Paul Lewis

A “Wild”and “Homely Narrative”:

How out of error shall we fabricate truth? and delighted in describing Poe’s experiments with
-Poe, Mapnalia, December 1844 sustaining mystery. The narrators of such stories as
To what extent are Poe’sexpressed views properly his own? “Ligeia” (1838), “The Fall of the House of Usher“
What, if anything, can be deduced from Poe’s silences? (1839), and “The Black Cat” (1843) were judged to
-Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses be variously unreliable: hallucinatory, lacking in self-
knowledge, confused about how the world operates,
By focusing attention on color relations (emphasiz- unable to comprehend the motivations of other
ing black, white, and red), on settings within the people, and quite possibly duplicitous. Within the
domestic sphere (involving ill-fated marriages), and formalist ideal of the selfcontained work, readers were
on the centrality of narrators whose deviations situ- left to wonder about the status of such “events”as the
ate them in relation to reform ideology, historicist return of Madeline Usher and Ligeia from the dead,
readings of Poe have in recent years sought to place the electrical storm at the end of “Usher,” and-in
his gothic fiction in the world of antebellum contes- the tale under particular consideration here-the
tation. To what extent was Poe racist or sexist?What formation of a gallows on the head of a cat. The tricks
did he have to say about the effects of alcohol or formalists reveled in uncovering concerned Poe’s
narcotics? About death and corpses? About the na- deployment of overwrought, intoxicated, and per-
ture of madness and the need for prison or asylum verse narrators whose unreliability was seen as creat-
reform? For all the excitement such questions raise ing endless circles of mystery. Even critics who wrote
about the possibilities of contextualizing Poe, who essays claiming to have discovered what really h a p
can seem the least American of our early authors, pens in one of these stories often noted Poe’s artful
there is a danger that the focus on antebellum Poe avoidance of resolution and, in effect, thought of
will obscure his originality. The task for historicist themselves asjoining Poe and his characters in their
critics, as defined by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen high-stakes interpretive games.
Rachman in their introduction to The American Face The present reading of “The Black Cat” as both a
ofEdgurAZZun Poe, is to “restore his writings to [their] conventional and yet provocatively unusual tale of the
cultural milieu”while taking full account of “the pro- 1840s seeks to preserve this sense of Poe as a gothic
cess by which Poe’s fictions simultaneously attempt innovator in the context of new historical revelations.
to abstract themselves from and allude to the par- Poe’s first readers-who were familiar with forthright
ticulars of their cultural moment.”l treatments of slavery and poverty, with reform stories
Fifty years of formalist readings culminating, per- about abusive masters, cruel husbands, intemperate
haps, in the work of G. R. Thompson in the 1970s drinkers, or impoverished criminals in which details
arrived at a Poe whose gothic tales were seen as edgy, of plot, characterization, mood, and setting inevita-
speculative, multilayered, ambiguous, and ironic. bly supported political, social, or moral theses-may
“Flatstatements. . .in Poe,” Thompson insisted, “are well have found “The Black Cat” unsettling in its un-
only seeming. Almost everything that Poe wrote is willingness to engage in argument not only about race
qualified by, indeed controlled by, a prevailing du- and gender but also about poverty and class. The
plicity or irony.”2Guided by New Critical sensitivity nonappearance of such arguments, the sense that
to narrative subjectivity, this approach found an un- confusion and error preside where coherence and
reliable teller at the center of the first-person tales direction are expected, creates a palpable void, a si-

1
lence that defines Poe’s gothic sensibility. The dan- to identify cultural theses undermine. The subjects
ger is that historicist readings of the gothic tales may on which Poe touches in this tale arrived on his writ-
sacrifice this narrative indeterminacy to the eureka ing table preanalyzed, drenched in didacticism.
impulse toward discovering theses that Poe labored, Though understandable evil amenable to personal
often in defiance of his moralistic contemporaries, or political reform (such as excessive drinking, race-
to subvert. Since gothic stories depend on the viola- based hostility, and domestic violence directed toward
tion of culturally defined taboos, the critical balance wives, children, or animals) can be sad or alarming,
required is particularly challenging. Historicist read- Poe understood the value of inexplicable evil to tales
ings of these moments of violation need to recover of t e r r ~ rTo
. ~ sustain this sense of the inexplicable,
contexts (the culturally specific norms, rules, or prac- Poe has his narrator offer three contending and per-
tices that the works take up) without implying that haps equally unconvincing explanations of his
stories depicting deviation from “proper” behavior crimes-based on ideas about intemperance, perver-
necessarily participate in a serious discussion of un- sity, and demonic seduction-each loaded with rich
derlying moral or political issues. resonances of anxiety and terror in the antebellum
Coming from different perspectives, Terence period. Beyond these, and serving as an overarching
Whalen and David S. Reynolds have sought to draw source of terror, is the failure of the narrator himself
the line between historicizing and distorting Poe. The to fit snugly into a single established category and
Poe Whalen describes was above all a professional function as an illustrative e ~ a m p l eEven
. ~ Reynolds’s
writer and editor trying to advance by adhering to a observation-that “The Black Cat” sustains a delicate
principle of “literary neutrality”-“attempt [ing] to balance by appealing to images of the “dark-temper-
expel politics from the literary commodity as a means ance tradition” while avoiding “an explicit moral
message” or “didactic statement”6-may not go quite
to ensure national marketability.” The Poe Reynolds
far enough in describing a story that undercuts all
describes, like the other canonical writers discussed
in Beneath the American Renaissance, was a genius who statements and messages.
deployed images from contemporary popular culture Still, other historicist readings of the tale have
while remaining at a distance from the arguments been less careful than Reynolds’s in preserving a sense
these images were designed to a d ~ a n c eThe
. ~ temp of Poe’s avoidance of argument. As a story about a
tation for New Historicists has been to see the frame white man who, while professing his benevolence, first
they uncover not just as relevant but as decisive or tortures and hangs his cat and then murders his wife,
definitive, as the context that provides hitherto un- “The Black Cat” has been read in relation to antebel-
discovered resolutions to the mysteries of the tales. lum discourse on class, race, crime, and reform.
Too frequently this has obscured the difference be- Ground-breaking articles by Lesley Ginsberg and T. J.
tween theme (or motif) and thesis and, in the most Matheson illustrate both the importance and the
egregious cases to which I will return at the end of challenges of historicizing Poe. By situating “The
this essay, has led critics to identify a political pur- Black Cat” in the context of contemporary treatments
pose (Teresa A. Goddu) or worldview (Mark Ed- of the Nat Turner rebellion, pro- and antislaveryvaria-
mundson) expressed by American gothicism that can tions of the animal/slave association, and discussions
be found in or traced back to Poe’s dark tales. of domestic tyranny and abuse, Ginsberg’s informa-
tive article uncovers important frames of contempo-
Taming the Cat
raneous reference and resonance. But Ginsberg’s
Focusing on “The Black Cat,” now regarded as one desire to connect Poe’s treatment of pet abuse with
of Poe’s most socially grounded stories-specifically discourses of advocacy and advice leads her unneces-
on its treatment of race, intemperance, and poverty- sarily beyond evocative references to find positions
should allow us to see both how much effort Poe on slavery and domestic violence. In this way Ginsberg
needed to put into avoiding argumentative coherence insists that Poe deploys images and stories about the
in his gothic work and how much this avoidance con- abuse of slaves, pets, and wives familiar to the read-
tributes to effect. I do not so much want to offer an- ers of such writers as T. D. Weld, Catharine Maria
other ambiguous reading of this much-analyzed story Sedgwick, and Lydia Maria Child-and to similar
as to align myself with critics who have taken this ap- ends: to “highligh [t] the dangers of familial tyranny,”
proach and highlight what some readings that seek praise “parents who wielded their powers with dis-

