Poe in the Ragged Mountains: Environmental History and Romantic Aesthetics

A later work, written at the same time as some of his best-known tales of horror and ratiocination—such as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Gold- Bug,” “The Black Cat,” “The Premature Burial,” and “The Purloined Letter”—“ A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844) has never been considered one of Edgar Allan Poe’s more successful stories. As Doris V. Falk has noted, the plot seems to be “deliberately obscure, full of multifarious Romantic-Gothic elements which never quite cohere,” and as a result, the very intricacy of the tale has probably “discouraged criticism, to say nothing of readers.”1 At the same time, however, Poe is said to have identified “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” as one of his favorite compositions, 2 and it is the only work in which he refers specifically to his experience in Charlottesville, where he attended the new University of Virginia during most of 1826.3 Despite its weaknesses, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” raises two important questions that deserve consideration: first, did Poe base his tale on the actual landscape of the Ragged Mountains, and second, how might his having done so affect our reading of the tale?.