Chapter 1 Introduction
1.3 Chapter Organization
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characterized by their “gender dispossession” and “subaltern male identit[ies]” (135, 137).
Essentially, the violent mutiny is a combat against the Father for “the female body of a ship” emblematic of the Mother (137), reenacting the Freudian theorization of primordial parricide. Such a confrontation between subaltern male subjects and normative masculinity is repeatedly played out in the narrative, culminating in the fraternal group’s collective mourning for their break from patronymic ties, wrought with guilt and remorse. Moreover, their prolonged and indeterminable mourning, albeit never explicitly articulated in words but present itself on the textual level, thematizes a queer melancholia wherein the Father is both the symptom and the repressed object of desire that has returned to haunt the fraternal order.
However, unlike the traditional psychoanalytic formula where “the social fraternal feelings . . . continued to exercise a profound influence” with the
“sanctification of the blood tie” (Totem 169), Poe’s deviant fraternity’s symbolic parricide does not glorify male bonding but underscores the destined erosion of such ties. Following this line of reasoning and retracing both the Freudian and Butlerian theorizations of the melancholiac, this thesis reads Pym’s inability to mourn the death of Augustus as a latent form of male melancholia, derived from a prohibited,
inexpressible grief in a time when queer losses cannot be properly mourned.
Tracing a detailed trajectory of gender failure that interconnects the three texts, the present study recognizes the self-destructive impulses that pervade Poe’s male characterization and explores the potential perils that underlie the politics of positivity.
1.3 Chapter Organization
The main body of this thesis consists of five chapters, including the
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introduction and the conclusion. The second chapter, “Constructing Jacksonian Manhood: Fear and Homosocial Desire in ‘The Black Cat,’” contextualizes the interrelation between manhood and fear represented in the antebellum Gothic narratives. As previous scholarly interest has largely been devoted to Edgar Poe’s representations of femininity and race in this story, further endeavors of excavation are required to examine how masculinity and male affect are figured in his tales. To begin with, the project sees the narrator’s ostensibly self-destructive violence as a productive locus of queer potentiality which lays bare the claustrophobic constraint of heterosexual domesticity. Critics who adopt the psychoanalytic approach tend to interpret Pluto as a psychological intrusion of trauma, while postcolonial readings find a neat fit between the black cats and a distinctive racial Other. Nevertheless, I argue both readings severely downplay the homoerotic sentiments between the narrator and his male cat. As few studies have delved into male sexuality in this text, I propose to read male-male relationship between the narrator and his male cat, Pluto, as a critique of the compulsory nature of antebellum homosociality. The fact that the narrator exhibits no affection or desire for his wife throughout the narration combined with his childlessness and precarious financial position indicates his struggle to meet socially determined gender expectations. Caught between the domestic ideal of gentility and the market values of aggressive subjecthood, the narrator undergoes a metamorphosis which not only happens within a domestic setting but reveals the claustrophobic limitations of it. I argue that the narrator’s emotional outburst denaturalizes the problematic nineteenth-century gendered division between the public and private spheres which associates the former with cultural registers of commerce and industry, whereas interlocking the latter with family and domesticity.
The third chapter “‘In Secret Communion with Myself’: Male Paranoia in
‘William Wilson’” grapples with the Double motif in “William Wilson” with a
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socially focused methodology. While critics tend to view the second Wilson as an externalized embodiment of the narrator’s conscience/superego, I propose to read this story as Poe’s satirization of Jacksonian gentry manhood, exhibited in the duality of William Wilson, Reverend Dr. Bransby and Glendinning the parvenue. What also comes under scrutiny is the indeterminacy of the doppelgänger’s male identity and his mimicry that elicits the narrator’s paranoia, both of which are ineluctably bound up with his sexuality. As expressed by the narrator on several occasions, the underlying sentiment of William Wilson’s relationship with his ghostly double is fraught with ambivalence. Departing from the conventional readings whilst following the argumentation of the previous chapter, I contend that Poe’s representation of male identity in “William Wilson” testifies to the constructedness, performativity, and oppressive nature of normative Jacksonian masculinity.