2
cretion,” and “make the link between slavery and pet both in dreaming and wakeful states. No doubt, any
ownership explicit.”’ But while animal abusers in the number of alternative decisions might have changed
works of these authors may, as Ginsberg suggests, be the outcome: had the narrator resisted the tempta-
as culpable as their pets are innocent, Poe’s violent tion to adopt a stray pet, had he kept potential in-
narrator is interacting with an animal or animals struments of cruelty (knives and axes) in an outbuild-
whose innocence is impossible to assess. ing, had he even put Pluto out of doors at night-all
If we consider parallel moments in “The Black workable solutions that might well have been offered
Cat” and The Mother’s Book by Child (1831), one of by the practical Mrs. Child-calamity might have been
the works Ginsberg discusses, the quite different in- avoided.
tentions become clear. In first describing and then Rather than pointing directly to practical, moral,
discussing an episode of pet abuse in her chapter on or political remedies, the echoes of domestic dis-
developing a child’s affections, Child insists that courses in “The Black Cat” add potency to the effects
“ [k]indness toward animals is of great importance.” produced by a world imploding through a failing
The illustrative example begins with a two-year-old process of thought and feeling, the inadequacy of
boy pulling a kitten’s tail while the “mother laugh[s] commonsense advice contributing to the sense of
very heartily.”When the exasperated kitten claws her collapse. For this reason, when Ginsberg argues for
tormentor, the mother pampers her son and pun- the potent return of repressed materials associated
ishes the cat. Not surprisingly, Child turns directly with power relations in the story, she finds a better
from narrative to lesson, noting that, “[iln the first formulation than when she suggests that the tale ar-
place, the child was encouraged in cruelty, [while] gues for positions. For if, as Ginsberg suggests, the
[i]n the next place, the kitten was struck for defend- tale arrives at “an indictment of the dehumanizing
ing herself; [which] was an injustice to the injured effects of both domestic slavery and antebellum fam-
animal, and a lesson of tyranny to the boy.”8 ily government,”1° it could do so only by sacrificing
Poe’s narrator moves through similar moments the intensity nurtured by ambiguity (who is tortur-
of interaction with his cat(s), the second of which, ing whom in the story?) to the reassuring resolutions
he claims, torments him by day and night. During of coherence (be a good boy and stop abusing your
the day, it follows him with pets).
a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the reader Ginsberg may well be right in suggesting that the
comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my narrator’s suspiciously motiveless crimes might have
chair, or spring upon my knees, covering me with its loath- called to mind similar treatments of the Nat Turner
some caresses. If I arose to walk it would get between my rebellion in Southern newspapers as oddly lacking
feet and thus nearly throw me down, or, fastening its long in purpose, but how would this association have
and sharp claws in my dress, clamber, in this manner, to played out for Poe’s readers? Since the cat, rather
my b r e a ~ t . ~ than the white narrator, would seem to be associated
At night, he reports, he is abruptly awakened “hourly, with Turner, would not the connection evoke the re-
from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot pressed fear of slave revolt more than the fear of the
breath of the thing upon [his] face, and its vast slave owner’s cruelty? Beyond this, the narrator’s in-
weight-an incarnate Night-Mare that [he] ha[s] no sistence that he does not know how to interpret his
power to shake off-incumbent eternally upon [his] own downfall stands in stark contrast to the many
hurt” (“BC,”603). Perhaps this homicidal man is not safely reasoned antebellum tracts and novels written
only a product of poor nurture but also a model of from the point of view of reformed sinners. By insist-
everything a husband, or pet owner, or white man ing that, in its association with the Turner uprising
should not be. But Poe avoids making these points and more broadly with familiar images of antebel-
by turning common sentimental assumptions about lum cruelty, “The Black Cat” offers progressive cul-
kindness and cruelty (including the narrator and his tural and political arguments, Ginsberg simplifies the
wife’s love of animals) into sources of fear, just as he range of possible responses that would have de-
has his narrator do with the familiar feline behavior pended and varied on the basis of a given reader’s
of his cat(s). We are left to wonder whether he has point of view and perceptions. Doing so, she finds
come to find the normally intrusive and clawing be- herself having to explain why an aspiring Southern
havior of his cats objectionable or is being haunted gentleman would have advanced positions that sound

