Edgar Allan Poe understood the potential of ventriloquism to scare us silly.
That is, he grasped how noises and voices hidden from view, somehow amplified and unnerving in a darkened theater, could be reproduced in print to similar effect. Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, professor of English and Poe scholar, writes about it in her latest award-winning essay, “Echoes of Ventriloquism in Poe’s Tales.” Traces of ventriloquism, an auditory illusion achieved by throwing the voice without moving the lips, appear in several of his most famous works, including “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
In Poe’s hands, ventriloquism’s tactics become literary devices such as mimicry, repetition and misdirection. Together, they work on the imagination, heightening feelings and emotions such as apprehension, confusion and fear, Sweeney says.
“I am very interested in the idea that, somehow, a human being would prefer to believe that an inanimate object or invisible being is speaking, rather than someone standing right next to them but just not moving their lips."
Apparently, so was Poe.
Ventriloquism was extremely popular in the 1830s and 1840s, the decades Poe published. In the way virtual reality makes gaming a wholly immersive experience, ventriloquism addressed 19th-century audiences’ desire for an experience that rendered them confused, scared and thrilled, Sweeney says.
She relates her work on ventriloquism's influence to scholarship about literature’s effect on the body — in the same way that gothic and romantic literature have been studied for how they affect the human heart rate, for example.
“I’m really fascinated, as I think any reader would be, to know how we can be so powerfully affected by things that we know aren’t true,” Sweeney says. “We identify with characters, for instance. We know they’re made up and yet they feel very, very real.”
And they linger.
“Even when I’m not reading the story, I’m still thinking about the characters, still imagining them. I think there’s something profoundly curious about how the human imagination works that Poe is able to tap into,” Sweeney says.
There’s something about Poe
Though not swoon-inducing like Byron or irresistibly aloof in the way of Hawthorne, no one suits the suffering artist stereotype better than Poe. The son of a Boston actress and an absent father, Poe’s troubles started early. He was orphaned young. He was court-martialed at West Point — despite distinguishing himself as an excellent code breaker and cryptographer, according to the school’s website. He worked as a writer, editor and critic, but lived in poverty. Evidence suggests that Poe struggled at times with alcoholism and also with depression. His marriage to his cousin Virginia Clemm in 1836 lasted only 11 years before she died of tuberculosis. Poe died in a Baltimore hospital in 1849, two years after Clemm and just four years after achieving celebrity status with the publication of “The Raven.”
Like his contemporary and fellow writer of dark romanticism, Herman Melville, Poe attained enormous critical acclaim and international fame only posthumously. Now regarded by many scholars, Sweeney among them, as the most famous and popular American writer worldwide, Poe is credited with the invention of detective fiction as well as lauded for his significant contributions to the mystery, horror, science fiction and thriller genres. He remains a pop culture icon and reliable box office bet; in recent years, the streaming service Netflix released film adaptations of “The Pale Blue Eye” (2022) and “The Fall of the House of Usher” (2023).
“None of the other writers that I work on had a ‘Simpsons’ episode devoted to one of their works or a football team named in their honor,” Sweeney notes.
Sweeney’s contributions to Poe scholarship have earned her multiple awards and accolades. She is the only scholar to have twice won the Poe Studies Association’s James W. Gargano Award; “Echoes of Ventriloquism” took the prize in 2021. She was also named as an Honorary Member, the PSA's highest honor.
In fall 2024, the “Edgar Allan Poe Review” will publish her essay “Heads or Tales: The Fate of Poe’s Female Storytellers” and the journal “Poe Studies” plans to publish "Photography, Scientific Discovery, and Narrative Invention in Poe’s 'Gold-Bug' and Beyond" in fall 2025.
Much of Sweeney’s research for the ventriloquism essay was done at Worcester’s American Antiquarian Society, where she read early 19th-century guidebooks on ventriloquism. She is writing a sequel to the ventriloquism essay, which will focus on disembodied animal voices in Poe's works, which she plans to present at a conference in Paris in the summer of 2025. A book is also in the works.
There seems no end to the enigma that is Edgar Allan Poe, Sweeney says. Not that she’s complaining.
“He was a pioneer in so many genres,” she says. “His works, in a sense, are bottomless in terms of their levels of ambiguity and authorial intention. He’s always ahead of me.”