Chapter four, “Queering Poe: Gender Melancholia in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,” sets out to explicate how male affect is embodied through the corporeality and death drive in Poe’s narrative. More precisely, the study
demonstrates that prohibition of lament over the loss of same-sex ties is inextricably bound up with gender melancholy in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of
Nantucket. To offer a comprehensive background, I will first highlight how melancholia functions as an integral part in the construction of nineteenth-century masculine identity. This chapter will be divided into three portions: to begin with, I shall juxtapose Arthur Gordon Pym’s resistance against familial bonds and stable heterosexual paths with his melancholic death wish to show the potential queer connotations of this break from patronymic ties. The subsequent section highlights Poe’s eroticized depictions of relationships between Augustus and Pym and that of Pym and Dirk Peters, which despite its ostensible similarities to the male-male intimacy illustrated in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, is marked by excessive
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corporeality and laden with death drive. In sum, the section focuses on how preemptive queer loss comes to shape American manhood, exemplified in an
emotional void which is marked by the textual absence of mourning in the narration.
Finally, I argue that the physical and emotional unavailability of the Jacksonian man on the make can be seen as a result of the unattainable social ideal of normative masculinity, embodied in the inaccessibility of male body in relation to the thwarted cannibalistic desire of the protagonist. The third section sketches out the historical interconnections between cannibalism and homosexuality and sees the literalized cannibalism of Pym’s men as a manifestation of gender melancholia over the loss of same-sex bonds.
The conclusion of my project can be found in the fifth chapter. This chapter encapsulates my previous findings and hopefully, by engaging an affectively infused queer approach, the study will serve as a starting point to open up new possibilities in the reinterpretations of same-sex desire in antebellum literature.
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Constructing Jacksonian Manhood: Fear and Homosocial Desire in “The Black Cat”
It is only a private study, a hideaway, a “den,” as the English say, where I can go, sometimes, on those infrequently yet inevitable occasions when the yoke of marriage seems to weigh too heavily on
my shoulders. There I can go, you understand, to savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless.
— Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber”
A ring of gold with the sun in it?
Lies, lies, and a grief
—Sylvia Plath, The Couriers
2.1 Victorian Gender Formation: Separate Spheres Ideology and Its Discontents With less than ten pages in its entirety, “The Black Cat” manages to epitomize the dread of the endearing turned monstrous, a perfect catalyst for the production of uncanniness. A derivative of the German word ‘unheimlich,’ the uncanny7, by
7 Extant studies of the uncanny have largely been based upon Freud’s theorization, wherein he borrows Friedrich von Schelling’s definition of ‘unheimlich’ to explicate the duality of the word. As he explains, ‘heimlich’ exhibits linguistic usages that ambivalently, if not paradoxically, run counter to the notion of “homeliness.” This is most manifest in the fact that the word ‘unheimlich’ simultaneously means what is familiar and amicable while on the other hand refers to what is hidden and
secretive—as Freud paraphrases, “everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (“The ‘Uncanny’” 224). The idea of heimlich pertaining to something dangerous and withdrawn from knowledge forms the basis of its ambivalence, which ultimately concurs with its opposite, unheimlich.
The prefix ‘un-’ here is deemed as “the token of repression” (244), a notion later appropriated by critics to account for the production of uncanniness in “The Black Cat,” in which repressed infantile complexes are believed to play a vital role in turning the homely into the object of terror. See also Nicholas Royle for more elaborations of the uncanny.
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definition, refers to what is homely—tame, familiar, intimate, agreeable, and belonging to the house—all of which finds a perfect exemplification in a house pet.
Yet, the feeling of the uncanny arises when what is supposed to remain concealed comes to light. Poe plays on the notion of the uncanny by reanimating the dead and bequeathing an amiable creature with a new role as a vengeful spirit. Situated in the household, the tale succeeds in the excitation of fear that nonetheless harks back to what has long been known and familiar. To be more specific, Poe invokes the image of a halcyon, sacrosanct American home and yet immediately transforms it into a nightmarish murder house. As the narrator recollects from a felon’s cell in the opening scene, the story is a “homely narrative” constituted by “a series of mere household events” (192). This attempt at trivializing the significance of the murders as well as rationalizing the corollary and motive behind his acts of violence invite multitudinous interpretations, wherein several critics endeavor to read the story through the lens of nineteenth-century gender construction.
Written in Philadelphia during the 1840s, “The Black Cat” revolves around two spatial settings which map out the silhouette of Victorian separate spheres: the city and the home. While the former is conceptually tied to the masculine public sphere associated with politics, commerce, and enterprise, the latter remains circumscribed to the feminine private sphere, a sequestered realm of domestic life and familial relations.
