Paste your essay in herTo separate Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado from its historical context would be to utterly deny the main foundations of the story. As we know from the works of Marxist readers and critics, it is impossible for literary works to stand alone, completely immune to the author’s past or present societal influences. Any work of fiction, obviously including Poe’s short stories, is never autonomous. An author’s work is always dependent on the historical moment from which it emerged (Montag, 469). In the case of The Cask of Amontillado, we can divine from the text not one or two but several dependencies upon Poe’s historical moment. Broadly, Poe clearly writes his story, perhaps even unconsciously, based on the economic class struggles subsisting before and during his lifetime. Inspiration for Poe’s story derived from history could also include rivalries with other authors, the Washington movement, and society’s general fear of live burial at the time. While these aspects of history are significant to the story and thus to a Marxist reading of it, I will primarily focus on analyzing economic class struggle as it works in the piece, since it is the most central theme and basis of the literature (as well as being, in Marx and Engel’s minds, the most important informant of any literary work).
Marxist theory is dependent on Marx and Engel’s idea that “Economics… provides the ‘base’ or ‘infrastructure’ of society, but from that base emerges a ‘superstructure’ consisting of law, politics, philosophy, religion, and art” in addition to the “materialist insight” that “consciousness… is not the source of social forms and economic conditions. It is, rather, their most important product”. In the following essay, I will apply these particular ideals of Marxist criticism to interpret the text, focusing specifically on how the dynamics of social and monetary classes of the time recur within the story, providing, as a Marxist critic would argue, a significant base upon which The Cask is built, without which the story would exist as it does. I intend to explicitly outline how these principles are proven in the text of The Cask of Amontillado by showing how economic and social situations of Poe’s time are represented in the story, once again demonstrating that these same situations provided the central foundation of the story, thus rendering it a “product” of the economic and social norms of its time.
But before I claim that Poe’s story is indeed exemplary of class struggle and is therefore evidence of the above theories, perhaps it would be beneficial to first prove to the reader how Poe sensed and was affected in his life by tension between classes, and secondly to explain precisely how this affectation is manifested in the story, how the two main men are from separate spheres, and how the strife between them arises at least in part from their difference in class.
Poe at birth was a man of no great consequence or family, no high-born ancestry to brag of. He achieved importance in his studies at the university of Virginia, being “in good standing with the faculty and obtained distinction at the final examination in Latin and French, then the highest honors to be obtained” (Pruette 374). Poe, once again lacking any noble blood, would have inevitably been set apart from his “foster brothers”, his peers in school. Lorine Pruette tells us in her essay “A Psycho-Analytical Study of Edgar Allan Poe” that “As [Poe] grew older he came to realize the anomalous position which he occupied in the Allan household and among the arrogant, aristocratic sons of Richmond. His supremacy in intellectual training and his easy physical prowess made him the most illustrious school boy in Richmond, but he was not allowed to derive pleasure from this high eminence. His playmates, too well trained in genealogy and taught an extravagant pride of ancestry, did not let him forget that his mother was an actress and that the privileges he enjoyed and they envied were owed to the beneficence of a Scotch merchant” (Pruette 373-374). Thus Poe was exposed early in his life to the struggle between people of the superior, high-born class, subject to the bullying and vengeant nature of the class above him, angry at his impudence in attempting to educate himself and achieve status equal to or above their own. Whether Poe was conscious of it or not, his personal experiences with economic/social class and the general strife between the two at the time evidently inform much of the plot of The Cask of Amontillado, seeing as we will how plainly representative Fortunato and Montresor are of the bourgeois and the aristocracy, respectively, and how distinctly Poe implies the struggle between them within his lines.
The name Fortunato in itself is the largest insinuation of the presence and importance of class. Translated from Italian, the name means “the fortunate one”. The name suggests that, much like Poe himself, Fortunato is part of the rising class of the wealthy, perhaps not born into wealth but acquiring importance and respect in society, importance and respect that had formerly been paid solely to aristocrats, threatening the superiority of now hostile nobility. Montresor on the other hand is a member of the declining aristocracy. This we can see very clearly particularly in the descriptions of the house in which Montresor resides and commits his murder. The family home includes “vaults”, “catacombs”, “attendants”, a “long and winding staircase” and is a “palazzo”; all of these attributes speak of grandeur and title, along with an archaism custom and characteristic of specifically aristocratic families and their homes, as Poe’s readers would very quickly understand. Additionally demonstrating Montresor’s lineage is his claim that “The Montresors… were a great and numerous family”, the most important word of course being “great”, directly claiming the high status or aristocracy the family held.
While instances exemplifying this real-world class struggle recur time and again within the lines, perhaps the most exemplary is the section in which Montresor describes his family crest (the fact that Montresor has a family crest in the first place serves to prove even further his symbolic nature, representing the aristocratic class in Poe’s day). Montresor describes his family arms as “A huge human foot d’or, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel”, with a motto stating “Nemo me impune lacessit”, or “No one provokes me without impunity”. In a broad sense we can very easily see the allegory of class struggle. Evidence from the text has shown us that each man is from a different class, each representative of an opposing side in economic and social class struggle. The crest serves to intimate to the reader the relations between these classes in a real-world context, and to therefore explain the motivation behind Montresor’s actions, or the actions of jealous real-life aristocracy. The foot clearly represents Montresor, and further nobility, as it stomps down the biting snake, allegorical to Fortunato and the bourgeoisie and the “biting” insults of their power grab from aristocracy. Additionally very ***resonant of the increasingly important “lower classes” (bourgeois) and the decreasingly important “higher classes” (aristocracy) is Montresor’s comment to Fortunato, “You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was. You are a man to be missed”. In these lines Montresor directly calls attention to the fact that as Fortunato has risen, Montresor has fallen. Or, in historical context, that as the bourgeois’s consequence has risen, so the aristocracy’s consequence has fallen. The lamentful, resentful, and sardonic tone of Montresor’s words further exemplify how this changing dynamic of class precipitates strife; his very sarcastic attempt at preserving his companion’s health speaks volumes to the bitterness and irritation Montresor and the aristocracy feel to the “insult” of the ascending significance of Fortunato and the bourgeoisie in society and economics.
I have thus argued that the “insult” added to “injuries” was that the wealth of Fortunato and his kinsmen the bourgeois began to threaten the status of the aristocrats, the superior class, the clique of elders who had long held their standing as top tier and were not prepared to let it go easily. Or as Jay Massiet aptly states in his piece “Marxist Criticism and Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’”, “Poe uses the vengeful and retaliatory nature of Montresor as a symbol of a real world upper-class that will fight in order to keep the power and status in which they are accustomed from slipping into the hands of the rising middle-class that will cause the upper-class’s inevitable downfall”. Poe’s experience with aristocratic (Montresor) attempts to crush the snake-like bourgeois (Fortunato) underfoot then is clearly replicated within the lines of the story, proving therefore the key theory associated with Marxist theory that economics creates social class and the conflict within them, and these conflicts in turn inform and provide bases for the “superstructure”, the arts of the world, Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.
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