The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic

Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351884143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Taking as its point of departure recent insights about the performative nature of genre, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic challenges the critical tendency to accept at face value that gothic literature is mainly about fear. Instead, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argues that the American Gothic, and gothic literature in general, is also about judgment: how to judge and what happens when judgment is confronted with situations that defy its limits. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gilman, and James all shared a concern with the political and ideological debates of their time, but tended to approach these debates indirectly. Thus, Monnet suggests, while slavery and race are not the explicit subject matter of antebellum works by Poe and Hawthorne, they nevertheless permeate it through suggestive analogies and tacit references. Similarly, Melville, Gilman, and James use the gothic to explore the categories of gender and sexuality that were being renegotiated during the latter half of the century. Focusing on "The Fall of the House of Usher, " The Marble Faun, Pierre, The Turn of the Screw, and "The Yellow Wallpaper, " Monnet brings to bear minor texts by the same authors that further enrich her innovative readings of these canonical works. At the same time, her study persuasively argues that the Gothic's endurance and ubiquity are in large part related to its being uniquely adapted to rehearse questions about judgment and justice that continue to fascinate and disturb.

Chapter 1
Unreliable Narrators and“unnatural sensations”: Irony and Conscience in Edgar Allan Poe

Poe’s politics have been the subject of speculation and projection since Baudelaire first praised Poe for what he saw as Poe’s justified contempt for American democracy.¹ Anglo-American critics have tended to agree with Baudelaire’s assessment of Poe’s politics, if not with his approval of it. Instead, Poe has generally been taken to task for being a racist and a snob. One of the most famous of these accusations was made by Ernest Marchand in “Poe as Social Critic” (1934), where he argued that, as a self-identified Virginia gentleman, Poe was “hostile” to “democracy, industrialization and reform” (43). Poe’s critical reputation perked up considerably after WWII, thanks to waning interest in politics among literary scholars and a turn to psychological and formal analysis. Poe’s work found even more favor with Lacanians and post-structuralists, who appreciated him precisely because he seemed to have no commitments other than to his art and craftsmanship. The first sentence of “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) was taken as a self-reflective dictum on Poe’s entire work: “It is well said of a certain German book that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’—that it does not permit itself to be read.”² According to this approach, Poe had already anticipated every critical move and incorporated it into his text, thereby proleptically proving Derrida’s claim in Of Grammatology that there is nothing outside the text, that there is no hors-texte (163).

In the 1990s, however, the hors-texte returned to haunt Poe criticism, and with it came a new round of denunciations of Poe’s reactionary politics and racism.³ Toni Morrison re-launched the debate about Poe’s racial politics by arguing in Playing in the Dark (1992) that Poe’s fiction stood at the center of white American self-fashioning around the obscured figure of the African American. In 2001, J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg edited a volume of essays, Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, devoted entirely to this question. Though aiming to “unsettle traditional understandings of Poe,” most of the essays included in the volume confirmed the longstanding consensus about Poe’s racism, differing mainly in the degree to which they held Poe personally accountable for his “unconscionable opinions and values” (xvi).

Currently, however, a new wave of scholarship has begun to take a closer look at Poe’s writings in their cultural context. For example, Terence Whalen’s influential monograph, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses (1999), suggests that Poe was neither an abolitionist nor a pro-slavery Southerner but a political centrist who adopted an editorial position of what Whalen calls “average racism” in order to not alienate readers who felt strongly about abolition one way or another. Along similar lines, Lesley Ginsberg has argued that “The Black Cat” (1843) is a satire of pro-slavery rhetoric, pushing the sentimentalist argument for the affectionate relationship between master and dependent to its absurd limit by showing how easily sentimentalism can become sadism when there are no checks on a master’s power. Analyzing the figure of the confidence man in “The Devil in the Belfry” (1839) and “The Man That Was Used Up” (1838), Clayton Marsh has recently suggested that Poe regarded the American myth of progress as “an oppressive and culturally pervasive confidence game that masked the horrors of frontier genocide and slavery beneath the speed and allure of industrial technology” (“Stealing Time” 260). In fact, one could say that a new Poe has emerged from the work of scholars such as Whalen, Ginsberg, and Marsh: a historically embedded and politically nuanced Poe, a writer who worried about the human costs of technological progress and the “rush of the age” and who responded to the slavery dispute in a variety of complex ways. This new scholarship neither denigrates nor exalts Poe as before but, instead, evokes a literary persona that reflected the complex and often contradictory political culture of antebellum America.