This ideology reinforces the structure of a falsely hierarchized divide between the two concepts and perpetuates the ideals of “proper gender roles.” A state of paradox hence came forth when this ideal of domestic manhood faced the inchoate market values that arose with rapid urbanization: men were expected to make their names by participating in economic pursuits and competing with other men in the marketplace.
Yet they were asked to rid the façade of self-made manhood once they stepped into
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the domestic sphere. Constructed alongside the Cult of True Womanhood8, Victorian manhood delineates a gender dilemma symptomatic of social strictures which demand
“the repudiation of the feminine, a resistance to mothers’ and wives’ efforts to civilize men” whereas vigorously upholding conventional domestic values (“Poe and
Nineteenth-Century Gender Constructions” 130).
Critics have noted how Poe curiously aligns the narrator with the feminized domestic sphere by deploying major plot threads within the household and
underscoring the narrator’s relationships with animals. In recollection, the narrator relates the story beginning with his childhood wherein he is constantly made “the jest of [his] companions” for his “tenderness of heart” as well as “the docility and
humanity of [his] disposition” (192). The narrator’s fondness for animals, combined with his parents’ “[indulgence] with a great variety of pets,” mark his eccentricity as a boy (192). What undergirds such eccentricity is the presupposed formation of a gendered selfhood that caters to a social expectation: boys should engage in violent, aggressive activities whereas girls spend their time with docile, domestic animals. The interactions with animals are crucial here, as they reflect the separate sphere structure wherein the narrator’s parents’ indulgence would correspond to what Richard
Brodhead illustrates as a bourgeois “disciplinary intimacy, or simply discipline through love” (qtd. in Neff 82).
By the 1830s, discourses of pet-keeping centralized on the relationship between children’s everyday encounters with non-human life and the role such relationships
8 Largely defining what qualifies one as an ideal woman in the Jacksonian Era, The Cult of True Womanhood refers to four cardinal virtues: “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity”—a combination that corresponds to the roles of “mother, daughter, sister, [and] wife,” with whom nineteenth-century American men could make
themselves “busy builder[s] of bridges and railroads, at work long hours in a materialistic society” without feeling guilty about leaving behind “hostage[s] in the home” who were obliged to “uphold the pillars of the temple with [their] frail white [hands]” (Welter 151-52).
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play in the formation of subjectivity. An individual’s interactions with animals were believed to help cultivate discipline and benevolence, virtues that were highly valued by the middle-class. More characteristically, nineteenth-century children literature invokes the Lockean pedagogy that inculcates a moral lesson: “we gain our humanity by performing acts of kindness to animals” (Boggs 116). Such domestic ethic of kindness to animals situates subjectivity in a relationship wherein “animals function as the ‘other’ and as the ground from which subjectivity becomes possible” (116).
However, by dismissing the promise of salvation guaranteed by this domestic education manual and using elements of Gothicism to illustrate the narrator’s relentless treatment of cats, Poe’s depictions of human-animal relations ultimately reveal “the tensions and the fissures in the assumptions that kindness toward animals is commensurate with kindness to human beings and that both are markers of
humanity” (117). Moreover, the dichotomized conception that pits humanity and reason against animality and instinct is refuted by Poe himself in his 1840 essay
“Instinct vs Reason—A Black Cat.” As theorized by Poe, “the line which demarcates the instinct of the brute creation from the boasted reason of man, is, beyond doubt, of the most shadowy and unsatisfactory character” (2). This is most manifest in the scene of revelation that points to the narrator’s culpability in “The Black Cat”: the
“informing voice” that “consign[s] [the narrator] to the hangman” (201) belongs to an animal, which offers a “vocal testimony that is more authoritative” than the narrator’s own account (Boggs 120). In this respect, the narrative does not “align the animal with the physical and the human with the verbal but . . . shows the intermingling and interdependence of both across the species line” (120). This arrangement casts doubt on the premise that “the subject is always verbal and the verbal subject always already human” (115), thereby making animality intrinsic to a specific kind of humanity, and vice versa.
