have been made that their relationships with young women are perverse. To consider these claims it is necessary to look at the types of relationships each writer had with young women and the reasoning behind those relationships. A consideration of this evidence will show that Edgar Allan Poe does have unhealthy relationships with women, while Lewis Carroll has healthy ones.

Edgar Allan Poe has a history of choosing inappropriate relationships. This began when Poe was attending private school, when he fell in love with a friend's mother. Poe described this love in "To Helen," a poem he wrote in 1831:

Helen, thy beauty is to me / Like those Nicean barks of yore, ... On desperate seas long wont to roam, / Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face.^[1]

Edgar Allan Poe's Relationships with Women

The poem shows Poe's longing for Helen while also suggesting that he knows there will never be a relationship. It seems more as though he admires her beauty and loves her, but sees her as someone forever out of reach. His first relationship with someone younger began in 1824, when he fell for Elmira Royston, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a neighbor.^[2] Poe became secretly engaged to Elmira, but the letters he wrote to her from college were intercepted by her father. When Poe finished university in 1826, he returned home to find that Elmira was engaged to someone else.

Both of these relationships suggest that Poe had significant issues in regard to women. The main thing they share in common is that they are both inappropriate. Poe falling in love with an older woman, Helen, demonstrates that his interest was not exclusively directed toward the young. More importantly, he falls in love with an older woman when he himself is young, and then with a younger woman when he is older. Viewed this way, it seems that Poe had a desire to choose partners who were inappropriate and unacceptable by society's standards. This tendency to stand apart from others is also a major part of Poe's character. He expresses it in his poem "Alone":

From childhood's hour I have not been / As others were—I have not seen / As others saw—I could not bring / My passions from a common spring. / From the same source I have not taken / My Sorrow; I could not awaken / My heart to joy at the same tone; / And all I lov'd, I lov'd alone.^[3]

These words suggest that something in Poe's character has a strong tendency to reject the norm and to choose actions that keep him separated from others. His choices in relationships seem designed to ensure that he does love alone, with those choices being difficult for society to accept.

This leads to a consideration of Poe's most inappropriate relationship: his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia. Poe went to live with his Aunt Maria Poe Clemm and his cousin Virginia in 1831, at which time Virginia was seven years old. In 1849, Poe wrote the poem "To My Mother," referring to his aunt Maria Clemm as more of a mother to him than his birth mother. While the poem initially seems like a simple expression of love for Maria Clemm, his stated reasons for loving her take a disturbing turn:

Poe's Marriage to Virginia and Its Psychological Roots

My mother—my own mother, who died early, / Was but the mother of myself; but you / Are mother to the one I loved so dearly, / And thus are dearer than the mother I knew / By that infinity with which my wife / Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.^[4]

In this poem, Poe is clearly stating that he loves Maria Clemm as his mother more than his real mother because she is the mother of the woman he loves. This seems to suggest that Poe accepts being related to Virginia and sees nothing wrong with it. It is initially disturbing to think that Poe wanted to marry his thirteen-year-old cousin. However, there is also the possibility that Poe genuinely loved her and that his decision to marry her was a painful struggle. Reading this poem, it appears that Poe is actually drawn to the fact that she is related to him—a strong suggestion that he has significant issues relating to women and an unhealthy view of relationships.

These unhealthy views can be partly understood by examining Poe's childhood. Poe was born to Edgar Poe and Elizabeth Arnold in 1809.^[5] In 1810, when Poe was just one year old, his father abandoned the family. When Poe was three, his mother died, leaving him an orphan. He was then fostered by John Allan. The first consequence of these events is that Poe never had a real mother figure. This may explain why he fell for his friend's mother while at school—his desire for an older woman representing an attempt to obtain a mother figure. Being orphaned by the age of three and growing up in a family that was not his own may also explain why he does not appear to have had a clear understanding of family, or of the role one should play within it.

It is notable that in marrying Virginia—his cousin—Poe does not seem to register anything wrong with his actions. The poem "To My Mother" does not suggest that Poe feels any shame. This can be understood by considering how he was raised in a family that was not biologically his own, which may explain why Poe never made a clear distinction between a woman who is family and a woman who is not. For Poe, Virginia may simply have been a woman he loved, with no awareness that relationships within families are inappropriate.

It is also notable that when Poe went to live with Maria Clemm and Virginia, he did so because his adoptive father John Allan had rejected him—the only real family Poe had ever known. With that rejection from his father figure, it can be understood that Poe longed desperately for family. This explains why he wanted so much to be part of the Clemm family. The poem "To My Mother" begins with these lines:

Because I feel that, in the heavens above, / The angels, whispering to one another, / Can find, among their burning terms of love, / None so devotional as that of "Mother,"^[6]

These lines focus on how Poe sees a mother as the most devoted of all people. Devotion, it seems, is precisely what Poe had lacked throughout his life. His own parents were not devoted to him, and his father figure eventually rejected him as well. The suggestion is that this left Poe desperately seeking the kind of devotion that family offers. His decision to marry Virginia can then be understood as an attempt to become part of the Clemm family and finally belong somewhere. Overall, Poe's unhealthy relationships with women can be seen as a product of his troubled childhood.

Lewis Carroll's Relationships with Children

In his short story "The Black Cat," Poe writes: "perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart...have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?"^[9] This statement can be read as representing Poe's own feelings about being perverse. The mention of violating Law has strong links to Poe's violation of normal social standards—most notably his marriage to his cousin. Poe's short stories also tend to feature psychologically disturbed male characters whose feelings of anger are often directed at female characters, which is further suggestive of the issues Poe had toward women. As revealed by his life, his relationships, and his childhood, the disturbed attitudes toward women that appear in his horror fiction are likely rooted in his own personal difficulties. Poe can ultimately be viewed as a troubled man whose childhood caused him to develop significant problems in his view of women and relationships, resulting most notably in his marriage to Virginia.

Having considered Poe in detail, it is now necessary to turn to the life, relationships, and writings of Lewis Carroll. The thing that Carroll and Poe have in common is that they both developed strong relationships with children. The major difference lies in the reasons for those relationships and their nature. As will be seen, Carroll's focus on children was a healthy one.

Carroll is well known for his strong connection to children. One source describes him as "diffident and shy," noting that he was "best able to communicate with children."^[10] His ability to communicate with children is probably best seen in the success of his two books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. As one text describes, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was "originally written to amuse one of his numerous small girl friends, the daughter of the Dean of [University]."^[11]

Statements such as these, combined with the knowledge that Carroll did tend to befriend young girls, immediately raise questions about the nature of his interest. There is a temptation to assume that this interest may have been sexual. However, there is little evidence to support that view, and considerably more to support the view that Carroll simply enjoyed the minds of the young and longed for the simplicities of childhood himself.

Conclusion: Healthy and Unhealthy Relationships Compared

Now that Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe have been considered in detail, it is clear that their relationships with children are completely different. For Poe, his relationship with the young Virginia is a result of his own issues with women and relationships, representing a perverse attachment rooted in a difficult childhood marked by abandonment, loss, and the absence of stable family bonds. In contrast, Carroll's relationships with children are healthy ones, characterized by genuine affection, a childlike imaginative sensibility, and a fatherly care that has no credible sexual dimension. Overall, this comparison shows that close relationships between adults and children can take two very different forms. For Poe, that relationship was an unhealthy one; for Carroll, it was a healthy one.