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 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 Times Literary Supplement in 1916, can be "tedious" and "discreditable," languishing in an "atmosphere…of 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.
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 Landor's Cottage (1849), when the narrator introduces "Annie," the angel of the house: "So intense an expression of romance…had 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."