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 Slavery in the United States. Paul-99- Paul- argues that "the domestic relations of the master and slave are of a more familiar, confidential, and even respectful character, than those of the employer and hireling elsewhere." He praises the reciprocal and natural attachment, "this state of feeling, which a Southern life and education can only give," and concludes: "It is often the case, that the children of the domestic servants become pets in the house, and the playmates of the white children of the family." But Poe is less interested in what Southerners claimed as a type of familial proprietorship — feelings that could elevate or mask what was merely the best use of valuable property — than in elucidating a gothic tale of excessive obedience, reminiscent of Caleb Williams's confession to Falkland: "Sir, I could die to serve you!"
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 ("ce que quel qu'un, quelque chose a, possède a l'exclusion de tout autre"), returns us to Poe's romance. For the remainder of the review gets its force from two proofs for "this school of feeling": in the sickroom and on the deathbed. As Poe says, "In this school we have witnessed scenes at which even the hard heart of a thorough bred philanthropist would melt."
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" mistress. Poe repeats the words of the faithful, "crouched down at the door, listening for the groans of the sufferer." Ordered home, she cries, "Master it ain't no use for me to go to bed, Sir. It don't do me no good, I cannot sleep, Sir."
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 Poems on Slavery (1845), Poe omits the discussion of race from his critical reviews and essays.
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 The Drama of Exile, and Other Poems in the Broadway Journal in 1845 expresses his concern about how women writers are treated when "the race of critics," as he put it, "are masculine — men." The greatest evil resulting from the absence of women critics, he explained, is that "the critical man" finds it "an unpleasant task. . 'to speak ill of a woman.'" Yet though here Poe refused to condescend to women, taking both their persons and their writings seriously, he blots out the activism of women writers who also happen to be abolitionists.
"Gracious heaven! What a prostitution!" James Kirke Paulding ends his Slavery in the United States with a warning to those women members of the abolition societies: "with all that respectful deference to the sex," he reminds them "that the appropriate sphere of women is their home, and their appropriate duties at the cradle or the fireside." For women must never forget that they are "the guardian angel of the happiness of man; his protector and mentor in childhood; his divinity in youth; his companion and solace in manhood; his benign and gentle nurse in old age."
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 Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), which Poe will review in The Literati of New York City in 1846: "There exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves, such as is expressed in the common phrase, 'Tell that to women and children.'" When Poe reviews Woman in the Nineteenth Century, he ignores Fuller's conjunction of woman and slave but praises the essay -101- as "nervous, forcible, thoughtful, suggestive, brilliant. . for all that Miss Fuller produces is entitled to those epithets — but I must say that the conclusions reached are only in part my own. Not that they are too bold, by any means — too novel, too startling, or too dangerous in their consequences." That Poe did not, or would not, make overtly the connection between women and slaves is also evident in his review of Lydia Maria Child, also in "The Literati of New York City." Throughout his praise of her poetry, there is never a reference to her well-known Anti-Slavery Catechism (1836), The Evils of Slavery and the Cure of Slavery (1836), or An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), even though he begins by noting — without naming — those compositions by which she has "acquired a just celebrity." He concludes by merely saying: I need scarcely add that she has always been distinguished for her energetic and active philanthropy."