3
so much like those of a liberal feminist critic writing deemable, unreformable “Black Cat” narrator
in the 1990s.” serves-what effect unfathomable evil has in the work.
To serve as an apt example in a counterargument
The difficulty of identifjmg racial motifs in a story
about intemperance, his motivations and utter cul-
like “The Black Cat” without seeing them as argu-
pability would need to be established beyond any
mentative is apparent even in Leland S. Person’s con-
doubt; only this would render the questions Matheson
tribution to the new collection Romancing the Shadow:
offers plausibly rhetorical. Is the narrator unusually
Poe and Race, edited byJ. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane
sensitive? If he were detoxified, would he change? Is
Weissberg. Determined not to allegorize characters
he seduced by demonic forces?
like the cat(s) into slaves, in “Poe’s Philosophy of
Amalgamation: Reading Racism in the Tales,” Per- To demonstrate that Poe wants readers to
son nonetheless finds Poe using racial images to “emerge” from the tale with a clear sense of the
“destabiliz[el the psychological constructs of white narrator’s evil as the source of his d ~ w n f a l l , to
’ ~ es-
male racism” in “The Black Cat” and other works. tablish that the story arrives at a “last analysis,”
While Person argues persuasively for the resonance Matheson needs to overemphasize the narrator’s de-
of white insecurity (as seen in contemporaneous anxi- liberate construction of an exculpatory story, one he
eties about such things as albino blacks and slave re- only pretends not to comprehend himself, and
volts) in “The Black Cat,” he is on surer ground when underemphasize the possible role of the supernatu-
h e sees Poe as “play[ing] to fears” at these moments ra1.I6 The second cat, Matheson argues, does “noth-
than when h e arrives at the view that the story ing” to advance the narrator’s moral undoing. And
“‘counters racist ideology and the racialist scientific yet the cat not only cries out from inside the wall but
knowledge structure.”’l* also triggers the murder by getting underfoot at just
Discussing the story in relation to reform dis- the right/wrong time.” Even if we accept Matheson’s
course, T.J. Matheson argues that it offers a “critique conclusion that the narrator is incurably and irre-
of temperance literature.”13According to Matheson, deemably depraved, the primary effect of this would
Poe was well aware of the expanding body of writing appear to be not so much a refutation of temperance
in the 1830s and 1840s-fictional and nonfictional, ideology as the depiction of a moral monster, a char-
sentimental and medical-that increasingly sought acter whose viciously destructive and self-destructive
to portray alcoholics in general and alcoholic crimi- propensities are meant, above all, to maximize our
nals in particular as victims of a disease that could be fear. The distinction is significant because it explains
cured, not “moral monsters” deserving social condem- why Poe would want to sustain ambiguous interpre-
nation. Whereas such contemporaries as Benjamin tive possibilities, frames of reference (perversity,
Rush, Daniel Drake, and T. S. Arthur urged forgive- supernaturalism, intemperance) that provide collat-
ness and treatment, Poe is seen as arguing the oppo- eral sources of terror.
site side of the issue, presenting us with “a cold- Poe’s resort to the supernatural in “The Black Cat”
blooded and sadistic killer who in the last analysis is falls somewhere between the demonic seduction plot
guilty as charged”: used famously in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s novel The
Was it true that drunkards tended to possess more than Monk (1795) and the illness and recovery plot devel-
normal sensitivity? Were they indeed enthralled by an ex- oped in works like T. S. Arthur’s “Manwith the Poker,”
ternal, demonic power which aloneturned them into moral one of the temperance tales in Six Nights with the Wash-
monsters? Was the mere removal of alcohol from their sys- ingtonians (1842). In the former, at Satan’s bidding,
tems all it took to make them sane and normal again? If a fiend assumes the form of a beautiful young woman,
“TheBlack Cat” is any indication,Poe’s answer to all these disguises herself as a novitiate, seduces the monk
questions was a resounding “No.” Ambrosio, and then encourages him to commit rape,
To agree with popular writers on alcohol abuse, murder, and matricide. In the latter, a reformed
Matheson notes, Poe would have had to “sacrifice fi- drunkard recounts his moral, financial, and mental
delity to the full truth.”14 But leaving aside whether decline-how drinking caused him to sink into de-
we should expect fidelity to the truth to be an objec- pravity and debt. At his nadir, he began to halluci-
tive in the work of a writer/critic who clung to the nate, seeing “‘serpents and dragons, and monsters
notion that short stories should privilege effect over of all shapes, coming. . . with hellish delight towards
theme, we need to focus on what purpose the unre- [him] .”’I8 But when this narrator told other people

4
about his visions, they explained that he was suffer- We can follow Poe’s avoidance of argument in
ing from “Mania-a-Potu”;soon after this, he gave up “The Black Cat” by concentrating on three strategies
alcohol, his visions vanished, and he was reformed. of evasion: first, avoiding- didactic frames familiar to
In contrast, the sustained nature of the “Black Cat” readers of sentimental fiction; second, minimizing
narrator’s visions, the fact that his wife is said to have consideration of the narrator’s victims and their
pointed out the forming gallows on the second cat’s plight; and finally, all but ignoring the economic con-
head, and especially the lack of other characters who sequences of his moral decline. All of these play out
could put his frenzied conclusions into more ratio- in a cultural frame that has escaped notice until now:
nal perspective all contribute to a lack of clarity about the charitable home visit. The first strategy must have
relations in the tale. Does the cat then play Matilda seemed jarring to Poe’s contemporaries; far more
(Lewis’s fiendish seductress) to the Poe narrator’s typical was the approach adopted by Walt Whitman
monk? Or is the reborn cat a deliberate fabrication in Franklin Evans; or; The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times
of the narrator’s or a hallucination induced by de- (1842),and perhaps later regretted. Narrated, like
lirium tremens? “TheBlack Cat,”in first person, Whitman’s novel tells
No doubt Poe held opinions about temperance the very different and more conventional story of a
reform efforts and his own use of alcohol, but in “The mournful, reformed, but previously self-destructive
Black Cat” he appears to be interested in disturbing drunkard who, also unlike Poe’s narrator, links every
and terrifying his audience in part by undermining event to an obvious point about the seductive allure
approaches to intemperance familiar to readers of or disastrous consequences of alcohol drinking or the
reform fiction. His intention seems particularly evi- proper response to the inebriate. For readers who
dent in the way alcoholism functions as only one of might miss one of these easily grasped and multiply
the shifting frames that never quite contain or even illustrated ideas, Whitman provides direct addresses
adequately describe the narrator. Though early in the designed to highlight them before, during, and after
story the narrator exclaims, “for what disease is like the related plot details unfold. At the outset of his
Alcohol!” elsewhere he blames “the hideous beast narrative, Evans is warned by an old merchant to avoid
whose craft had seduced [him] into murder” and “the drinking because it can lead to poverty and early
spirit of PERVERSENESS” (“BC,” 598, 606, 599). death. “The subsequent pages,” Evans insists, “will
Within the selfcontained narrative, how can we fi- prove the wisdom of his warning.”At one point Evans
nally subordinate one of these theories to another? takes an early form of the temperance pledge in which
If there is a truth here, it would appear to be about the inebriate promises to refrain from drinking hard,
the failure or collapse of argument or understand- but not all, liquor. Even before we see how this leads
ing as a cause of doom. No doubt the narrator drinks him back into folly, he provides the following fore-
to excess, but he also acts out of a perverse fear of cast:
intimacy, as Christopher Benfey observes, both lov- It will be seen in the remaining chapters of my narrative
ing and hating his pets, wife, and self.lg Is there a whether the Old Pledge was sufficient to remove the dan-
single cause here? Are we as readers meant to supply gers which may be apprehended from habits of intemper-
the “intellect . . . [that] reduce[s] [the narrator’s] ance. For, though I had now reformed from my hitherto
phantasm to the common-place” (“BC,” 597)? We evil courses, and had always subsequently kept the integ-
rity of my promise, I think it will be allowed that the fruits
should proceed with care, since the effort to see him
of temperance were not fully reaped by me in that portion
only as a self-destructive and utterly depraved alco- of my life which I am now going to transcribe.
holic, however well elaborated or contextualized,
implodes other possibilities. More broadly, Poe’s de- In the middle of his darkest, most criminal escapades,
ployment of the familiar figure of the alcoholic as Evans stops to remind us of his motivation: “I think
criminal may allow him to exploit prevalent anxieties that by laying before [readers] a candid relation of
that were, as Matheson shows, being calmed by tem- the dangers which have involved me, and the temp-
perance ideology, but without mounting an argument tations which have seduced me aside, the narrative
in defense of a version of the “full truth.” And we can may act as a beacon light, guiding their feet from the
ask why Poe, at least occasionally an intemperate same fearful hazards.”After he is arrested for his role
drinker himself, should want to argue against a posi- in an attempted robbery, Evans pauses to note, “It
tion that would exculpate not only his homicidal were a stale homily were I to stay here and remark
drunkard but himself. upon the easy road from intemperance to crime,”

