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Against this notion of literature as socially constructive, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville turned

the novel into a proto-modernist art form, self-contained and increasingly self-referential.

Undoubtedly pushed in this direction by lack of sales, the men were already moving toward

aesthetic disentanglement, encoding in their narratives and theoretical pronouncements the

impulse to specialize ascendant elsewhere in market culture.

Poe and Melville were evolving toward the same position of disinterestedness. In The Fall of

the House of Usher(1839), Poe imagines the artist as a hypersensitive being isolated from

everyday reality, a creator of imageless pictures and self-reflexive songs. Poe's critical

ruminations champion autonomous literature, and his appeal to Baudelaire was as a

precocious proponent ofart pour l'art. His essay on "The Poetic Principle" inveighs against

"the heresy ofThe Didactic"and extols the "poem written solely for the poem's sake."

The canonical writers' modernist orientation espoused a version of professionalism that

located itself outside the commercial world. Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville developed

occupational ideals different in significant ways from the practical vocational outlook of the

domestic novelists, for whom the confirmation of the common reader in sales was a relatively

unambiguous gauge of success. The canonical ethic took the form it did as a deliberate act of

self-definition against the contrary example of the women. The three male writers

simultaneously wanted to demarcate themselves from their female rivals and to associate their

practice of authorship with other professions that were emerging or undergoing rationalization

during this era. Medicine, law, and teaching, occupations from which women were usually

barred (except at the lower levels of teaching), were establishing more stringent requirements

to enter the field and stricter standards of practice within it.

Poe shared Hawthorne's preoccupation with technique and agreed that the making of

literature was a profession as distinct as medicine or law. Finding favor with the mass public,

he stated in a review of Sedgwick, "has nothing to do with literature proper." And by

"literature proper," Poe meant a self-conscious art pruned of everything that was not literature,

an art obedient to its own regulations and explainable on its own terms. Like Hawthorne, he

invited readers into his laboratory and allowed them to glimpse the creative process. "The

Philosophy of Composition" describes how he selected the topic, determined the length, and

achieved the effect of his poem "The Raven" a palpably fraudulent account that says more

about the pressure to professionalize than about the text's actual preparation.

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For Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, the writer's vocation crystallized as a counterpoise to

the articulation of literary domesticity. The three men defined their callings as artists in

opposition to the sentimental novelists.

Poe's attitude toward the imagination and thus toward his fiction contrasts sharply with

that of Hawthorne. Whereas Hawthorne labors toward the latitude he sees necessary for the

romance, Poe leaps boldly into what the narrator of"Berenice"(1835) calls "palace[s] of -77-

imagination" and thumbs his nose at the hot, hard practical life of America. Whereas

Hawthorne focuses on the consequences of human action with painstaking emphasis, Poe (as

we shall see) ignores consequences, at times with sportive insistence. He champions the

imagination, proclaims its range as unlimited, and sets it free to play in a realm of its own

where it is lord of all it surveys. In his "Marginalia"(1846) Poe describes certain fancies that

come to one on the "borderground" between sleep and wakefulness. His version of a middle

ground, unlike Hawthorne's, is not a place where the actual and the imaginary may meet in

productive combination; the fancies of which he speaks inspire ecstasy beyond the range of

human experience; they reveal "a glimpse of the spirit's outer world." Poe's "border-ground,"

in other words, is a point from which the imagination, unbounded and free from constraint,

may journey into the "supernal."

Poe's fiction enacts the system of priorities suggested by this passage fromthe "Marginalia."His tales present the spectacle of the imagination playing games of its own

according to rules of its own making. And where the imagination is at its purest and most

triumphant, we may expect to find it transcending consequences. The narrator of"Loss of

Breath"(1832), for example, undergoes startling mutilations that have no "real" effect on him.

After cutting off his ears, a surgeon cuts him open and removes part of his viscera. Later, one

ear is somehow back on his head. And, although the cats that eat on his nose do cause pain, no

more is heard of wounds or their effects. He tells his story in the manner of someone having a

bad day.

In the work of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville revenge thrives on an atmosphere of

intensity that brings the self to stand apart from communal and institutional concerns, to

confront what is perceived as a target with the full force of mind and volition. Various

strategies of caricature serve each writer well; for by means of caricature the portrayal of self

is perforce distorted, at once limited and magnified, invested with incipient Virtually all ofPoe's tales display the human form in distorted and extravagant postures, versions of what Poe

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called the grotesque. In"King Pest"(1835), for example, the method is that of portrait

caricature, which E. H. Gombrich (almost as if he had been reading Poe) defines as "the

playful distortion of a victim's face." Poe characterizes each of his strange company by

describing one highly exaggerated facial feature a "terrific chasm" of a mouth, "a pair of

prodigious ears," "huge goggle eyes" amazed at "their own enormity." In The Facts in the

Case of M. Valdemar(1845), caricature accelerates to metamorphosis when the long-dead

Valdemar suddenly rots away on his bed "a nearly liquid mass of loathsome of

detestable putridity."

