“The Raven” and the Antebellum Culture of Bereavement

Abstract Despite the worldwide familiarity of “The Raven,” few readers are aware of the antebellum era’s elaborate cultural prescriptions for mourning that shape the poem and its thematic significance. For a missing perspective on Poe’s poem concerns the speaker’s representative behavior as genteel middle-class mourner, with the mysterious bird taking on the role of consolatory visitor, but a visitor who implicitly mocks the prescribed role of spiritual sympathizer by suggesting demonic doubts about the era’s evangelical hope of reunion in the afterlife with the beloved. Such a thematic emphasis is enhanced by the intertextual relationship of “The Raven” with relevant passages in the Bible as well as poems by Elizabeth Barrett, Gottfried August Bürger, and Felicia Hemans. While the scene enacted in “The Raven” anticipates the mourning that Poe would undergo following the death of his twenty-four-year-old wife Virginia in January 1847, it also illustrates the desperate hope for spiritual reunion notably seen in the bereavement behavior of Rufus W. Griswold, Poe’s notorious literary executor, whose young wife died in November 1842.