5
but then goes on to make this point for a long para- of view-the level of hostility expressed in her refer-
graph.*O In taking up these materials in “The Black ences to the forming of a gallows on the second cat’s
Cat,” Poe must have seen the inevitable conflict be- head, for instance-is unreadable. In “The Drunk-
tween such “stale homilies” and the vivid depiction ard’s Wife,” every indignity (the wife’s being com-
of a criminal mind. pelled to go with her intoxicated husband to a social
According to Carol Mattingly, temperance rheto- event at which he disgraces himself, or her having to
ric consistently calls attention to the abuse inflicted watch as he loses patients and income) is lingered
by intoxicated men, calling on listeners and readers over with rhetorical intensity. As presented, Grace
to “‘look for a moment at the condition of the Harper appears to suffer more from an awkward
drunkard’s wife and children.”’*l Such looks are then evening out than the wife of Poe’s narrator does from
having her head split by an axe. Here is Grace:
constructed to expose the physical harm of abuse and
the impoverished state of the sufferers. Refusing to [T]o the eyelids of the distressed wife, the “sweetrestorer”
offer pointed presentations of this kind, “The Black brought not, for hours, the calm, refreshing slumber that
Cat” unnerves readers by confining them within the had for years been her nightly visitant. In vain did she strive
narrator’s claustrophobic world. The contrast with a to sink away into forgetfulness. That evening had been too
full of strange, unlooked for incidents, and she could not
conventional temperance story-such as “The
banish them from her mind. But at length, as the night
Drunkard’s Wife,”included in Arthur’s Six Nights with
waned, overwearied nature gave way, and she sunk into
the Washingtonians collection-could not be more troubled slumber, full of startling dreams.22
striking. As told by a third-person narrator, Arthur’s
tale shifts between scenes of the degradation of the With its descriptive details and heaped-up modifiers,
husband, Dr. Harper, and of long periods of grief this passage strives to build empathy for the inebriate’s
suffered by his wife, Grace-all of which serve as bea- wife. In “The Black Cat,” even the wife’s last act, in-
cons to the author’s new-pledge temperance thesis. terposing herself between the axe and the cat, is de-
In Poe’s tale, the wife’s anguish is barely noted, as in scribed without reference to anything she may have
these passages: felt or said. In recounting the act of raising the axe,
the narrator observes, simply, that the “blow was ar-
I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a
rested by the hand of [his] wife” (“BC,”603). By frus-
disposition not uncongenial with my own. (“BC,”597)
trating the expectation that domestic abuse stories
I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more re- will focus on the experiences of victims and insist on
gardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use remedies, Poe avails himself of an unusual source of
intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered disquiet or fear.
her personal violence. (“BC,”598)
“The Black Cat” also downplays the socially
This circumstance [the discovery that the second cat was
also missing an eye] . . . only endeared it to my wife, who
charged issue of poverty as a consequence of alco-
. . . possessed, in a high degree, that humanity of feeling holism in two comments. In the first of these, recall-
which had once been my distinguishing trait. (“BC,”602) ing the loss of his house by fire, the narrator says,
“My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I
My wife had called my attention, more than once, to the
resigned myself thenceforward to despair”; in the
character of the mark of white hair, of which I have spo-
ken, and which constituted the sole visible difference be-
second, he refers to the “old building which our pov-
tween the strange beast and the one I had destroyed. (“BC,” erty compelled us to inhabit” (“BC,”600,603).Read-
602) ers accustomed to demonstrated connections be-
tween intemperance, abuse, and poverty-connec-
The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of
tions seen in the anguished faces and bruised bodies
all things and of all mankind; while, from the sudden, fre-
quent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I
of victims and in detailed accounts of the family’s
now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, gradual or rapid descent into penury because of the
alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers. inebriate father’s loss Of industry-must have been
(“BC,” 603) subtly disturbed by the way Poe both assumes and
minimizes these relations in the process of focusing
With the exception of the odd howl and summa-
on and within the drunkard’s mind.
rized but never quoted comment, the narrator’s vic-
tims are difficult to hear and see, their suffering sub- Given the pervasiveness of reform ideology and
merged in his self-torturing lament. His wife’s point its inclination to find apt examples everywhere, the

6
contrast between the expectation of illustrative clar- strategy assumes that being in the presence of the
ity and the (at least comparative) murkiness of the poor-seeing what they look like and how they live,
“Black Cat” narrator’s story points to a culturally hearing what they say-will allow valid conclusions
grounded source of fear in the tale: the loss of argu- to be drawn. An 1845 AICP visitor’s manual calls on
mentative relevance. Another comparison, this one relief workers to “ascertain”the “character and con-
to Stowe’sSimon Legree, helps make the case. Every- dition” of their subjects, distinguishing between
thing about Legree-from the way he acts to the way “[tlhose who have been reduced to indigence by
he thinks and lives-defines his power as an example unavoidable causes,’’ “ [i]ndividuals who have become
of the abusive slave owner, the poor rich man, the mendicants through their own improvidence and
spiritually impoverished inebriate, the man whose vices,” and “those who are able but unwilling to
worst instincts have been indulged, indeed bloated, lab0ur.”2~
by his position as master in the slave system. In Stories told by poor folk are often included in
Legree’s demonic and therefore self-destructive treat- the visitor’s report to provide direct and clear evi-
ment of Tom and Cassie particularly, we see how al- dence of the moral qualities of the visited ~ubjects.2~
cohol compounds his monstrosity and how his evil Easy in, easy out, but imagine the difficulty a poor
can be attributed to a combination of personal expe- visitor would have in assessing the culpability of Poe’s
rience (traceable back to his failed relationship with narrator and proposing an effective remedy just af-
his mother) and institutional corruption. And this ter his house burns down and he and his wife move
clarity about causes highlights the way Stowe’s con- to the old building as they are sinking into poverty. Is
sistently Christian mythic framework always suggests he victim or victimizer? And what does he need: to
that redemption for Legree might be possible-but take the new temperance pledge, enter a group for
not while he is a brutal slave owner. In comparison to victims of the perverse, or undergo exorcism? Look-
the clarity of Legree’s moral situation (what is wrong ing back over its first decade in 1853, the AICP char-
with him and what needs to change to make him acterized the interaction between poor folk and home
right), the “Black Cat” narrator’s experiences, for all visitors in terms of moral absolutes: “If any instrumen-
their echoing of familiar images, are too contradic- tality can do [the poor] good, it is the confiding,
tory to prove a point. He is a bad example in both friendly intercourse of the educated with the unedu-
senses of the phrase. cated, the virtuous with the vicious, when it earnestly
The inebriate’snarrative, increasingly familiar in seeks the rescue of the degraded and wretched, by
the expanding body of temperance literature, figures the exercise of those kind offices, and agencies, which
more broadly in antebellum life as one kind of story Christian sympathy inspires.”*5But Poe’s deployment
or part of a story that middle-class charitable workers of the home visit, taking us to a household that pre-
might have heard in the course of their visits to pri- sents “littlebut Horror” (“BC,”597),veers away from
vate homes and public institutions (prisons, orphan- such comforting frames of certainty into the haunted
ages, workhouses). On entering the dwelling places interior of his narrator’s mind.
of the poor, such visitors seem to have operated un- Poe and Mystery
der the assumption that a quick survey of surface
appearances would allow them to size up the occu- The question remains: Why go there-why tell this
pants as morally worthy or unworthy of receiving as- narrator’s story? The answer has to do with its inde-
sistance. Visitation forms created by the largest secu- terminacy. In the opening sentences of “The Black
lar relief society operating in New York City in the Cat,” we encounter a man who rejects his own con-
1840s, the Association for Improving the Condition clusions, mistrusts his senses, and feels the need to
of the Poor (AICP), called on workers to assess the assure us that he “surely” is not dreaming. Like so
sobriety, industriousness, cleanliness, and piety of many domestic narratives, this story is “homely”;like
their subjects by putting checks in neatly lined rows so many gothic tales, it is also “wild.”On this shifting
that listed virtues and opposing vices. Because poor ground of knowledge and on the similarly unreliable
folk regarded as shiftless paupers often applied for moral sensibility of a man who claims to trust the “self-
relief or begged door-todoor, organizations like the sacrificing love” of animals more than the “gossamer
AICP sought to base charitable giving on objective fidelity of mere Man,” Poe builds his mysteries to their
evaluations of individual applicants. Of course, this shrieking conclusion. For the narrator, after suggest-