The distorting violence of Poe's imagination can take caricature an additional step to

cruelty and revenge. Hop-Frog, court jester to a brutal king, is both a dwarf and a cripple, who

can move along the floor "only with great pain and difficulty." The extreme anguish and

abasement of his life (synopsized, as it were, by his deformities) bring him to hoist the king

and seven counselors on a chandelier during a -81- masquerade party and burn them alive.

And thus a narrative that begins, "I never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the king

was.

violence. He seemed to live only for joking," ends with "The eight corpses swung in their

chains, a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass." An ominous idea of joking

encompasses "Hop-Frog"(1849): Poe twists it through stages of cruelty, uses a masqueradeparty to reverse its direction, and finally has it consummated by an act of revenge for

whichHop-Frog, incidentally, pays no penalty.

In some of his best-known work Poe explores the intricate and baffling nature of the perverse.

Characteristically, he uses narrators who seek to destroy the "I" the self driven by an

"unfathomable longing" to offer violence to "its own nature" (as we read in "The Black Cat").

Obsessed by the "eye" of his victim, the narrator ofThe Tell-Tale Heart(1843) decides "to

take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever." Given Poe's fondness for

puns (and his disdain for the transcendentalists' emphasis on self), it is tempting to substitute

an "I" for an "eye" in this context.

Hawthorne's use of caricature differs from that of Poe when it depends for its validity on the

perceptions of characters. What Giovanni sees in Rappaccini's garden (evidence of Beatrice's

poisonous nature) may be the product of his skepticism and inability to love. What Young

Goodman Brown sees in the forest (evidence of evil in those he reveres) may be the result of

specter evidence. What various people see, and don't see, on Arthur Dimmesdale's breast at

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the end ofThe Scarlet Lettertells us something about the spectators, something about

ourselves, and a lot about Hawthorne inventor of the first multiple-choice test in the

romance.

The duplicity in such spectacles of feeling, the hitch in the business of sentiment would be

enacted in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Critics, myself included, have ignored the way the

romance of the South and the realities of race were fundamental to his literary production. Poe

was not an exotic, a writer displaced "out of Space, out of Time." He knew the South, and for

the most part remained ambiguous and cautious about the practice of chattel slavery. Yet the

terrors of barbarism, and his own alternating unease with and attraction to the language of the

heart, mark his tales of revelation and revenge. In the course of his life, something strange

happened to what might have remained mere regionalist sentiment. But that gradual

transformation should not blind us to the way Poe perpetually returns to his sense of the

South, while attempting to screen his increasingly subversive concerns: the perils of mastery

and nightmares about the decay of all fictions of status, the rot at the heart of the Great House.

Nowhere does Poe reveal his comprehension of the power extended over another in love, the

terrible knot of complicity, as in his treatment of bondage: that unerring reciprocity between

one who calls him or herself master and one who responds as slave. It is quite possible that

Poe's most parodic exaggerations, his most sentimental posturings, have their source in what

remained for Poe the ground of "civilized" society: human bondage. For Poe, as for Burke,

Carlyle, or Jefferson, also severe (and enlightened) constructors of English -93- prose, the fact

of the negro made possible the empirical elevation of something they call "human," with its

finest image in tow, the Marie Antoinettes of this world. And yet, in Poe's writings how

slippery, how easily reversed is the divide between human and brute, lady and slave.

If to sentimentalize is to colonize the image, then Poe will ironize fantasies of love and

domesticity. More important, as becomes evident in Poe's letters recycled to his various

beloveds, there is nothing more compelling than possession: you love most what you own.

And yet that love, as Virginia Woolf realized when she reviewed Caroline Ticknor's Poe's

Helen in the Times Literary Supplementin 1916, can be "tedious" and "discreditable,"

languishing in an "atmosphereof withered roses and moonshine." Poe understood the

terrible burden of feeling, the tyranny of the "law of the heart," as the late "love poems"

"To Marie Louise Shew," "To Helen," and "For Annie" demonstrate.

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Poe knew that the language of romanticism allowed the covert continuation of inequality.

What does man love in woman? Her transformation into superlatives, or as Poe repeats and

overdoes it, her reduction into generality. Recall the exaggerations of his landscape

sketchLandor's Cottage (1849), when the narrator introduces "Annie," the angel of the house:

"So intense an expression of romancehad never sunk into my heart of hearts before.

