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 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 Byron…took 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 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
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 ('
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'
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 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's
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
'Gracious heaven! What a prostitution!' James Kirke Paulding ends his
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
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