7
ing that either inebriation or perversity may have tales. Like Roderick Usher, who positively stupifies
been his undoing, concludes that he has been the his friend, and like the old man whose evil defies even
victim of demonic seduction that leaves him the brilliant analytical powers of the narrator in “The
“[s]wooning” and others “motionless, through ex- Man of the Crowd” (1840), the “Black Cat” narrator
tremity of terror and of awe” (“BC,”597, 606). provokes confusion and paradox, not allowing him-
self to be read.28
In thinking about Poe’s intentions in “The Black
Cat,” it helps to consider his treatment of mystery at In his 21 September 1839 letter to P. P. Cooke,
the height of his career as a writer of criticism and Poe defends the ending of “Ligeia” from Cooke’s
fiction, 183845, especially in the stories and reviews charge that having the narrator’s first wife take over
he published in Graham’s Mugurine during the early his second wife’s corpse “violat[es] the ghostly pro-
1840s. Scott Peeples notes that Poe (in the divided prieties”-pointing out, in the process, that an ear-
1842 review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told T u b ) “main- lier experiment (“Morella,”1835) had aimed for the
tained that while the effect of beauty belongs to po- effect of a “gradualconviction” about a wife’s return
etry rather than prose fiction, truth, which is not the in the body of her daughter (Complete Works, 17:50,
aim of poetry, could be the aim of a tale.”26But Poe’s 52). The writer revealed in this letter is not taking
exact language is important: positions about the afterlife; he is moving mysteries
Truth is often, and in very great degree, the aim of the this way and that to arrive at different sources of ter-
tale. Some of the finest tales are tales of ratiocination. Thus ror and surprise. As in “Ligeia”and “Usher,”in “The
the field of this species of composition,if not in so elevated Black Cat” Poe pushes against the theoretical limits
a region of the mountain of Mind, is a table-land of far of mystery, about events (what actually happens) and
vaster extent than the domain of the mere poem. Its prod- motives (who did it and why). Like the inconclusive
ucts are never so rich, but infinitely more numerous, and stories of other Poe narrators, the efforts of the “Black
more appreciable by the mass of mankind. The writer of Cat” narrator to illuminate what he calls his “phan-
the prose tale, in short, may bring to his theme a vast vari- tasm” twist around without arriving at finality. In these
ety of modes or inflections of thought and expression- tales, Poe’s sense of the flexibility of short fiction leads
(the ratiocinative, for example, the sarcastic or the humor-
him to experiment with point of view, most famously
ous) which are . . . antagonistical to the nature of the
poem.27 in the gothic story, which in his hands often operates
as the opposite of the detective tale, avoiding final
Poe is thinking here of the short story as a subdivid- answers and the moral theses they might support.
able prose form, some subgenres of which-like the
detective tale in which crimes are solved by arriving As J. Lasley Dameron notes, the kind of truth for
at a true explanation of mysteries, or the parodic tale which Poe strives in the tales is coherence, consistent
in which the treatment of a particular target of ridi- tone and effect, not corre~pondence.2~ In a work like
cule supports a clear point of view-are defined by “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841),seemingly
their presentation of a truth or truths. Still, in his inexplicable facts supply the detective with the mate-
own gothic experimentation, Poe is keenly aware of rials he uses to solve the crime. In a work like “The
the opportunities mystery offers: how the writer can Black Cat,” which appeals to a range of hot-button
toy with readers by providing just enough (and just issues of the 1840s, coherence seems to proceed, para-
contradictory enough) information to delay or im- doxically, from the consistency of the narrator’s de-
plode resolution, prolonging the sense of intellec- viation from accepted norms. Critics who seek final
tual hesitation (between uncanny and marvelous ex- answers in Poe’s extreme gothic tales assume the
planations) that Todorov has called the experience detective’s position in stories defined by his absence.
of the fantastic. The one weakness Poe dwells on in As a force in these stories, only the fading shadow of
his long 1841 review of Dickens’s Burnuby Rudge con- Dupin (seen fleetingly in failed attempts to observe
cerns what he calls “[t]he design of mystery” (ER,233); and explain) appears. In the fading of that shadow
according to Poe, Dickens fails to keep readers guess- can be found Poe’s greatest, because most original,
ing about criminal deeds for as long as necessary. contribution to gothicism as a literary movement.
Indeed, Poe boasts about having solved the crime Poe and the Gothic
long before Dickens means it to be solvable. And we
can see Poe playing this game of postponing or un- Poe exploited and variously adapted three forms of
dermining resolution in several of his most original early gothicism, each based on a characteristic treat-