'Romance,' provided my readers fully comprehend what I would hear implied by the word

'romance' and 'womanliness' seem to me convertible terms: and, after all, what man truly

loves in woman, is simply her womanhood."

If Poe's women become shadowy, losing substance in attributes repeated and recycled no

matter for whom or when he wrote, the writer himself seems to be most "heartfelt" when most

vague.

narrators in the tales about women, in "Ligeia" (1838), "Berenice" (1835), or "Morella"

(1835), for example, become as vain, abstract, and diseased as the objects of their desire (the

women the madmen had idolized), Poe's letters and his love poems also trade on a sexual

exchange. If women in nineteenth-century America must bear the trappings of style, must

inhabit most fully the external as essence, Poe shows how such a spectacle both exploits and

consumes its participants, both men and women.

If we place Poe in his historical and social context , reread his comments on Longfellow'sPoems on Slavery (with his jibe that the collection is especially suited for "the use of those

negrophilic old ladies of the north"), reconsider his scattered attacks on the fanatic coterie of

abolitionists and transcendentalists, and recall his deep faith in human imperfection, we can

see how much Poe's politics concerning slavery, social status, and property rights owed to the

conservative tradition of the Virginia planter aristocracy.

Though Poe tried to subvert his society's idealizing rhetoric about women, he could not apply

the same irony and skepticism to the institution of slavery.

What I have argued about Poe's defiance of masculine disempowering of women is

confounded by the question of slavery. Here, Poe produces straight the language of affection

and subservience he seems to hyperbolize and mock when imaging women. The bond

between master and slave that Poe portrays reads like a case of pietism gone wild.

Poe begins his review with a discussion of the French Revolution. Like Edmund Burke

before him, he argues that since "property" is what everyone most wants, it is the secret law of

any upheaval: "the many who want, band themselves together against the few that possess;

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and the lawless appetite of the multitude for the property of others calls itself the spirit of

liberty." After condemning the Revolution, which he calls "this eccentric comet," he uncovers

its real object. And he is far more honest than many historians of revolutionary France: "the

first object of attack was property in slaves; that in that war on behalf of the alleged right of

man to be discharged from all control of law, the first triumph achieved was in the

emancipation of slaves." Poe, ever rigorous in his analysis, suggests how deeply dependent

was the progress of the French Revolution on slave revolts in the Caribbean. For Poe, private

property and the possession of slaves remained at the center of events in France and put such

abstractions as "the rights of Man" to the test. Before turning to "Domestic Slavery," however,

Poe turns to what he refers to as "recent events in the West Indies," treating them as

foreboding what he deems

"the parallel movement here."

Poe wants his readers to recognize that abolitionists who "come to us in the name of our

common Redeemer and common country" seek "our destruction under the mask of Christian

Charity and Brotherly Love." Ever alert to the way totalizing rhetoric screens more devious

concerns, Poe now substitutes a few unalienable facts for what he sees as the dangerous

masquerade of liberation. What follows are five of the most disturbing pages Poe ever wrote.

Here, all the language of sentiment the cunning use of the claims of the heart to remove ordeny real human claims what Poe recognized in his writings about women, is used, with no

irony intended, as he turns to blacks.

What he introduces as "a few words of [his] own" is far more vehement than Paulding's

discussion of slave devotion and the master's "kindly feeling and condescending familiarity."

Here, Poe takes "kindly feeling and condescending familiarity."

Here, Poe takes his own romantic postures, the supine poet dead or dying in "For

Annie," or the varying deathbed scenes in his tales about women, and gives what was literary

parody or philosophical crux a ground in reality. And the reality is ugly, and perhaps made

more so by Poe's moralizing idealism, his attempt to turn a thing into a man, to paraphrase

Philip Fisher's words inHard Facts (1985). "We speak of the moral influences flowing from

the relation of master and slave, and the moral feelings engendered and cultivated by it." Poe

depends for his lesson about this relation on what he calls the "patriarchal character." This

character is both sustained and necessitated by what he calls "the peculiar character (I may

say the peculiar nature) of the negro." No less a suggestion than that the enslaved want to be

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mastered, for they love and this is the crucial word for Poe to serve, to be subservient.

What follows is an excess of devotion that becomes the focus, as Poe sees it, of the master-

slave relationship. In "The Black Cat" (1843) Poe will reveal the consequences of such an

inextricable bond through the horrific reversals possible in a formally benevolent attachment:

"the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute" and the "docility and humanity" of the

master.

