愛倫坡作品中之魑魅陽剛與同性慾望 - 政大學術集成

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(1)國立政治大學英國語文學系碩士論文. 指導教授: 葉德宣博士趙順良博士 Advisors:. 政治大 Dr. Shun-liang Chao. 愛倫坡作品中之魑魅陽剛與同性慾望. 學. ‧ 國. 立. Dr. Te-hsuan Yeh. ‧. Gothic Masculinity and Same-Sex Desire in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. 研究生: 徐千惠撰 Name: Chantal Chien-hui Hsu 中華民國 106 年 7 月 July 2017. v.

(2) Gothic Masculinity and Same-Sex Desire in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe. A Master Thesis Presented to Department of English, National Chengchi University. 學. In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. Nat. n. al. er. io. sit. y. ‧. ‧ 國. 立. 政治大. Ch. engchi. i n U. by Chantal Chien-hui Hsu July 2017. v.

(3) Acknowledgments Thanks are due to people who have offered assistances at the various stages of this thesis. Owing to their persistent support, I was fortunate enough to find myself preoccupied with a writing process more like a saunter in the sanctuary than an ordeal composed of strenuous intellectual work. The initial stage of this thesis went through a longer-than-expected gestation period. That being said, multifarious ideas gleamed in fleeting moments, not infrequently met with detours, yet eventually gathered into what can be said to sum up my graduate studies at NCCU.. 政治大 for commenting on this thesis, as well as always being a patient reader and an acute critic 立. Among all others, I am especially indebted to my advisor Dr. Jonathan Te-hsuan Yeh. ‧ 國. 學. throughout my academic years. Words are not enough to express my heartfelt gratitude to him, not only for introducing me to the field of queer studies in my first graduate seminar, but for. ‧. being a bona fide mentor/friend who has always shown the utmost support for my academic. sit. y. Nat. pursuits and offered thought-provoking suggestions despite the obstacles that might have. io. er. arisen with the arrangement of co-advising across universities. Had it not been for his. al. prodding advice, unwearied patience and greatest encouragement in my moments of. n. v i n C h infeasible in its U self-doubt, this thesis would have proved e n g c h i nascent phase. It is precisely for his enduring faith in my research capabilities that I have the courage to stay with my topic and accomplish the current project. For these reasons, I owe him thanks more than what can be properly stated in this acknowledgment. In addition, I would like to express my thanks to my co-advisor Dr. Shun-liang Chao along with all the other instructors who have contributed tremendously to broadening my knowledge in literary studies, offered me invaluable guidance in the academia, and equipped me with all the necessary skills as an aspiring researcher. I have been intensely motivated by their scholarly exuberance in ways they could not have imagined. A special word of thanks iii.

(4) also goes to Dr. Yih-Dau Wu for his meticulous reading and invaluable suggestions that sharpened the argument of this project. In addition, my study has benefited from many conversations and presentations of The Fourth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference in 2015, which I am grateful to be a part of. I wish to convey my hearty appreciation for the generous travel grant provided by Susan Jaffe Tane and the Poe Studies Association, without which my presentation at the conference wouldn’t have been possible. Similarly, I would like to extend my thanks to Geoffrey Chen, who has always inspired me with his critical enthusiasm as a fellow researcher and provided a congenial. 政治大 Shih and Rain Chan for deepening my knowledge of queer politics and feminist discourses. 立 companionship which never fails to invigorate my spirit. Likewise, I am thankful to Paris. ‧ 國. 學. Their enduring commitment to gender studies reassured my aspiration to pursue a PhD in literature. My heartfelt thanks also go to Ken Chang, for his contributions to our late night. ‧. tête-à-tête and other inappropriate delights. (Here’s to our recalcitrant sisterhood, for many. sit. y. Nat. years and beyond.) I owe a different kind of debt to Gisele Hsing and Suyeh Liao for not only. io. er. their calming presences but being extraordinarily heart-warming listeners in my fits of. al. melancholy. Special thanks also go to Garfield Chang for constantly reaching out with her. n. v i n C h with these people ungrudging moral support. My friendship e n g c h i Uis among the best things in my life, personally and intellectually.. A thank you to all of my NCCU buddies as well for the mix of prodding, encouragement, empathy, listening, and research assistance I received while working on this project. Without you, clusters of serendipity would not have presented themselves in this solitary process. Finally, my greatest gratitude goes to my family, especially my mother, for being an attentive listener despite our incessant disagreements on the definition of a desirable career path. Though the influences of my family are not immediately reflected in my research, they are essentially the genesis of how I think and how I live. iv.