8
ment of mystery: first, the reassuring empiricism of tative agendas more familiar to literary critics writing
Ann Radcliffe, which Poe deployed in such stories as in the 1990s than to antebellum authors: “insist[ing]
“The Sphinx” (1846) and transformed into the tale on the constructed nature of race” and developing
of ratiocination; second, the ordered supernatural- an argument that “shows that whiteness is as much a
ism of Horace Walpole and Matthew Gregory Lewis, construct as blackness.” In a more recent essay, “Re-
which provided models for both the sensationalism thinking Race and Slavery in Poe Studies,” Goddu
of such tales as “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842) extends this approach by downplaying Poe’s agency
and a heavy-handed didacticism based on coherent as a writer and emphasizing the containment of his
theology or myth;30and last, the experimental ambi- works within “larger cultural structures imbricated
guity of such German and American romanticists as with slavery and antebellum racial ideology.” The
Ludwig Tieck, Charles Brockden Brown, and Wash- problem with this approach, designed to “mov[e]
ington Irving. Any reading of Poe’s great tales of away from insular authordriven accounts that place
mystery that diminishes the impact of their sustained Poe’s consciousness at the center of the discussion,’’
ambiguity by reducing them, in the “Black Cat” is that it tends to overlook Poe’s playful, manipula-
narrator’s memorable phrase, to a “mere series of tive, effect-shaping deployment of the very cultural
household causes and effects” does so at the cost of structures (norms, expectations, codes, and conven-
minimizing Poe’s slft to the gothic and to the evolu- tions) in which his work is supposedly “enme~hed.”~*
tion of narrative point of view: the celebration of ir-
More flamboyantly, in Mark Edmundson’s Night-
resolution and effect. As Benfey observes, “Poe’s fas-
mare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the
cination with the idea of a crime without a clear mo-
Culture ofGothic, the impulse to mine Poe’s gothicism
tive has proved to be one of his richest bequests to
for implicit arguments becomes the determination
later writers.”31
to see him as the master and originator of a contem-
Over the past two decades we have stopped think- porary and destructive zeitgeist:
ing of antebellum romancers as isolated, asocial fig-
In their commitment to ultimate despair, 1990s Gothic
ures. In the case of writers like Thoreau and Melville, modes are beholden to the genius of American terror, to
whose social alienation often manifests itself in po- Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is our national prophet of death’s
lemic or satire, the dialogue between author and so- inevitable victory over life. We know from nearly the be-
ciety is transparent. Hawthorne’s various moves into ginning that the black cat will return to wreak vengeance;
imaginative realms (utopian communities and the that Fortunato will be walled up in the catacombwhere he
American past) do little to disguise his positions in had hoped to find the cask of amontillado; that the House
ongoing dialogues about the evolution of American of Usher will come tumbling down around Roderick. And
politics and religion in his own time. But the case of now it is as though Poe’s spirit, like a specter from one of
Poe presents a particular challenge: how can we situ- his own tales, has risen up to brood over the fin de ~ i i c l e . ~ ~
ate him in his time without obscuring a radicalism For Edmundson but surely not for Poe, who delighted
most strongly felt in his determination not to engage in selfdeflating humor and effect-foreffect’s-sakeself-
in argument about the most contentious and contro- consciousness, the gothic provides
versial topics of the 1830s and 1840s? Can nuanced
readings demonstrate Poe’s social imbrication with- a horizon of ultimate meaning. We recover something of
what is lost with the withdrawal of God from the day-today
out walling him up like one of the victims of his own
world. With the Gothic, we can tell ourselves that we live
tales, preserving a sense of the extent to which his in the worst and most barbaric of times, that all is broken
separation of didacticism from fiction represented a never to be mended, that things are bad and fated to be,
shift in discursive practice? that significant hope is a sonyjoke, the prerogative of suck-
In GothicAmerica,Teresa Goddu contends that the ers. The Gothic, dark as it is, offers epistemological cer-
tainty; it allows us to believe that we’ve found the truth.34
process of historicizing American gothicism leads
inexorably to the recovery of racial themes and the- In his insistence that gothicism embodies a worldview
ses that “disrup[t] the dream world of national myth characterized by atheism and despair, Edmundson
with the nightmares of history” and “undermine the misses the spirit of playful intrigue-the imaginative
nation’s claim to purity and equality.” Goddu sees and temporary experience of fear-that draws both
works like “The Black Cat” and The Narrative ofArthur writers and readers of the gothic, certainly including
Gordon 4 m of Nantucket (1838) as pursuing argumen- Poe. Like jokes, gothic narratives need established

9
norms of order and decorum to twist or violate for The contrast between Poe the holder of opinions
effect.35Averitable hive of genres (gothic and mock- and Poe the master of effects calls to mind an anec-
gothic, detective and mockdetective, science fiction dote Alfred Hitchcock liked to tell about a man who
tale and science fiction Poe’s work had its reproached him after his daughter had seen both
greatest point of originality in his eagerness to ex- Diabolique (a horror film that features a corpse in a
ploit the same materials for both humor and fear, bathtub) and Psycho (with its famous shower scene).
often in the same stories, in a manner that sacrifices With the girl refusing to bathe or shower, the father
theme and, by extension, worldview to effect. wondered what he should do. Hitchcock’s reply:
“Have you considered dry leaning?"^' Obviously
If not as pieces of evidence arranged in support Hitchcock was amused by the complaint, as he may
of positions, how should we think of Poe’s many cul- have been by the assumption that Psycho has some-
turally based details-the appeals to relations in- thing to say, a point to make, about methods of stay-
flected by race, class, gender, and reform in ways fa- ing clean. Hisjoking rejoinder suggests a useful anal-
miliar to his contemporaries? Insofar as Poe’s instinct ogy to the content of works of horror: likejokes, fright-
is to ridicule the very ideas and genres he seems else- ening works are often about the emotions they in-
where to take seriously, to explore both the tragic spire, not about the subjects exploited to achieve
and the comic sides of the same situations, should desired effects. Unlike arguments, jokes and horror
we expect to find advocacy, rather than entertain- stories move quickly past their subjects, content to
ment, in his gothic tales? With so many characters shake us up and let us return more or less undisturbed
dying only to rise again, for example, should we read to the flow of our lives. They appeal-in a memo-
tales like “The Black Cat,” “Usher,” “Morella,” and rable phrase of Stephen King’s that Michael L.
“Ligeia”as arguments about the instability of the dis- Burduck applies to Poe’s effectism-to “‘phobicpres-
tinction between life and death? Is he demonstrat- sure points,”’ preexisting concerns and anxieties eas-
ing, to use a word employed by some critics to de- ily excited for their horror p ~ t e n t i a l . ~ ~
scribe Poe’s rhetorical intention, that “[t]he bound-
aries which divide Life from Death, are at best shad- At their best, by asking how an image or event
owy and vague” (“PB,”666)? Perhaps, but it is inter- figures, not in the presentation of an argument, but
esting to observe that the character who earnestly in the creation of an effect, New Historicist studies of
advances this argument (and whom I have just American gothicism in general and Poe in particular
quoted) is the obsessive narrator of “The Premature provide affective glosses: guides to norms and issues
Burial” (1844).And of course, for all its intensity, the (“‘phobic pressure points”’) to which the works al-
argument that constitutes the first half of this story lude and appeal. At their worst, they suggest that
turns out to be not rational but the clearest sign of speculative narratives that include racial, class, and
his disorder, and even this position (that the fear of gender stereotypes are demonstrations of this or that
premature burial is unfounded) is partially under- thesis-thus eroding the difference between Poe and
mined by an ambiguous final paragraph. The irony contemporary writers for whom every plot detail,
here is that most arguments advanced in Poe’s gothic character description, and snippet of dialogue has a
tales are like these: selfdefeating, self-serving, and clear argumentative weight. This is an odd, even a
suspect, often laughable. In tales such as “The Pre- perverse, fate for a writer who continues to draw a
mature Burial,” “The Black Cat,” “Usher,”and “The wide audience not for his treatment of race theory,
Imp of the Perverse” (1845), arguments fold in on temperance literature, or domestic violence but be-
themselves, collapsing into horror, humor, or both. cause, like such followers as H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen
The cultural critic, while never suggesting that Poe’s King, Wes Craven, and Chris Carter, he is himself that
didacticism rises to the directness of many, indeed “skilful literary artist” who “combines such events as
most, of his contemporaries, may nonetheless be at may best aid . . . in establishing . . . preconceived
risk of projecting his or her own interest in political effect[s]” (ER, 572). The Poe of the gothic tales is, as
argumentation onto a writer who insisted in “The Gary Lindberg demonstrates, a con man and show-
Poetic Principle” that his “deep. . . reverence for the a writer who takes us into the cluttered store-
True” made him want to “limit, in some measure, its house of our (no doubt culturally constructed) psy-
modes of inculcation” (ER, 76). ches, stares at us with his eye of fire, and then winks.