But before Poe gets to his theory of servitude, cast as devotional sermon, he presents the

essential negro. Poe never has problems with invention, and yet his inventiveness, his

masterly design, is confounded in his attempt to "develop the causes which might and should

have blackened the negro's skin and crisped his hair into -98- wool." Since Poe admits it

might be a while before anyone can answer the why of the curse of pigment and frizz, he

gives us his theory of the institution of slavery. This theory is based on the reciprocity

between what he describes as "loyal devotion on the part of the slave" and "the master's

reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependent." These "sentiments in the

breast of the negro and his master," Poe explains, "are stronger than they would be under like

circumstances between individuals of the white race." So, slavery becomes something akin to

divine devotion, a lock of love that no mere mortal white man can sunder. As Melville

reiterates in "Benito Cereno" when Captain Delano thinks about the "negro":

When to this [the good humor and cheerfulness of the negro] is added the docility arising

from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind, and that susceptibility of blind attachment

sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors, one readily perceives why those

hypochondriacs, Johnson and Byrontook to their hearts, almost to the exclusion of the

entire white race, their serving men, the negroes, Barber and Fletcher.

If there is any doubt that Poe is raising the "childlike" devotion of the slave and the

"fatherly" concern of the master to the status of something akin to courtly love (where,

however, the heart is made noble by not possessing), note what follows.

That they [these sentiments] belong to the class of feelings "by which the heart is made

better," we know. How come they? They have their rise in the relation between the infant and

the nurse. They are cultivated between him and his foster brother. They are cherished by the

parents of both. They are fostered by the habit of affording protection and favors to the

younger offspring of the same nurse. They grow by the habitual use of the word "my," used in

the language of affectionate appropriation, long before any idea of value mixes with it. It is a

term of endearment. That is an easy transition by which he who is taught to call the little

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negro "his," in this sense and because he loves him, shall love him because he is his. The idea

is not new, that our habits and affections are reciprocally cause and effect of each other.

Applying the same analytic skill to this nearly incomprehensible (and incommensurate)

relation as he will apply to the cosmic attractions of Eureka, Poe bases the cause of reciprocity

in what is cultivated, cherished, and fostered. In this diagnosis, he goes far beyond the

discourse of James Kirke Paulding in Slavery in the United States. Paul-99- Paul- argues that

"the domestic relations of the master and slave are of a more familiar, confidential, and even

respectful character, than those of the employer and hireling elsewhere." He praises the

reciprocal and natural attachment, "this state of feeling, which a Southern life and education

can only give," and concludes: "It is often the case, that the children of the domestic servants

become pets in the house, and the playmates of the white children of the family." But Poe is

less interested in what Southerners claimed as a type of familial proprietorship feelings

that could elevate or mask what was merely the best use of valuable property than in

elucidating a gothic tale of excessive obedience, reminiscent of Caleb Williams's confession

to Falkland: "Sir, I could die to serve you!"

No cause for attachment is more powerful than a linguistic practice, the use of "the

possessive 'my'the language of affectionate appropriation." This recognition that you love

what is your own, or "propre" in French ("ce que quel qu'un, quelque chose a, possde a

l'exclusion de tout autre"), returns us to Poe's romance. For the remainder of the review gets

its force from two proofs for "this school of feeling": in the sickroom and on the deathbed. As

Poe says, "In this school we have witnessed scenes at which even the hard heart of a thorough

bred philanthropist would melt."

Love and piety flow from both sides, from both the proprietor and the property. "But it is

not by the bedside of the sick negro that the feeling we speak of is chiefly engendered. They

who would view it in its causes and effects must see him by the sick bed of his master

must see her by the sick bed of her mistress. We have seen these things." Poe takes what he

calls "t he study of human nature" out of the closet, as he reports intimate scenes of a black

nanny shedding tears over her white "foster babe," of a black servant, "advanced in

pregnancy, and in bad health," who kept returning at night to the door of her "good

lady" mistress. Poe repeats the words of the faithful, "crouched down at the door, listening for

the groans of the sufferer." Ordered home, she cries, "Master it ain't no use for me to go to

bed, Sir. It don't do me no good, I cannot sleep, Sir."

In this world of noble sentiments, nothing less than love "prompts" the master, not

"interest" or "value." Since the black was for Poe savage, childlike, and brute, a near mystical

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reliance on a cult of feeling becomes most fit for any discussion of race relations. Ap-100-

propriative language is appropriate for a piece of property. For Poe, biological traits would

accomplish the full metaphysical right of exclusion. Except for this one review, and a brief

discussion of Longfellow'sPoems on Slavery (1845), Poe omits the discussion of race from

his critical reviews and essays.

