Color becomes Poe's subject, as in the celebrated description of the water of Tsalaclass="underline" not black, not white, but "not colourless: nor was it of any one uniform colour — presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk." If the justification of slavery depended on the curse of color as sign of inferiority — what Jefferson stressed as the "real distinction which nature has made" — this story depends upon a crisis of color. Even though the waters manifest an uncommon variability of color, upon closer examination Pym discovers that "the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue. . these veins did not commingle."
Without pushing too far the problematic symbolic construction of a totalizing category called race in this romance, I turn to the final entries in Pym's narrative, before his fall into the vacancy of whiteness. Moving quickly southward, Pym, Peters, and the black-teethed Nu-Nu are absorbed by an inexplicable whitening: the warm water -108- has a "milky hue"; a "fine white powder, resembling ashes" falls over the canoe; another white animal floats by. In the apocalyptic end, they are in between a "sullen darkness" and "milky depths." Then the darkness spreads except for the "veil" or "curtain" of whiteness. Pym's final vision — the mysterious "shrouded human figure" with a complexion "of the perfect whiteness of snow" — has been described as God, Lord of Death, or the "Deity of Eureka," ushering all things into the final Unity. However we choose to interpret the figure, the ultimate revelation of light becomes deadly, absorbing the previous nuances of shadow or darkness.
In the "Note" that follows Pym's death and the abrupt end of his story, the unnamed writer refers to "the most faintly-detailed incidents of the narrative." Attempting an interpretation of the figures of the chasms on the island of Tsalal, he moves his reader toward "The region of the south." The arm of the '"most northwardly' of the figures" is "outstretched towards the south," and the displaced Virginian Poe concludes with a litany on white: "the carcass of the i animal picked up at se. . the shuddering exclamation of the captive Tsalalian upon encountering the white materials in possession of Mr. Pym. . the shriek of the swift-flying, white, and gigantic birds which had issued from the vapoury white curtain of the South. Nothing white was to be found at Tsalal." And in the region beyond, Poe suggests we can know nothing. Yet, perhaps his Southern readers, especially those Virginians who had followed closely the debates about slavery in the Virginia Legislature in 1831-32, would not be immune to the final effect of this strange commentary on the vicissitudes of white power. The unaccountable and prophetic final sentence of the "Note" reads: "I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock." What G. R. Thompson in Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973) calls a divine and "perverse vengeance for some unknown offense," no doubt recalled for some readers the known offense of slavery, and the fears of some Southerners, like Jefferson and Poe, that God's judgment would not be stayed, that the inevitable catastrophe is at hand.
Joan Dayan
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Domesticity and Fiction
Literary histories have employed a variety of terms to describe the novels written by women in the United States during the middle decades of the nineteenth century: the sentimental novel, the female Bildungsroman, the domestic novel. This proliferation of terms is useful, if for no other reason, because it suggests that women novelists of the period were hardly the undifferentiated mass that Nathaniel Hawthorne represented them as being when (rankled by the success of the women novelists with whom he competed for the public's attention) he complained to his publisher that "America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women."
Although rakish characters like Charles Morgeson in Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons (1862) and St. Elmo in Augusta Evans Wilson's St. Elmo (1867) owe more than a little to Samuel Richardson, the seduction plot so prominent in the early sentimental fiction intrudes only occasionally in women's novels published after 1820. Female Bildungsroman more adequately describes much of this fiction. Yet, while Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Martha Finley's Elsie Dinsmore (1867) are exemplary instances of the novel of female development, Caroline Lee Hentz's Linda (1850) and E. D. E. N. Southworrh's The Hidden Hand (1859) flaunt the realist conventions of the Bildungsroman and might be more accurately classified as female picaresque or sensation fiction. Finally, to call women's popular fiction "domestic novels" is also somewhat misleading. Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Home (1835) is little more than a fictionalized treatise on housekeeping and child-rearing, but -110- Fanny Fern's semiautobiographical Ruth Hall (1855) records the adventures of a woman whose domestic ties have been severed and Caroline Chesebro's Isa: A Pilgrimage (1852) tells the story of a radical feminist who lives with a man to whom she is not married.
"Women's novels" might be the only rubric elastic enough to encompass the diversity within this literature. But since historically the gender distinction has worked at the expense of women writers (as Hawthorne's comment suggests), we now must wield it very carefully. Arguably, the only way to avoid inadvertent replication of the invidious nineteenth-century gender distinction would be to dispense with the category of "women writers" altogether. And yet, entirely abandoning this category of analysis seems unwise at this particular historic juncture. Literary historians, accepting Hawthorne's comments about scribbling women at face value, have assumed that women novelists of the period do not merit serious study, and hence these writers languish in undeserved obscurity. Given that women novelists have been excluded as a class, feminist literary histories must include them as a class — albeit with the understanding that the category of "women novelists" intervenes rather than describes, which is to say that it is used provisionally to redress strategic omissions in the scholarship rather than used to suggest either that women's novels are all the same or that they are necessarily different from men's novels.
One could argue that the ill-repute of mid-century novels by women owes less to their individual literary infelicities than to the rhetorical uses toward which scholars attempting to define the classic tradition of the novel have deployed them. Acts of definition are necessarily acts of differentiation. The highly contingent process of defining a classic tradition in part involved distinguishing it from what is not the classic tradition. By aligning the distinction they produced between canonical and noncanonical with gender difference, scholars could give that distinction the look of a difference found in nature (as it were) rather than in the opinions of mere human beings. Literary historians evolved a complex history of nineteenth-century culture in which they associated femininity with the passive reproduction of the status quo and masculinity with the willful transgression of norms. In defining the classic tradition they excluded not just -111- women but also male novelists whom they perceived as capitulating to the conventional, and they exalted those male novelists who most visibly thematized their own defiance of cultural expectations.