I intend to flesh out this nuanced and politically responsive Poe by exploring an aspect of his work that has been nearly universally ignored: the ethical. Reading Poe in terms of the gothic facilitates this kind of focus, since certain ethical issues (such as persecution, torture, and abuse of power) are axiomatic to the gothic genre. Poe stages and thematizes the gothic issues of judgment and its limitations in ways that can be read against the backdrop of Southern slavery. Just as Joan Dyan has suggested that slavery is the horizon of meaning for the way human bodies are so easily convertible into things in Poe’s work, I will show how slavery is a potential horizon of meaning for the pervasive concern with conscience (and specifically, its failure) in several of Poe’s stories, including “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839; “Amorous Bondage” 192).

Poe’s Aestheticism

Critics have produced a notorious diversity of interpretations about the meaning of Poe’s stories. In contrast to these startling disparities, Poe’s lack of ethical and moral commitments has generally enjoyed a serene critical consensus. In 1961, Vincent Buranelli declared empically that “Poe does not touch morality,” thus summing up a commonplace of twentieth-century Poe criticism (Edgar Allan Poe 72). Poe himself was partly responsible for creating this impression, notably with essays such as “The Rationale of Verse” (1848) and “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), where he famously defines beauty in the following manner:

When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect—they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul—not of intellect, or of heart—upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating “the beautiful.” (Essays and Reviews, henceforth abbreviated as ER, 16)

Poe insists here that art should be concerned with “effect” (rather than meaning, by implication) and with an “elevation of the soul” rather than “intellect” or “heart.” In other words, art should not be concerned with truth or morality but with a specifically aesthetic effect that Poe locates in the idea of “soul” and which corresponds roughly to Kant’s autonomous sphere of aesthetic judgment. In spite of Poe’s occasional jabs at Kant (or “cant,” as he liked to pun), Poe’s tripartite model of the mind is directly inspired by the German philosopher’s division of the human subject into “pure reason” (the intellect), “practical reason” (morality or “the heart”), and judgment (the affective part that responds to art, beauty, and the sublime). Like Kant’s, Poe’s aestheticism is designed to clear a theoretical and cultural space for art to function free from accountability to truth, didacticism, morality, or social uplift. Also like Kant’s, Poe’s model of Pure Intellect, Moral Sense, and Taste assumes that the latter holds a privileged position with regard to the others, especially the Moral Sense. In “The Poetic Principle” (1850), Poe observes that there is merely a “faint” difference between Taste and the Moral Sense: the Moral Sense shows the “good” as a duty (“Conscience teaches the obligation”) while Taste contents herself with “displaying [its] charms” (ER 76). Firmly grounded in the Common Sense School as well as German Romanticism, Poe argues in this essay that “Vice” is recognizable by its “deformity” and “disproportion,” suggesting that the aesthetic was a means to recognize and appreciate the ethical.

Poe’s aestheticism was in fact far less radical and divorced from ethics than it came to be seen by twentieth-century critics, though it may have seemed quite radical in its original antebellum context. In fact, that was its whole point. Antebellum literary culture tended to reflect the middle-class values of sentimentalism and didacticism, and Poe’s position was clearly meant to define him as an oppositional figure. Aestheticism allowed him to defend the writer’s and editor’s right to pursue artistic freedom and merit, but it also gave him a recognizable public persona, something like a brand. Poe’s public identity was that of a literary provocateur, nicknamed “the Tomahawk” for his iconoclastic and merciless reviews. Adopting an amoral and even anti-moralist aesthetic philosophy was a canny self-marketing strategy, since being controversial was a distinct advantage in a literary culture ruled by commercial principles.⁴

Poe’s aestheticism, broadly defined as a concern with the technical aspects of literary effect, was also related to his status as literary professional. As a writer who depended on literary and journalistic production for his livelihood, Poe was deeply committed to promoting an understanding of writing as a vocation requiring specific skills and talents worthy of remuneration and protection by copyright laws. To this end, it was important to stress the writer’s technical qualifications and strategies in order to debunk the Romantic myth of writer as inspired genius (who, by implication, does not need to be paid for his literary effusions).