For Poe the analogy between women and slaves was unthinkable. Poe could never, in

spite of his awareness of women's subordination, entertain the conjunction of race and gender.

For example, his review of Elizabeth Barrett's The Drama of Exile, and Other Poems in the

Broadway Journalin 1845 expresses his concern about how women writers are treated when

"the race of critics," as he put it, "are masculine men." The greatest evil resulting from the

absence of women critics, he explained, is that "the critical man" finds it "an unpleasant task. .

'to speak ill of a woman.'" Yet though here Poe refused to condescend to women, taking both

their persons and their writings seriously, he blots out the activism of women writers who also

happen to be abolitionists.

"Gracious heaven! What a prostitution!" James Kirke Paulding ends his Slavery in the

United States with a warning to those women members of the abolition societies: "with all

that respectful deference to the sex," he reminds them "that the appropriate sphere of women

is their home, and their appropriate duties at the cradle or the fireside." For women must never

forget that they are "the guardian angel of the happiness of man; his protector and mentor in

childhood; his divinity in youth; his companion and solace in manhood; his benign and gentle

nurse in old age."

In spite of Poe's subversion of the romantic idea of woman his interrogation of

women's coercion into image he could never make the connection between slavery and the

condition of white women in his society. No woman will ever be named by Poe as part of "the

small coterie of abolitionists, transcendentalists and fanatics in general," who are a "knot of

rogues and madmen." Recall Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845),

which Poe will review in The Literati of New York City in 1846: "There exists in the minds of

men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves, such as is expressed in the common

phrase, 'Tell that to women and children.'" When Poe reviews Woman in the Nineteenth

Century, he ignores Fuller's conjunction of woman and slave but praises the essay -101- as

"nervous, forcible, thoughtful, suggestive, brilliant. . for all that Miss Fuller produces is

entitled to those epithets but I must say that the conclusions reached are only in part my

own. Not that they are too bold, by any means too novel, too startling, or too dangerous in

their consequences." That Poe did not, or would not, make overtly the connection between

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women and slaves is also evident in his review of Lydia Maria Child, also in "The Literati of

New York City."Throughout his praise of her poetry, there is never a reference to her well-

knownAnti-Slavery Catechism (1836), The Evils of Slavery and the Cure of Slavery (1836),

orAn Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), even though he

begins by noting without naming those compositions by which she has "acquired a just

celebrity." He concludes by merely saying: I need scarcely add that she has always been

distinguished for her energetic and active philanthropy."

Poe remained haunted, as did Jefferson, by the terrible disjunction between the ideology

of slavery (the abstract and rather benign parental ideology grounded in the equally abstract

assumption of negro inferiority) and the concrete realities of mutilation, torture, and violation.

Jefferson's inability to deal with the issue of slavery leads directly to the apocalyptic

terminology at the end of Query XVIII inNotes on the State of Virginia: "Indeed I tremble for

my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that

considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an

exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become possible by supernatural

interference!" The gospel of apocalypse, the blood, fire, and overturning of Poe's tales of

terror, gain their force from Poe's problematic relation to notions of mastery and

subordination. More important, he understood how the idealization of women in his society

depended for its force on the dehumanization of blacks. When he writes Eureka at the end of

his life, his version of"the realm of Ends,"he demonstrates the "convertibility" of matter and

spirit, destroying the divisions that were at the heart of racialist discourse.

In the South's official mythology, the negro was forever nonAdamic: he/she had no task

of naming and no gift of language. In -102- "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe uses

Dupin's acuteness in detection to reveal his own fantasy of barbarism. Poe had no doubt read

that most severe of colonial historians, Edward Long, who in hisHistory of Jamaica wrote:

"That the oran-outang and some races of black men are very nearly allied, is, I think, more

than probable." As Long admitted with Buffon: "the oran-outang's brain is a senseless iconof

the human;. . it is meer matter, unanimated with a thinking principle, in any, or at least in a

very minute and imperfect degree. . an oran-outang. . is a human being. . but of an inferior

species. . he has in form a much nearer resemblance to the Negroe race, than the latter bear to

white men."

The most difficult problem in knowing what manner of brute is the murderer in the Rue

Morgue is the "very strange voice," the unrecognizable language of the criminal. Dupin

explains: "How strangely unusual must that voice have really been. . - in whose tones, even,

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denizens of the five great divisions of Europe could recognize nothing familiar! You will say

that it might have been the voice of an Asiatic of an African." Poe concludes the story by

describing a scene of wrath and revenge that suddenly, whether intentionally or not, moves us

from Paris to the South, from Madame L'Espanaye to the brute's master:

Gnashing its teeth, and flashing fire from its eyes, it flew upon the body of the girl, and

imbedded its fearful talons in her throat, retaining its grasp until she expired. Its wandering

and wild glances fell at this moment upon the head of the bed, over which the face of its

master, rigid with horror, was just discernible. The fury of the beast, who no doubt bore still

in mind the dreaded whip, was suddenly converted into fear.