(5) Table of Contents Acknowledgments……………………………………………………......... iii Chinese Abstract……………………………………………………….........vii English Abstract…………………………………………………………......ix Chapter 1 Introduction…………………………………………………....... 1 1.1 Critical Background................................................................. 2 1.2 Gothic Masculinity and Romantic Camaraderie…………...... 15. 政治大 Chapter 2 Constructing Jacksonian Manhood: Fear and Homosocial Desire in 立 1.3 Chapter Organization……………………………………....... 28. “The Black Cat”…………………………………………………………..... 33. ‧ 國. 學. 2.1 Victorian Gender Formation: Separate Spheres Ideology and Its. ‧. Discontents……………………………………………………..... 33. y. Nat. 2.2 “Spirit of PERVERSENESS”: Desires Untold…………........ 39. er. io. sit. 2.3 Household Horror: “the Cult of True Manhood”......................50 Chapter 3 “In Secret Communion with Myself”: Male Paranoia in “William Wilson”. al. n. v i n Ch ....................................................................................................................... 57 engchi U 3.1 Poe’s Literary Doubling........................................................... 57 3.2 The Southern Gentleman As Fiction........................................ 64. 3.3 “In Secret Communion with Myself”: Onanistic Desire and Male Paranoia..........................................................................................69 Chapter 4 Queering Poe: Gender Melancholia in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket....................................................................................................77 4.1 Corporealized Male Bodies and Deviant Fraternity................. 77 4.2 Unmournable Loss: Broken Intimacy and Impossible Love....85. v.

(6) 4.3 Cannibalistic Desire and Homosexuality..................................90 Chapter 5 Conclusion......................................................................................97 Works Cited.....................................................................................................102. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. vi. i n U. v.

(7) 國立政治大學英國語文學系碩士班碩士論文提要論文名稱: 愛倫坡作品中之魑魅陽剛與同性慾望指導教授: 葉德宣教授研究生: 徐千惠論文提要內容:. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. 本論文旨在分析愛倫坡作品中之陽剛氣質與同性慾望的社會建構，藉由探討男性敘事者的負面情感與角色間的同性社交慾望，本研究意欲以酷兒閱讀的方法對美國戰前時期文本提出新詮。論文第一部分剖析短篇故事《黑貓》中正典陽剛氣質與異性戀婚家常規之共構、. n. al. er. io. sit. y. Nat. 重探維多利亞時期公私領域分離的意識形態如何性別化地形塑家庭與酒館之文化意義，並據此提出敘事者和其寵物黑貓間的親密關係或可理解為一種酷兒情慾之隱喻。在此脈絡下，敘事者對雄貓之恐懼與同性親密關係之拒斥遂映照出其悖離資本主義式中產階級男性身分之挫敗陽剛。. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. 第二部分以《威廉‧威爾森》為例，探討哥德傳統中反覆出現的替身母題與自戀和男性偏執妄想之內在關聯。延續傳統上常見於愛倫坡研究的心理分析方法，此章在不否定將主角替身視為超我的前提下，將焦點轉移至主角與替身之間競爭關係的曖昧模稜，並揭示這種競爭關係與賽菊寇同性社交慾望理論之若合符節。第三部分檢視同性慾望結構中常見的死亡慾力與肉身性如何具體而微地在長篇小說《亞瑟‧戈登‧皮姆之自述》中呈現。此章從巴特勒對佛洛伊德《傷逝與憂鬱》論述之改寫出發，重新闡釋故事中帶有毀滅色彩的重要場景──奧古斯特之死與集體食人，並分析同性愛結構中被壓抑的慾力投注如何以情感遺骸之形式往復迴返，成為美國戰前時期性別憂鬱之縮影。據此，論文將問題意識收束在三個面向:陽剛身分之內在裂隙、同性社交情誼之踰越性、與情感的性別政治意涵，透過梳理愛倫坡筆下男性角色的負面情感，本 vii.