If aestheticism was a logical stance for Poe to adopt vis à vis the literary culture in which he found himself, it is also understandable that he exaggerated this position for the rhetorical purpose of making it clearer and more distinctive. As a result of his exaggerated and even hyperbolic arguments about the importance of the technical dimension of writing, however, critics have failed to appreciate the ethical sensibility that also informs his writing.

Poe’s insistence on the aesthetic over all other considerations has also created among readers the nagging suspicion that he is never entirely serious and so therefore is not to be taken seriously. “The Philosophy of Composition” in particular, with its straight-faced assertion that poetry is no more than a matter of mathematics and stagecraft, has made readers wonder if Poe’s work is not all a joke. After all, if Poe is being serious in this essay, then we would have to accept that “The Raven” and perhaps his other poems and tales are all clever market-oriented gimmicks. That said, if Poe is not being entirely serious in “The Philosophy of Composition,” then when is he? Poe creates a kind of literary version of the Liar’s Paradox with the “Philosophy of Composition.” As a result, critical reactions to Poe, especially by humanist critics prizing sincerity and literary seriousness, are suffused from the very start by accusations of hoaxing and charlatanism.

Unreliable Narrators

Poe’s complicated irony continues to confuse readers who want to pin down his texts. Although many studies have examined what Jonathan Elmer calls Poe’s “tonal instability,” critics whose primary concern is not his use of irony tend to ignore it entirely in order to facilitate the reading they need (Reading at the Social Limit 175). To take an example that speaks directly to my concern with Poe’s politics, “Mellonta Tauta” (1849) has often been read as a lightly veiled statement of Poe’s own anti-democratic views. Even the supposedly neutral introduction to Romancing the Shadow (ed. Kennedy and Weissberg) asserts that the story “betrays [Poe’s] contempt for the mob and the gospel of progress” (xiii). “Mellonta Tauta” is narrated by a woman whose notes from a balloon voyage in the year 2848 are presented by Poe as a found manuscript. Pundita, as her satirical name suggests, is a clear example of what Wayne Booth has called an “unreliable narrator.”⁵ While this is a term that has fallen into disuse since post-structuralism elevated the unreliability of literature and language to a general principle, it is nevertheless useful to keep this device in our critical toolbox when reading Poe. Unreliable narrators invite readers’ active participation in deciphering a narrative because they themselves misunderstand what they describe, overlook important connections, or fail to see their own or others’ motivations.

Poe uses unreliable narrators in virtually all of his stories, and their function is always to describe but fail to recognize important elements of the story, obliging the reader to make the connections the narrator misses. In “Mellonta Tauta,” the narrator describes a former nation called “Amricca” that the reader immediately recognizes as mid-nineteenth-century America. The narrator heaps scorn on this benighted country, especially its democracy and universal franchise. These passages are frequently quoted, as by Daniel Hoffman in 1972 or Maurice Lee in 2003, as proof of Poe’s “combatively conservative” opinion that democracy was a “stupid institution.”⁶ Yet, using them in this way makes no more sense than quoting the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” to prove that Poe was a murderer. Like the mad narrator of that story, Pundita reveals her unreliability early in the narrative through her emphatic assertion that “War and Pestilence” are a “positive advantage to the mass” and by writing approvingly of the fact that a man thrown overboard from the balloon is not rescued because in her “enlightened age” the needs of the collectivity are put before any individual’s (PT 874). No critic would suggest that Poe believed war was a positive good or that individuals should be sacrificed for the mass, so it is startling how eager critics are to believe that Pundita’s other fascistic pronouncements reflect Poe’s own views.