What Poe calls the "catastrophe of the drama" in the supposedly "humorous" story The

System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether(1844), we should now recall: "But I shall never

forget the emotions of wonder and horror with which I gazed, when, leaping through these

windows, and down among uspele-mele, fighting, stamping, scratching, and howling, there

rushed a perfect army of what I took to be Chimpanzees, Ourang-Outangs, or big black

baboons of the Cape of Good Hope."

Poe'sHop-Frog; or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs (1849), one of his last tales,

written some seven months before his -103- death, after the end of his engagement to Sarah

Helen Whitman, while he fought illness and despair, remains Poe's most horrible tale ofretribution. What Thomas O. Mabbott regards as merely "a terrible exposition of the darkness

of a human soul" is Poe's final revelation of the national sin of slavery. Did Poe know Hegel's

analysis of convertibility? The master, dependent on the labor of the slave, would end by

depending on the slave, and the terms of domination would be reversed. As Hegel wrote in

hisPhenomenology of Mind: "Just as lordship showed its essential nature to be the reverse of

what it wants to be, so, too, bondage will, when completed, pass into the opposite of what it

immediately is." In any case, Poe would have been familiar with Jefferson's description of the

effect of slavery "as a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting

despotism," which turned the master into brute.

The eight masters of"Hop-Frog"get turned into orang-outangs, tarred and flaxed (not

feathered), by an enslaved dwarf "from some barbarous province that no person ever heard

of." Then, chained in a circle, facing each other in a stupor of coincidence, they are burned to

"a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass." The shocking blind spot of most

critics to the practice of slavery as fundamental to the horrors of "Hop-Frog"is exemplified

by Mabbot's reflection in introducing the story in his Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe:

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"The manner of chaining apes described is not mentioned by any authorities consulted, and

since it is integral to the plot, may well be invented on the basis of the captive wild men

described by Froissart." In the final incendiary climax of"Hop-Frog"Poe gives "the power of

blackness" its obvious, though repressed cause. Poe recalls, in a bloodcurdling way, his own

earlier preoccupation in the "Paulding-Drayton Review" with what, in God's name, might

"have blackened the negro's skin and crisped his hair into wool." But the tables have turned.

The epidermic curse the fatality of being black, or blackened has been visited on the

master race.

Writing his 1855 "Preface"toLeaves of Grass, Walt Whitman declared: "Great genius

and the people of these states must never be demeaned to romances. As soon as histories are

properly told there is no more need of romances." By the 1850s the apparent division between

fact and fiction was breaking down. The "romance" of the -104- fugitive slave depended for

its force on being a "true history." These "verifiable" romances were janus-faced, pointing to

both truth and fable. Hawthorne precedes The House of the Seven Gables (1851) with a

discourse on "Romance" that grants the writer the use of the "Marvelous" in writing a tale that

attempts "to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us." And

as Poe had argued against Hawthorne's heavy-handed use of allegory in his 1847 review

ofTwice-Told Tales, now Hawthorne emphasizes the importance of keeping any moral

"undercurrent" to the tale unobtrusive. Unsubtle didacticism can kill the effect proper to

revealing "the truth of the human heart."

Whereas Hawthorne can choose to err on the side of fiction, no African American writer

who had recovered his freedom only to work for the abolitionist cause could afford such

flights of fancy. On the one hand, the conversion of brute to man depended on a language so

extraordinary that it could make the horrible facts of slavery into romance. On the other hand,

these titillating narratives had to be based on true experiences. Harriet A. Jacobs, writing

her"Preface"toIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861, begins: "Reader, be

assured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem

incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true." And her editor, Lydia Maria Child,

authenticated the document in the introduction to Jacobs's drama of what happens when

romance or more precisely, sexuality is locked into race. She assures readers that she

knows the writer and adds: "I believe those who know her will not be disposed to doubt her

veracity, though some incidents in her story are more romantic than fiction."

