Freemasonry Through the Eyes of Edgar Allan Poe, Part 2

Once upon a time, there was a young British boy who sang in a boys’ choir.  Then, out of the blue, came a devastating blow: he was expelled from the group, discarded, excluded, not because of anything he did, but merely because puberty had caused his voice to change.

The experience turned him into a rebel.  "I wanted nothing to do with authority,” he said many years later.  “I just found it all superfluous and unfair.”

Things turned out all right for that boy, though.  He met another boy who loved music—a kid by the name of Mick Jagger—and they started making music together.  Today, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger are still making music as the “bad boys of rock ‘n’ roll” or, as they are more commonly known, the Rolling Stones.

Alas, exclusion doesn’t always end so well.

Poe Was Out There

Edgar Allan Poe thought a lot about exclusion and wrote about it again and again.

Outsiders, in fact, are all over his fiction and poetry.  As I mentioned last week, Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin, and his solitary artist, Roderick Usher, are both outré (to borrow a word from Poe himself), as are, in one way or another, characters in “Berenice,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Gold-Bug.”  Poe gave memorable expression to this situation of the outsider in his poem “Alone,” which begins:

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—

Now, Romantic poets such as Poe, Coleridge, and Dickinson sometimes embraced the situation of the outsider, so some of Poe’s characterizations amount to posturing.  If you put a red bow tie on them and forget about the live burials for a moment, you can almost imagine his narrators saying, “I’m a loner, Dottie, a rebel.”  Sometimes it’s cool to be different.

For Poe, however, exclusion went much deeper.  He didn’t have to imagine what it felt like to be an outsider.  He was one, almost from the day he was born.

Before he turned 3, he experienced the worst kind of rejection when his father abandoned the family. Not long after, his mother died.  For the rest of his life, he would be excluded from the safety and love of a natural family.

Even after a couple named John and Frances Allan took him in, he was still an outsider.  The Allans never formally adopted him, and Frances was a sickly woman, unable to give much care; she died when Poe was 20.  John sent his foster son to the University of Virginia, but Poe felt like an outsider there, too.  Amidst classmates from well-heeled families, he didn’t feel that he had enough money and got himself into trouble by gambling—generally not a sound approach to achieving financial independence, but Poe is not known for sound decision-making strategies. (I doubt he ever made a list of pros and cons—well, cons maybe, but never pros.)

Later, after getting himself expelled from West Point, he did something nearly as financially foolhardy as gambling: he became a poet.  His first three books of poetry did little for his financial situation or his status.

When he finally did make a modest name for himself in the world of letters—mainly as an editor, although he did win a few minor prizes for his fiction and achieved more than a little fame with “The Raven”—he still sometimes felt as if he was on the outside looking in—specifically at New England writers, such as Emerson and Longfellow, who constituted the in-crowd of American letters in 1830s and 1840s.  Emerson once dismissed Poe as “the jingle man.”

It got to Poe, all this exclusion.  As an editor and critic, he was belligerent, attacking other writers and even picking a fight with the beloved Longfellow, whom he accused, with the thinnest of evidence, of being a plagiarist.

Poe’s resentment and thirst for revenge also shows up in his fiction, not only in “The Cask of Amontillado,” as we saw last week, but also notably (and gruesomely) in a story called “Hop-Frog,” in which a dwarf gets back at the elites who excluded him by inflicting a horrifying form of vengeance.  (Read it if you dare.)

The life of Poe, in short, was a life lived on the margins.

Not So “Alone”

While Poe portrayed himself as “alone,” his experience of feeling excluded is all too common.

In fact, virtually all of us have been excluded at one time or another—probably many times, in fact. Maybe you were cut from the basketball team, or you failed the audition for the school play. Many people have endured unfathomable discrimination based on their race, religion, or other characteristics. Some have lost jobs or entire families.

We endure, most of us anyway, but these moments of feeling rejected and excluded can be devastating, just as they were for Keef and Poe. There’s actually an underlying physiological basis for this pain. In an article for a special Time publication, psychiatrist Steven Southwick is quoted as saying: “This notion that I'm going to be rejected or fail or won't be accepted by the group activates the same circuits as if I saw a wolf.” The author of the article, Mandy Oaklander, adds, “It's an evolutionary hanger-on from when our ancestors survived only in groups.” In other words, being ostracized activates a powerful response because it could be literally life-threatening.

The Consequences of Exclusion

Sometimes the response to rejection amounts to more than a work of horror fiction. Too often, it takes the form of real-life violence and other negative outcomes. "Developmental psychologists have amassed decades of research on peer rejection and its consequences,” explains psychologist Jennifer Watling Neal. “Those consequences include depression, loneliness, aggressive behaviors and academic problems.”

Most of us, of course, do not lash out at those who reject us. We might even accuse those who do as “overreacting.” I’m not a psychologist, but it seems to me that there’s a better way of characterizing their behavior. I suspect that their response to exclusion feels natural to them, after all. In any case, it clearly is not a constructive response; rather, it can be destructive to both the people they attack, through words or actions, and themselves. If the excluded parties can learn to control their emotional response, they and others often will be better off. But the rest of us play a role here, too.

The causes of destruction, as experts such as Professor Neal have shown, are complex, and there is not always a clear line connecting rejection and, say, school shootings or suicide. Still, I believe that all of us, when we are members of the “in-group,” can remove the impediments that cause others to feel excluded, simply by including those people—or, better yet, by never even setting up those obstacles in the first place. While most of us never intend to exclude the people around us, even unintentional actions can send messages that ultimately have negative consequences.

Membership may have its privileges, but it also has its costs.

In a speech he delivered to the National Educational Association in 1904, educator and author Booker T. Washington said, “There are two ways of exerting one’s strength; one in pushing down, and the other in pulling up.”

If excluding is a way to push others down, then inclusion is a way to pull them up, and that act can go a long way, as Washington knew. The next line in his speech reads, “It is a sign of the highest civilization when individuals reach that point where their strength is used in pulling every human soul up to the very highest point of usefulness and service.”

I hope we can find inspiration in Washington’s words and, through inclusion, aspire to be this “highest civilization.”