This type of misreading is avoidable if one understands the rhetorical importance of unreliable narrators to Poe’s textual effects. Almost every story is told by a narrator whose point of view is flawed in some way and requires the reader to complete the hermeneutic circle by making important connections for him or herself. An obvious example is “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where the narrator betrays his insanity quite quickly. At the other end of the spectrum, the narrator of “Berenice,” though eccentric, gives the reader no serious cause to doubt the reliability of his narrative until the end, when it is revealed that Berenice’s teeth are in his possession. Again, as in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his failure is the result not of deliberate deception but of temporary madness or somnambulism: he seems to not have been conscious of his acts at the time. Yet, even this ending is narrated “unreliably” by never using the word “teeth.” Instead, the narrator describes “thirty-two small, white, and ivory-looking substances” falling to the floor (PT 233). This absurdly indirect description (after all, who could recognize that there are thirty-two of anything in a single glance?), like all unreliable narration, requires the reader to produce the final meaning herself by recognizing them as teeth. This involves the reader more directly in the surprise ending and presumably creates a more powerful effect, as she must make the gruesome connections in her own mind rather than being told by the text.

While the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” betrays his unreliability near the beginning, and the narrator of “Berenice” reveals his only at the end, most of Poe’s unreliable narrators betray their blind or biased perspective only gradually during the course of their narration. An example of this incremental estrangement is the early mock-gothic story “Metzengerstein” (1832). A conventional summary would describe it as revolving around a typically gothic rivalry between two aristocratic houses, haunted tapestries, an enigmatic and possibly haunted horse and ending with the violent death of the main protagonist. However, this description would completely miss the point of how the story works for a reader, namely, by a carefully choreographed estrangement from the narrator’s perceptions, which requires him to make sense of the story through inference. The reader’s active role is prepared for, as if often the case in Poe’s fiction, in the opening paragraphs. In this passage, the narrator describes what he identifies as a Hungarian superstition: the idea that human souls enter the bodies of animals under certain circumstances. The narrator naturally disavows this belief, but its presence at the opening of the story performs the rhetorical function of cueing the reader to the possibility that “metempsychosis” will play a part in the story that follows.

The story then begins with a description of the two rivals, old Berlifitzing and the young Metzengerstein, who has just inherited his parents’ vast fortune and embarked on several days of debauchery to celebrate. This revelry includes not only “unheard-of atrocities” towards his servants but also setting afire his neighbor’s prized stables, which leads to old Berlifitzing’s death in the fire. Although the first paragraph already put the narrator’s omniscient neutrality into question, he only really betrays his unreliability in the passage where the reader learns, along with the young Metzengerstein, that the horse-loving Berlifitzing has died at exactly the same moment that a mysterious black horse appears on his property. Metzengerstein receives this news with an exaggeratedly strange reaction: “I—n—d—e—e—d! ejaculated the Baron, as if slowly and deliberately impressed with the truth of some exciting idea” (PT 139). The narrator does not explain what the “exciting idea” is, but the reader has been given the tools in the opening paragraphs to make the appropriate inference. The next paragraphs are intensely ironic and deeply flattering to the reader, since they review the various hypotheses put forward by Metzengerstein’s entourage to account for his increasingly eccentric attachment to the wild horse, while the reader “knows” all along that Metzengerstein rides the horse constantly because he knows it possesses the soul of his enemy Berlifitzing. The reader also knows from the narrator’s passing references to the rider’s pitiable appearance that the horse’s spirit is somehow the stronger of the two, with the horse torturing the rider rather than the other way around.

The most intensely ironic moment of the narrative occurs shortly before the end of the story, when the narrator mentions that

Among all the retinue of the Baron, however, none were found to doubt the ardor of that extraordinary affection which existed on the part of the young nobleman for the fiery qualities of his horse; at least, none but an insignificant and misshapen little page, whose deformities were in everybody’s way, and...