Toni Morrison writes inBeloved(1987): "Definitions belong to the definers not the

defined." The black fugitive turned hero or heroine found not only that there had to be limits

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to invention imagination had to be accountable to a reality often invented by someone else

but also that these facts could then be embellished or made to serve the often demeaning

romantic fantasies about the "African character." So, terms like romance and history (like

liberty and bondage) underwent some strange but instructive metamorphoses. In the history of

the United States, where a slave, a piece of property, could become an object of "love,"

linguistic distinctions were undone, humanitarian definitions derailed and dismantled. -105-

The oft-repeated "power of blackness" thus could be argued to be absolutely necessary to

the continued construction of whiteness. As Frantz Fanon argued inBlack Skin, White

Masks (1952, tr. 1967): "The black soul is a white man's artifact." Who holds the claims on

the business of racial identity? Melville knew that the claims of color are nothing more than a

sometime masquerade, depending on who wields power when. The Confidence-Man (1857)

remains the most astonishing narrative of convertibility. But as early asPierre; or, The

Ambiguities (1852), Melville attempted to "gospelize the world anew" by reveling in a wild

blurring of opposites, what Poe had called "Infernal Twoness." Reviewers were quick to

condemnPierre when it appeared, recognizing how dangerous were the excesses of his

language (not only his subject) to morals and to the very myths of purity and domestic love on

which Americans of "good taste and good sense" depended.

Like Poe inEureka, Melville dealt with impossible inversions, unspeakable mergings.

But Melville humanized or gave flesh to Poe's Newtonian mechanics and cosmic attractions.

He attempted nothing less than to give a moral to what might have remained an abstract story.

"This history goes forward and goes backward, as occasion calls." The convertibility between

matter and spirit that Poe cast as atoms moving to and fro in the throes of attraction and

repulsion, Melville articulated as the inevitable reciprocity between "Lucy or God," "Virtue or

Vice," light and dark, "wife or sister, saint or fiend!" In Pierre's remarkable dream of

Enceladus, the burden of whiteness parasitical, destructive, and sterile is embodied in

the white amaranthine flower. These flowers multiply, contribute nothing to the agricultural

value of the hillside pastures, and force the tenants to beg their "lady" to abate their rent: "The

small white flower it is our bane!. . The aspiring amaranth, every year it climbs and adds new

terraces to its sway! The immortal amaranth, it will not die, but last year's flowers survive to

this!"

The dark world, the trope of aggression and excess, Melville reassigns to an

overpowering whiteness. After all, if natural philosophers had argued about the cause of

human blackness, the pollution of color, the barbaric stain, Melville put inscrutablewhiteness,

the "colorless, all-color," the "shrouded phantom of the whitened waters" at the heart of the

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terror and the fascination ofMoby-Dick, his -106- other quest romance. In 1837-38 Poe wrote

a story that no doubt influenced Melville. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of

Nantucketwas his own "narrative" of whiteness, a romantic voyage to the " white curtain of

the South." If the Southern slave made his perilous journey from bondage to the North a

place that, as Frederick Douglass and other African American autobiographers would find,

was no salvation from degradation Poe takes his reader from the North to a terribly iterated

South. Ostensibly a trip to the South Seas, the narrative at times seems to mime and invert the

narratives of American slavery. The title page reads as a burlesque of captivity, catastrophe,

and incredibility: ". . the massacre of her crew among/ A group of islands in the / EIGHTY-

FOURTH PARALLEL OF SOUTHERN LATITUDE; / Together with the incredible

adventures and discoveries / STILL FURTHER SOUTH / To which that distressing calamity

gave rise."

In the "Preface"to his narrative, "A. G. Pym" places a "Mr. Poe, lately editor of

the Southern Literary Messenger," quite firmly in the role of Southern gentleman, one of

those "several gentlemen in Richmond, Va., who felt deep interest in all matters relating to the

regions I had visited." Although Pym fears his story will lack "theappearance of that truth it

would reallypossess," that only family and friends would "put faith in [his] veracity," and that

the public would judge his writing "an impudent and ingenious fiction," he agrees to a " ruse"

suggested by Mr. Poe. The adventures will be published in theSouthern Literary

Messenger"under the garb of fiction." Yet the public refuses to receive the "pretended

fiction" as a "fable," and Pym decides "to undertake a regular compilation and publication of

the adventures in question."

Poe will later claimEureka to be his "Book of Truths" as well as a "Romance."

Convertibility is essential to both his style and his metaphysics. Fact becomes fancy and fancy

fact in the mutual adaptation that remains for his earthbound readers the sure sign of God's

perfection. But what is being made convertible in Pym's strange narrative? Pym's narrative is

based on other chronicles of polar exploration and travel, most notably Benjamin

Morrell'sNarrative of Four Voyages (1832). This story, however, is less a romance of

voyages to distant seas than a spectacular and violent staging of "civilization" defining itself

through the conquest of savagery. Yet there is -107- no possibility of definition or conquest in

this world of shifting appearances. Before Pym and Peters reach the black island of Tsalal

(meaning "to be shaded, dark" in Hebrew and "to be shade" in its ancient Ethiopian root), the

reader has already endured scenes of butchery, drunkenness, treachery, and cannibalism. So,

although Pym's story leads us to the islands of the South Seas where we encounter

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"barbarians" and "savages," when the explorers finally visit the island village, the common

racist divisions between "civilization" and "barbarism," good and evil, black and white, are no

longer operative.

