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 Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia (1835-38), he corresponded with Thomas R. Dew, professor of history at William and Mary College, author of the Vindication of Perpetual Slavery (1836), and he published an introductory note to Thomas R. Dew's "Address" delivered at the College on October 10, 1836. In the April 1836 issue of the magazine a review of two books on slavery appeared, known as the "PauldingDrayton Review." As Bernard Rosenthal writes in "Poe, Slavery, and the Southern Literary Messenger: A Reexamination," in Poe Studies (December 1974), his excellent argument for Poe's authorship of this contested document, the review was traditionally assumed to have been written by Poe. The essay was included in J ames Harrison's Virginia edition, but in 1941 and subsequently, some scholars claimed that the review had been "misattributed" to Poe and identified Nathaniel Beverley Tucker as author. The review is excluded from Essays and Reviews in the Library of America edition of Poe's work.
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 Slavery in the United States and an anonymous -96- work, The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists. The review appeared the same year as Lydia Maria Child's Anti-Slavery Catechism (1836). What I have argued about Poe's defiance of masculine disempowering of women is confounded by the question of slavery. Here, Poe produces straight the language of affection and subservience he seems to hyperbolize and mock when imaging women. The bond between master and slave that Poe portrays reads like a case of pietism gone wild.
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 upheavaclass="underline" "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 Hard Facts (1985). "We speak of the moral influences flowing from the relation of master and slave, and the moral feelings engendered and cultivated by it." Poe depends for his lesson about this relation on 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":