idealization unworkable. In plantation isolation, the extremes of differences were blurred in an odd promiscuity, where those who were supposedly inferior became absolutely necessary to those who imagined themselves superior.
If being master or mistress was so addictive a pleasure that the slave as ultimate possession (what Edgar Allan Poe in his review of James Kirke Paulding's 1836 Slavery in the United States praised as dependent upon, indeed goaded by, the use of the word 'my,' that 'language of affectionate appropriation') became a necessary part of the master's or mistress's identity, then we are up against a situation where the terms of exclusivity or control, proclaimed and repeated, are somehow confounded by the facts of slavery. What happens to such words as 'power,' 'purity,' 'love,' or 'filth' when, as an anonymous planter from Saint-Domingue put it, you have 'tasted the pleasures of a nearly absolute domination'?
The development of romance in the United States was linked in unsettling ways to the business of race. Out of the ground of bondage, the curse of slavery, and the fear of 'servile war' came a twisted sentimentality, a cruel analytic of 'love' in the New World: a conceit of counterfeit of intimacy. So Herman Melville in Moby- Dick (1851) presented Ishmael and the cannibal Queequeg locked in a marital embrace. In Pierre (1852) the dark, mysterious Isabel and Pierre perform the spectacle of husband and wife, finally to be reciprocally neutered in a stony apocalypse. In Benito Cereno (1856) Don Benito and Babo act out a masquerade of servitude and attachment that -90- Melville will take to its most alarming extreme in the negative romance Bartleby, the Scrivener (1856). Poe's Eureka (1848) ends with an apocalypse startling in its eroticism: 'a novel Universe swelling into existence and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart divine.' The atoms in the intensity of their 'spiritual passion,' in their 'appetite for oneness,' will at last 'flash…into a common embrace.' This essay on the 'Material and Spiritual Universe' Poe called a 'Romance.'
Speaking about the epic adventures of fugitive slaves in his lecture The American Scholar (delivered 1849), Theodore Parker declared that 'all the original romance of Americans is in them, not in the white man's novel.' The facts of slave life, once turned into heroic and sentimental romances, turned negroes into matter for idealization. Critics as diverse as Winthrop Jordan, William Andrews, Eric Sundquist, and Gillian Brown have noted how the cult of sentiment with its emphasis on self-denial, piety, and pathos signaled a turn away from the ethical problems of slavery. Further, like the idealization of women, which narrowed their realm to the domestic haven of home — a pristine place of comfort and compensation — the conversion of the negro into a figure for romance or a call to formal lament turned the oppressed, whether slave or ex-slave, man or woman, into an object in someone else's story, deprived of the possibility of significant action. The very question of love, as Ann Douglas argued in The Feminization of American Culture (1977), had to be de-natured when both ministers and ladies found themselves marginalized and awash in a language of spirit that allowed another reality to perpetuate itself. While Sarah Hale of Godey's Lady's Book celebrated the powers of feminizing and angelic 'influence' on the brute, money-making men, the divide between those who wielded the terms of mastery and power and those who were busy sanctifying, serving, and suffering increased.
'What then is the American, this new man?' To answer St. John de Crèvecoeur's question in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) demands that we recognize that the Declaration of Independence always meant independence for white men only: an exclusion implied in the title of Lydia Maria Child's essay, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833). A Calvinist fear of pol-91- lution and dread of the flesh would find ready objects and necessary victims in those marginalized by the curse of color: the blackness that marked for the racist imagination depravity and corruption.
In the first half of the nineteenth century more Africans than Europeans arrived in the Americas. William Bird wrote to Lord Eymons as early as 1732: 'They import so many Negros hither, that I fear this Colony will some time or other be confirmed by the Name of New Guinea.' It is therefore not surprising when reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Custom-House (the preface to The Scarlet Letter [1850]) to note that he describes the street running through the old town of Salem as having 'Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other.' In 'Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migration: Some Comparisons,' The American Historical Review (April 1983), David Eltis writes: 'In every year from about the mid- sixteenth century to 1831, more Africans than Europeans quite likely came to the Americas, and not until the second wave of mass migration began in the 1880s did the sum of that European immigration start to match and then exceed the cumulative influx from Africa…. In terms of immigration alone, then, America was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the nineteenth century.'
The revolution in Saint-Domingue (1791–1804) — the only successful slave revolt in the New World — forced the call for 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' to crash hard upon the facts of Property, Labor, and Race. For Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), as for other apologists of Empire, the emancipating year of 1789 turned the French into 'a nation of low-born servile wretches.' The colonists of Saint-Domingue had been proved right. That one could speak freedom for all humans, no matter the color of the skin, did mean 'the end of Saint-Domingue.' What might have remained vague ('The rights of men,' Burke claimed, 'are in a sort of middle'), once on the soil of Saint-Domingue became quite clear. When mulatto and black began to compete for pieces of 'republican' entitlement, race, what Aimé Césaire has called 'the terrifying negro problem,' would explode what might have remained abstract, safe, or static.
In the United States the first successful slave revolution in the New -92- World qualified the 'democracy' of the 'Founding Fathers' and gave substance to the specter of the racial Armageddon prophesied by Thomas Jefferson in his 1781 Notes on the State of Virginia. 'Deeprooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will…produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extinction of one or the other race.' Thomas Carlyle's 'African Haiti' — 'black without remedy…. a monition to the world' — and reported scenes of vengeance would haunt those proslavery writers who sought to prove the deep bonds of affection between masters and their slaves: a compelling empathy and disciplined love that no 'crude' or 'fanatic' abolitionist could understand.
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.
Let us try to give a history to the dark side of Poe's romance. On June 22, 1815, according to The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe (1987): 'John Allan writes Charles Ellis to sell Scipio, a slave, for $600 and to hire out others at $50 a year.' On December 10, 1829, two years after Poe left the Allan household, Poe acted as agent for Maria Clemm of Baltimore in the sale of a slave named Edwin to Henry Ridgway for a term of nine years. In the Baltimore Sun (April 6, 1940), May Garrettson Evans begins her article by explaining that 'a Baltimore man who wishes his name withheld quite by chance came across an old document relating to Edgar Allan Poe, which seems thus far to have entirely escaped the poet's biographers.' It is easy to understand why a Baltimore gentleman might want to remain unnamed as he provides information that