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Following this line of reasoning, I argue that the narrator’s relationship with the two cats epitomizes a self-contradictory bourgeois moral education that links the individual’s relationship with animals to his ability to participate in society as a subject, yet defines aggressiveness toward domestic pets as manly behavior. In contrast to the education that worked to deter children from cruelty toward animals, boy culture during this period often involved hostile combat and physical punishment, violent activities that extended sadistic dominance to the hunting, trapping, and killing of small animals (Rotundo 35). Moreover, these pastimes were widely practiced as young men’s preparation for the market-oriented career by cultivating them to be autonomous, masterly, and self-reliant (45-46). Youngsters inflicted pain on each other as intimate games that served both as vehicles of tender affections between boys and an imitative play of hostile competition associated with the power and status of adult men. Viewed in this light, the mockery of the narrator’s peers seems
understandable given the manner he treated domestic pets. Insofar as preconceived notions of masculinity demand aggression toward pets, the narrator’s effeminate tenderness and mothering care for his pets are regarded as a marker of failed manhood and form much of the foundation of his later violent outburst.
Indeed, the narrator’s depiction of his infancy “marks the narrator as part of a middle-class world where authority [is] tied to domesticity,” in which mothers exert their power by nurture while fathers do so with discipline (82). More specifically, what accompanies the advent of the market revolution is the drastic shift of familial roles in terms of parenting. For the first time in American history, women became not only the primary parent but the dominant figure in households while men were frequently absent from home, preoccupied with their workplaces (Rotundo 28). It is against the backdrop of this domestic upbringing dictated by bourgeois advice manuals that the narrator becomes an outcast from normative masculinity. By virtue
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of this logic, his violent outbursts later in life can be seen as a critique of the constriction imposed by such middle-class domestic upbringing (Neff 88-89).
In addition, the narrator’s effeminacy evokes the image of a “fairy,” a term which by the end of the nineteenth century acquired the meaning of an effeminate male homosexual. Notably, the term is also a vivid reminder of the nineteenth-century equation of male femininity and sodomy. George Chauncey’s in-depth study of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century New York culture provides a pertinent insight in this regard. As Chauncey indicates, the primary determinant that
characterized a man as a fairy was not “homosexual behavior per se,” but “gender behavior” (qtd. in “Queer Poe” 13). Namely, insofar as men
maintained a masculine demeanor and played (or claimed to play) only the ‘masculine,’ or insertive role in the sexual encounter—so long, that is, as they eschewed the style of the fairy and did not allow their bodies to be sexually penetrated—neither they, the fairies, nor the working-class public considered them to be queer. (13)
What this entails is that to live in accord with dichotomized gender values, a man must never express his desire for another man.
One is tempted to go so far as to claim that homosexuality comes to embody a source of genuine anxiety for men who attempt to navigate their roles in a society.
However, the precariousness of attempting to establish a masculine identity by othering its counterpart is reminded by Lee Edelman in Homographesis: “[The]
historical positing of the category of ‘the homosexual’ textualizes male identity as such, subjecting it to the alienating requirement that it be ‘read,’ and threatening . . . to strip ‘masculinity’ of its privileged status as the self-authenticating paradigm of the natural or the self-evident” (12). To put it more succinctly, masculinity can no longer be contained in a consistent category, nor can it bolster the axiomatic norm against
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which all otherness is defined. The crux of this gender indeterminacy lies in the fact that to be “not-female” no longer suffices, one has to become “the appropriate type of man.” While homosexuality as an identity category has only emerged during the late nineteenth century, one can certainly gain a glimpse of its engagement with the anxieties and fear inherent in antebellum masculine identities.
2.2 “Spirit of PERVERSENESS”: Desires Untold
Linked to the vicissitudes of market-oriented masculinity is the emergence of panic-stricken professional males in antebellum sensationalism. During the first half of the nineteenth century following the detrimental effects of the Panic of 1837, sensationalist novels witnessed a flourish of debtor male figures who strived to make a name under the period’s perilously unstable economy. Depictions of insecure debtor males and their persecutory creditors under pressure imposed by the ethos of capitalist competitiveness altogether formed a vivid tableau in urban dime novels. This
Linked to the vicissitudes of market-oriented masculinity is the emergence of panic-stricken professional males in antebellum sensationalism. During the first half of the nineteenth century following the detrimental effects of the Panic of 1837, sensationalist novels witnessed a flourish of debtor male figures who strived to make a name under the period’s perilously unstable economy. Depictions of insecure debtor males and their persecutory creditors under pressure imposed by the ethos of capitalist competitiveness altogether formed a vivid tableau in urban dime novels. This