10
This winking, divided sensibility that keeps Poe’s hor- Notes
ror close to his humor and his humor close to his
horror is the ground of his greatest originality: the Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman, eds.,
insistence that literature at its best serves its own aes- introduction to The American Face of Edgar Allun Poe (Balti-
thetic and affective aims beyond the themes and im- more:Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995),xi, Xvii. For a simi-
ages brought into their service. lar formulation of the challenge facing historicist readings
of Poe, see Meredith L. McGill, “Introduction: New Direc-
Historicist readings should, then, leave room for
tions in Poe Studies,” Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism 33
ways in which Poe pushed against accepted practices, (2000): 1-3. An earlier version of the present essay will
becoming a theorist and writer on the cutting edge appear in POEtic Egect and Cultural Discourses: hceedings of
of modernity. The very quality of his gothic works that theEdgarAUan Poe Symposium in Eichtatt, ed. Hermann Josef
irritated T. S. Eliot-that he seems not to believe in Schnackertz (forthcoming). I am grateful to Professor
the ideas he takes up in his tales-sets Poe apart from Schnackertz for permission to publish the revised version
most of his contemporaries. A useful and last correc- here.
tive might be found in Poe’s views on Catharine 2 G. R. Thompson, Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Imny in the
Sedgwick and Lydia Maria Child. In his articles on Gothic T a b (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 9.
New York literati, Poe judged Sedgwick, a writer who Thompson goes on to elaborate: “With . . . multiple vision,
often blurred the line between novel and tract, to be and with . . . strategies of duplicity, [Poe] could satisfy his
inferior in “imagination”to Child (ER,1204). Nev- public audience, deal with his obsession, and control in
ertheless, even Child was firmly opposed to the flights intricate structures of opposed forces his simultaneous
involvement in, and mocking detachment from, the double
of imagination for which Poe is most justly famous.
horror of the external world and the internal mind” (1 7).
Declaring her “deep prejudice against” popular For a brief overview of Poe criticism prior to New Histori-
gothic works by such authors as Charles Robert cism, see Charles E. May, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of the
Maturin, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Ann Radcliffe, Short Fiction (Boston: Twyne, 1991), 3-4, 139. Based on
Child insists that “[t]he necessity of fierce excitement this work, May’s approach emphasizes Poe’s interest in
in reading is a sort of intellectual intemperance . . . generic experimentation and ambiguity: “the presentation
[that] like bodily intoxication . . .produces weakness of the horrible in the midst of the absurd, the parallel be-
and delirium.”40Underlying such an assertion is a tween the physical and the metaphysical, the demonic
bias against fear and works of art that stimulate it- breakup of the ordinary and the everyday, and the ambi-
indeed, against intense effects in general. Child’s as- guity of the states of madness and sanity” (32).
sumption that imaginative literature is to be valued See Terence Whalen, EdgarAllan Poe and the Masses:
for its ability to inculcate truth and influence the The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America
moral development of readers, coupled with her re- (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999), 31,18; and David
pudiation of “excitement in reading,” place her at S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subver-
sive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cam-
the opposite pole from Poe. We can see Poe as an
bridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), 22548.
exploiter of culturally specific phobias, the manipu-
lator of norms of security, normalcy, and sanity, then, For a reading of “The Black Cat” that emphasizes
its fearful impact based on the narrator’s decline, see Ri-
without disturbing our sense of him as a writer who
chard Badenhausen, “Fear and Trembling in Literature
gloried in mystery without advocating a particular of the Fantastic: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,”’ Stud-
view of it. Preserving our sense of Poe’s distance from ies in Short Fiction 29 (1992): 487-98.
what in “The Poetic Principle”he so pointedly called
As Badenhausen notes, the narrator first declares
the “heresy of The Didactic” (ER,7 5 ) should be one
that he is not aiming to be believed, and then “is constantly
objective of criticism that seeks to situate him in his qualifying, correcting, and explaining, in the hope that
cultural moment. the audience will see events from his perspective” (“Fear
and Trembling,” 488).
Boston College ti David S. Reynolds, “Black Cats and Delirium Tre-
mens,” in The S q e n t in the Cup: Tmperance in American Lit-
erature, ed. David S . Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal
(Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 22-59, esp.
34, 35.
’Lesley Ginsberg, “Slaveryand the Gothic Horror of