The "savages" are described with their "complexion a jet black, with thick and woolly

hair." The natives dread the complexion of "the white race" and, most of all, the strange white

thing "lying on the ground," earlier described by Pym as "a singular-looking landanimal,"

with a "body. . covered with a straight silky hair, perfectly white." The complex working out

of the narrative depends upon a duplicity ordoublingof color. As the explorers journey farther

into the interior to that "country differing essentially from any hitherto visited by civilized

men," any simple splitting of color into black and white with the metaphysical truths

normally attached to such biological facts becomes more vexed and shifting than any

racialist polarity allows.

Color becomes Poe's subject, as in the celebrated description of the water of Tsalal: not

black, not white, but "notcolourless: nor was it of any one uniform colour presenting to

the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk." If the

justification of slavery depended on the curse of color as sign of inferiority what Jefferson

stressed as the "real distinction which nature has made" this story depends upon a crisis of

color. Even though the waters manifest an uncommon variability of color, upon closer

examination Pym discovers that "the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of

distinct veins, each of a distinct hue. . these veins did not commingle."

Without pushing too far the problematic symbolic construction of a totalizing category

called race in this romance, I turn to the final entries in Pym's narrative, before his fall into

the vacancy of whiteness. Moving quickly southward, Pym, Peters, and the black-teethed Nu-

Nu are absorbed by an inexplicable whitening: the warm water -108- has a "milky hue"; a

"fine white powder, resembling ashes" falls over the canoe; another white animal floats by. In

the apocalyptic end, they are in between a "sullen darkness" and "milky depths." Then the

darkness spreads except for the "veil" or "curtain" of whiteness. Pym's final vision the

mysterious "shrouded human figure" with a complexion "of the perfect whiteness of snow"

has been described as God, Lord of Death, or the "Deity ofEureka," ushering all things into

the final Unity. However we choose to interpret the figure, the ultimate revelation of light

becomes deadly, absorbing the previous nuances of shadow or darkness.

In the "Note" that follows Pym's death and the abrupt end of his story, the unnamed

writer refers to "the most faintly-detailed incidents of the narrative." Attempting an

interpretation of the figures of the chasms on the island of Tsalal, he moves his reader toward

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"The region of the south." The arm of the '"most northwardly' of the figures" is "outstretched

towards the south," and the displaced Virginian Poe concludes with a litany on white: "the

carcass of the i animal picked up at se. . the shuddering exclamation of the captive Tsalalian

upon encountering the white materials in possession of Mr. Pym. . the shriek of the swift-

flying, white, and gigantic birds which had issued from the vapoury white curtain of the

South. Nothing white was to be found at Tsalal." And in the region beyond, Poe suggests we

can know nothing. Yet, perhaps his Southern readers, especially those Virginians who had

followed closely the debates about slavery in the Virginia Legislature in 1831-32, would not

be immune to the final effect of this strange commentary on the vicissitudes of white power.

The unaccountable and prophetic final sentence of the "Note" reads: "I have graven it within

the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock." What G. R. Thompson in Poe's

Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973) calls a divine and "perverse vengeance for

some unknown offense," no doubt recalled for some readers the known offense of slavery, and

the fears of some Southerners, like Jefferson and Poe, that God's judgment would not be

stayed, that the inevitable catastrophe is at hand.

Joan Dayan

Poe was born in Boston to itinerant actors, both of whom died while he was very young.

Unofficially adopted by John Allen, of Richmond, -800- Virginia, he entered the University

of Virginia in 1826, but left after only one year, following a bitter quarrel with Allen over

debts. After brief stints in the United States Army and at West Point, Poe, destitute and

wholly estranged from his one-time benefactor, located an aunt, Maria Clemm, and her

daughter Virginia, whom he married in 1836. The remainder of his life is a chronicle of

increasing desperation, as Poe tried to support his dependents on the unreliable income of his

journalistic endeavors. Virginia died in 1847; Poe's depression deepened as his health and

sanity deteriorated. In October 1849 he was found unconscious on a Baltimore street, and died

four days later. Today, his literary legacy marks him as one of the most original creative

minds of his time. His single novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), is difficult

to classify, but recounts the horrific adventures of a young stowaway on his voyage into a

moral, as well as an Antarctic, abyss.

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