If one thing were to define the life of Benjamin Franklin, it would have to be his belief in order and reason. Franklin lived his life according to rules, the most famous of these being his list of virtues. In these thirteen simple precepts Franklin hoped to distill the essence of a virtuous life. For Franklin moral virtue was no nebulous affair, it was simply another goal to be achieved. As he writes, ``I wish'd to live without committing any Fault at any time ... As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other'' (Franklin 94-95). Life was something to be broken down into components, each with the ability to be individually analyzed and tuned. Franklin believed in advancement through work and individual effort. His story traces his rise from humble beginnings. Born the fifteenth son of a candle maker, it is only through hard work and perseverance that Franklin is able to reach his later station in life. Franklin writes of the notice given his work by a Doctor Baird. He notes, ``the Industry of that Franklin, says he, is superior to any thing I ever saw of the kind: I see him still at work when I go home from the Club; and he is at Work again before his Neighbours are out of bed'' (77). This industry is not chance, it is calculated for its result. Each event in his life is just part of the larger journey. Events that would be large in the lives of others are noted summarily and passed by. Reason leaves no room for emotion, even when the event is as tragic as the death of a child. In 1736 Franklin's four year old son dies of Small Pox. He devotes only one small paragraph to the subject, and this only ``for the Sake of Parents, who omit that Operation on the Supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a Child died under it'' (110). He then proceeds on to talk of his social club. Certainly each event contains meaning and feeling, but Franklin seems to view each as just another in the numerous steps of life.
On the contrary, Poe is far more concerned with the present than he is with any other point. His characters are caught in very immediate situations that defy their control. In his story ``A Descent Into the Maelstrom,'' Poe writes of a sailor whose ship is inexorably pulled into a deadly whirlpool. As his ship circles lower and lower, the sailor by chance notices that some objects around him are sinking faster than others. He recalls, ``at every revolution, we passed something like a barrel ... while many of these things, which had been on our level when I first opened my eyes on the wonders of the whirlpool, were now high up above us'' (Poe 172)1. From this observation he makes a judgment that ends up saving his life. It is only afterward that he learns of the scientific reasoning behind his discovery, so the choice made was one simply of chance and not self-creation. Had there not been other barrels careening through the waters about him, his life would most certainly have been lost. In ``The Pit and the Pendulum'' the narrator through chance averts certain death, once through the luck of escaping the pit, once through a spark of brilliance that allows him to allude the pendulum. Yet still he is about to die at the hands of burning hot walls when chance finds his tormentors overrun and his sentence nullified.
Poe does not confine himself to events that can be explained through reason. Instead he revels in the netherworld, readily allowing his characters interactions with ghosts and the dream world. One of Poe's favorite ploys is the resurrection of lost love, be it in the body of another or in the spirit of a bird. These events defy reason, yet Poe's characters accept them without reservation. His characters are not concerned with how and why, only with what is. In Poe's story ``Ligeia'' is found a central character who tells the stories of his two wives, Ligeia and Rowena. Ligeia, the woman his text treats as a goddess, has died. Rowena falls ill, and then mysterious events lead to her death. The narrator claims to have seen a spirit pour drops of poison into Rowena's wine, though he cannot be sure. He hears footsteps, and then says ``I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid'' (65). He accepts this event as fact, and Rowena dies. Inevitably, though, at story's end she returns to life as the lady Ligeia.
The American dream is to make something out of nothing. Franklin's tale is illustrative of this. It is a journey, with reasoned steps occurring in progression. Poe not only has to set his characters in Europe in order to exploit the area's history, he also has to do so to avoid the basic makeup of the American identity. The American tale is that of progress, while Poe's characters find themselves at best even with where they started. Though he survives the maelstrom, the old sailor emerges having lost his ship, his livelihood, and his brother. Certainly this is no tale of a self made man. The story of Ligeia ends as it began, with the man and his Ligeia together again. Though time has passed they are the same.
Though an American author, the works of Poe draw most heavily on the
European traditions. Where Franklin's reason and control model the
American identity, Poe creates characters embedded with traits more
reminiscent of the old Gothic world, where castles and ghosts lived
in local legend. The two models do not contradict one another, instead
they exist simultaneously as opposites. They are the ends of the spectrum,
Poe's old world versus Franklin's new. In the end one understands
that the act of writing in America does not necessitate assuming the
identity of the land.