11
Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,”’ in American Gothic: Neu Intmen- Strugglef o r a D r y A m a i c a1800-1933
, (Chicago: Ivan R.Dee,
tions in a National Narrative, ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric 1998).
Savoy (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1998), 99-128, esp. l4 Matheson, “Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’” 75, 74.
106, 108.
l5 Matheson, “Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,”’ 75.
[Lydia Maria] Child, The Mother’s Book (Boston:
lSAneven more restrictive effort to solve the myster-
Carter and Hendee, 1831),6,7.
ies of this story can be found in Susan Amper’s ingenious
EdgarAllan Poe: Poetry and Tales,ed. Patrick F. Quinn 1992 article “Untold Story: The Lying Narrator in ‘The
(New York: Library of America), 602. Further citations to Black Cat,”’ Studies in Short Fiction 29 (1992): 475-85. In
Poe’s fiction are from this edition; page numbers will a p this essay, the critic responds to the narrator’s invitation to
pear parenthetically in the text along with abbreviated titles solve his mystery or crime by finding, “in the circumstances
of specific tales. [he] detail[s] with awe, nothing more than an ordinary
lo Ginsberg, “Slavery,”119. succession of very natural causes and effects” (“BC,”597).
l1 The temptation to see Poe’s use of contemporary
To Amper, the entire story of the killing of the cat is a lie
topics in the gothic tales as argumentative is rarely resisted designed to cover up the real crime-the murder of the
even in the most richly detailed feminist readings. For in- wife-a reading that manages to explain or explain away
otherwise sketchy or mysterious events, including the a p
stance, Joan Dayan (in “Poe’sWomen: A Feminist Poe?”
pearance of the dead cat’s image on the one wall that re-
Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism 26 [ 19931: 1-12) has sought
mains after the narrator’s house burns down and the dis-
to replace the view of Poe as a romantic who accepted nine-
teenthcentury ideals of femininity and female beauty with proportionate grief the narrator feels while killing Pluto.
a Poe whose demonstration of “the reversibility of all con- Although Amper’s interpretation responds to many of the
cepts” and “unsettling of the subject” advance a feminist weaknesses in the narrator’s account, it cannot entirely
dismiss alternative explanations-including the possibil-
epistemology (1,9).Although Dayan’scase is nuanced (she
ity that the narrator has been tormented and destroyed by
suggests that Poe “interrogates” but never “fully rejects”
supernatural forces beyond his understanding and con-
the “most valued assumptions of his culture” [ l ] ) , the Poe
trol.
she unconvincingly describes is engaged in a “radical
project” designed to “suspen[d] gender as a component l 7 By reading the narrator’s seemingly “uncanny”
of identity,” “attack the subordination of women,” and confession to the police as an expression of “the form of
“mutilate what his society constructed as manhood” (4,8, selfhood that disciplinary intimacy wants to make standard
9). issue,” Richard H. Brodhead firmly situates the act in a
culturally defined and natural context, reducing what
l 2 Leland S. Person, “Poe’s Philosophy of Amalgam-
might be a supernatural haunting to the unexpected prod-
ation: Reading Racism in the Tales,”chap. 8 in Romancing
ding of internalized moral norms (Culturesof Letters: Scenes
the Shadow: Poe and Race, ed.J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane
of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America [Chi-
Weissberg (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 205-24, esp.
cago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993],29).
207,220,221. Person quotes approvingly,in the latter case,
from Dana D. Nelson, The Word in Black and White:Reading l8 T. S. Arthur, Six Nights with the Washingtonians: A
“Race” in American Literature, 1638-1867 (New York: Ox- Series ofTmperance Tales, 2vols. (NewYork:E. Ferrett, 1842),
ford Univ. Press, 1992), 92. In general the essays in & 1:67.
mancing the Shadow are at their best when they adhere to l9 Christopher Benfey, “Poe and the Unreadable:
Toni Morrison’s idea of a subtle, nondidactic “Africanist ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’” in New Essays
presence” in antebellum literature that “sabotagesthe sur- on Poe’s Major Tales, ed. Kenneth Silverman (Cambridge:
face text’s expressed intentions or escapes them through Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 27-44.
a language that mystifies what it cannot bring itself to ar-
2o Walt Whitman, Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate, in
ticulate but still attempts to register” (Playing in the Dark:
The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, ed. Emory
Whitenessand the Literary Imagznation [Cambridge: Harvard
Halloway (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, Page, 1921),2:122,
Univ. Press, 1992],66),rather than when, in the words of
182, 147, 172.
editors Kennedy and Weissberg, they seek to demonstrate
that Poe “participate[d]-albeit covertly-in the contem- 21 Carol Mattingly, Well-Tmpered Women: Nineteenth-
porary debate on race” (Romancing the Shadow, xvi). Century Temperance Rhetm‘c (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
Univ. Press, 1998), 13.
l 3 T. J- Matheson, “Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ as a Cri-
tique of Temperance Literature,” Mosaic 19 (summer 22 Arthur, Six Nights, 2: 11.
1986): 69. For overviews of the history of the temperance 23 New York Association for Improving the Condi-
movement, see Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby tion of the Poor, Annual Repurts, No. I-10,1845-1853 (New
Martin, Drinking in America: A Histmy (NewYork Free Press, York Arno Press and the New York Times, 1971), 26, 27,
1982); and Thomas R. Pegram, Battling Demon Rum: The 28.

12
 z4 For a discussion of antebellum poor visit conven- 31 Benfey, “Poe and the Unreadable,” 29.
tions, see Paul Lewis, “‘Lecturesor a Little Charity’: Poor 32 See Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative,
Visits in Antebellum Literature and Culture,”New EngZund Histmy, and Nation (NewYork Columbia Univ. Press, 1997),
Quarb-Zy73 (2000): 246-73. 10,85,86, emphases mine; and ”RethinkingRace and Sla-
25 New York AICP, Annual Rqbwts, 22. very in Poe Studies,”Pue Studies/Dad Ronulnticism 33 (2000):
15, 18.
26 Scott Peeples, Edgar Allan Poe Revisited (NewYork
Twayne, 1998), 99. 33 Mark Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street: An-
gels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic (Cambridge:
27EdgarAllan Poe:Essays and Rmews, ed. G. R Thomp
Harvard Univ. Press, 1997), 71.
son (NewYork Library of America, 1984), 573; hereafter
cited parenthetically as ER. 34 Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street, 68.

28 Critics determined to solve the mysteries of “The 35 On the interaction of mystery, humor, and fear in
Black Cat” tend to emphasize similarities to the clearly Poe, see Paul Lewis, “Poe’sHumor: A PsychologicalAnaly-
hallucinatory “Tell-TaleHeart,”published in the same year. sis,” Studies in Short Fiction 26 (1989): 531-46.
But “TheMan of the Crowd,”with its movement away from 36 For a discussion of Poe’s interest in subgenres of
levels of intelligible evil defined by class and gender (clerks the short story, see May, Edgar Allun Poe, 3-10.
and prostitutes, for instance) to the unreadable perversity
37 For an account of this exchange, see Stephen
of the eponymous character, may be closer to “The Black
Rebello, Alfi-ed Hitchcock and t h Making of “Psycho”(New
Cat” in its treatment of mystery. Just as “The Black Cat”
resists or subverts familiar sentimental and domestic mod- York Dembner Books, 1990), 174.
els, ”TheMan of the Crowd”shiftsfrom “easilyunderstood” 38 Michael L. Burduck, Grim Phantasm: Fear in Poe’s
criminals to “‘thetype and the genius of deep crime”’ (390, Short Fiction (NewYork Garland, 1992), xiv.
396). 39 Gary Lindberg, The ConfidenceMan in American Lit-
29J. Lasley Dameron, “Poe’sConcept of Truth,” Mis- erature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 48-69.
sissilgi Quartmij 43 (winter 1989-90): 11-21.
4o Child, Mother’s Book, 93.
30 See Paul Lewis, “FearfulLessons: The Didacticism
of the Early Gothic Novel,” CLA Journal 22 (1980): 470-
84.

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