30 pages • 1 hour read
Edgar Allan PoeThe Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1845A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Sleep
The motif of sleep is present in a literal sense and a figurative sense throughout the story, feeding into the Liminality of Death and helping the reader to explore the concept of the body versus the mind. The practice of mesmerism aims to put its subject into a trance, or a sleep-like state, and the Narrator achieves this with Valdemar, causing him to slumber undisturbed for seven months. Much of the story’s tension derives from the Narrator’s attempts to discern if, and when, Valdemar enters into the mesmeric trance, and, once he is satisfied that his experiment has indeed been successful, to discern whether Valdemar is still alive (and only sleeping), or dead.
Sleep is a sort of hazy midway point between a more active, living status, and totally passive death; Valdemar’s hovering in a state of strange sleep or trance makes his condition always mysterious, a source of intrigue exploited by Poe. The Narrator constantly asks Valdemar if he is “sleeping,” and readers are left in anticipation as to if and when he will awaken. Notably, Valdemar is also stretched out on his bed during almost the entirety of the story, his personal bed becoming his literal death bed by its end. The site of sleep, then, is the geographical focal point of the story. Sleep is also a state in which we, even under totally natural circumstances, experience a kind of disjunction between our mind and our body. When we dream, our mind seems to wander away from our physical body, which becomes passive while we are asleep; another way of thinking of this—and which aligns with Poe’s interest in sleep and trances—is that our mind is trapped within a body that it cannot control while we are asleep. Valdemar’s condition finds his body immobilized but his mind apparently, at least partly, alert and aware, as he speaks to the Narrator at several points. His final entreaty—to either put him to sleep or awaken him—expresses Valdemar’s despair at finding himself trapped within this artificial mesmeric slumber.
Eyes
Poe’s emphasis on eyes manifests itself in two different ways in this story. Firstly, the movements and appearance of Valdemar’s eyes are commonly referenced by the Narrator as a gauge by which he tries to determine whether Valdemar has been successfully mesmerized, serving as a measurement of sleep, or death. When entering the trance state, the Narrator says that Valdemar’s eyes roll up into his head, in an unnatural and disturbing fashion. He can only see the whites of Valdemar’s eyes until he closes them. Much as one closes the eyes of a corpse, the Narrator seeks to physically block Valdemar’s because they are a clear sign of the strangeness of his condition and bring discomfort to viewers. Nevertheless, Poe subjects us—his readers—to extremely detailed descriptions of Valdemar’s eyes, telling us, for example, when Valdemar is finally being brought out of the trance seven years after he was put into it, his eyes roll back down and release a stinking, rancid ooze of “ichor.” In fact, this highly descriptive, visceral approach to Poe’s writing of the story is employed much more generally by the Narrator—describing Valdemar’s lips, tongue, limbs, etc., all in vivid detail—to create a feeling of immediacy (and, therefore, of factuality) in the readers, to make us feel as if we were there, seeing the improbable sights and events he is recounting. Poe, as the author, expands the motif of eyes to a broader theme of vision through these descriptions, which seek to make us see clearly by creating images in our mind’s eye.
Mouth/Tongue
The other main part of the body upon which Poe focuses in his descriptions is Valdemar’s mouth and, especially, his tongue. In the same way that eyes are used to measure liminality, these vivid descriptions serve the dual purpose of creating an effect of disgust in the reader of the story and serving as concrete observations of the Narrator and other medical professionals. The Narrator tells us that Valdemar’s lips writhe back, his mouth opens widely and remains open, while the “swollen and blackened” (101) tongue squirms inside and speaks the unearthly voice that tells them Valdemar is caught between life and death. As the organ and source of speech, the mouth naturally assumes great importance in this story because it is the place from which the primary supernatural element (Valdemar’s speaking after his death) enters the story. Poe’s decision to create an uncanny setting—a mouth that does not move, but a tongue that does—for the unearthly speech helps to make the development even more horrific for the reader and visually reinforce the strangeness of the event.
Worms
Worm-like imagery is present during Valdemar’s decay, such as his “Swollen and blackened tongue” (101), his voice “from some deep cavern within the earth,” (101) and “the rotting body of “nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity” (103). This imagery recalls Poe’s poem “The Conqueror Worm” (which appeared in his short story “Ligeia” and is available online from the Poetry Foundation), in particular the following stanza:
But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
Aside from the parallels of the “writhing,” “crawling” forms featured in both pieces, the short story is also strongly thematically linked to this poem; “The Conqueror Worm” referenced in its title is Death itself, which ultimately, inevitably “conquers” Man, and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is a story that concerns itself primarily with the death of its title character. In the end of the story, once the mesmeric trance has come to an end, physical death comes swiftly to Valdemar. Worms are often symbolically associated with death because of their part in the process of decomposition; appropriately, in this story, Valdemar’s death is marked by an unnatural, accelerated process of decomposition. Additionally, the unnatural voice he speaks in after he has died is described as sounding like it emanates from a setting suitable for a subterranean creature and evoking the burial of dead bodies.
Related Titles
By Edgar Allan Poe
