those who prefer to monumentalize a rarefied Poe would prefer to ignore.
Edgar A. Poe agent for Maria Clemm of Baltimore City and County and State of Maryland, for and in consideration of the sum of forty dollars in hand paid by Henry Ridgway of Baltimore City at or before the sealing and delivery of these presents the receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged have granted, bargained and sold by these presents do grant bargain and sell unto the said Henry Ridgway his executors administrators and assigns a negro man named Edwin age twenty one years on the first day of March next to serve until he shall arrive to the age of thirty years no longer.
Poe was then awaiting the time for his entrance to West Point and had already written his early 'romantic' poems, including 'Al Aaraaf,' 'Tamerlane,' 'To the River — ,' 'A Dream,' and 'Fairyland.'
What happens if we add the despotism of slavery to the cult of sentiment: to Poe's 'fair sex' and the 'romance' she appears to demand? Race remains crucial to Poe's treatment of women and 'womanliness.' For Poe understood the matter of idealization better than most of his contemporaries. He knew how praise, or the sanc-94- tifying of women, can become easy handmaid to a deadly, conservative ideology. For mystification is always a matter of power: a decreeing subject ordains the terms for a silenced object to attain the status, or stasis, of myth. The master makes the myth through which the other must seek his or her identity.
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
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 sketch
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. If Poe's 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. -95-
What happened to the tough, sometimes delirious skepticism of the critic of a society 'sunk in feeling,' when he turned to an institution that sustained itself by the most incredible mystifications? What were the effects of Poe's characterization of Jupiter in 'The Gold Bug' (1843) or the fiendish 'brute' whose shrill 'jabberings' are unidentifiable — the terribly marked deeds of the 'OurangOutang' driven wild by 'the dreaded whip' in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) — on readers for and against human ownership?
When Poe was an editor of the
If we place Poe in his historical and social context, reread his comments on Longfellow's Poems 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. I now turn to what could be called Poe's most disturbing, because most authentic, 'love poem,' his review of James Kirke Paulding's
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; 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.'
Writing in 1836, Poe no doubt refers to the slave revolt of 1831-32 in Jamaica, also known as the Christmas Rebellion of 1831-32, the Baptist 'War,' or the Sam Sharpe Insurrection, involving between 18,000 and 50,000 slaves and their sympathizers over five parishes in North and North-Central Jamaica. The revolt lasted only ten days — December 28, 1831, to January 5, 1832. At the end, fourteen whites were dead and 312 slaves executed, with over 1000 shot in battle or while fleeing. What Poe leaves unsaid is significant. He says nothing about the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831, too unspeakable to mention, perhaps because it took place too close to home in Southampton, Virginia. -97-
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 or deny 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 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 in