(8) 論文得以發掘其作品中哥德元素、破碎陽剛與酷兒情慾間的潛在關聯，進而揭示同性情慾如何在美國戰前文學中隱沒／現身。關鍵字:愛倫坡，哥德／志異，戰前奇情小說，負面情感，陽剛氣質，同性慾望，賽菊寇，巴特勒. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. viii. i n U. v.

(9) Abstract The present study engages three works written by Edgar Allan Poe to contextualize the construction of masculinity and same-sex desire in antebellum sensation fictions. While ample analyses have been dedicated to Poe’s depictions of femininity, the interrelation between masculinity and incipient homoeroticism in his stories proves to be significantly understudied. By examining the negative affects of. 政治大. Poe’s male protagonists—respectively fear in “The Black Cat,” paranoia in “William. 立. Wilson,” and melancholia in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, this. ‧ 國. 學. project aims to provide a queer reinterpretation of these texts.. Structurally, the thesis consists of five chapters. The second chapter delineates. ‧. the Victorian separate spheres ideology to explore its significance in the formation of. y. Nat. io. sit. normative manhood in “The Black Cat.” By underscoring the homoerotic relationship. n. al. er. between the narrator and Pluto, the study thereby sees the conclusion of the story as a. i n U. v. testimonial to the unattainable ideals of Jacksonian manhood and its oppressive. Ch. engchi. continuum with the heterosexual domestic sphere. In so doing, the study is able to substantiate a connection between the narrator’s perverseness with a homosocial desire that is subjected to heteronormative cultural silencing. The third chapter is an attempt to establish a linkage between Gothic doubling, narcissism, and male paranoia in “William Wilson.” While exhaustive studies have been taken upon to validate the readings wherein the second Wilson is treated as the narrator’s super-ego, the present study further argues that Gothic doubling finds expression in this tale in the form of capitalist competitiveness. Building on this observation, the project examines Poe’s doubling in relation to the narrator’s paranoia ix.

(10) and his conscious disengagement from the patriarchal social order. Through a reassessment of the gentlemanly edifices of Poe’s male characters, this study explores the constructedness of antebellum manhood and discovers a concurrence of onanism and homosexuality in Poe’s time, thereby establishing a connection between Wilson’s narcissistic desire and its homoerotic potentialities. Lastly, the fourth chapter demonstrates how unconsummated mourning over the. 政治大. loss of same-sex ties in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket functions. 立. as an integral part of Jacksonian normative male identity. Focusing on the queer. ‧ 國. 學. connotations of Pym’s break from patronymic ties, this study contends that becoming the antebellum subject entails a preclusion of homosexual attachments. Reconsidering. ‧. the protagonist’s inability to mourn Augustus Barnard’s death and the crew’s. y. Nat. io. sit. cannibalism, this study sees Arthur Gordon Pym as the Butlerian melancholic subject. n. al. er. who is unable to perform the work of mourning for his beloved object. Read in. i n U. v. tandem with Freud’s conception of primordial parricide, the fraternal revolt that. Ch. engchi. works at the center of the story can be viewed as a form of gender nonconformity which foregrounds melancholia in the abandonment of familial bonds. As such, the project excavates the instability, constructedness, and finally—the Gothicness that underlie Poe’s representations of masculinity. Reappraising the failed manhood of Poe’s men, this thesis concludes that the affective dynamics between Poe’s male characters are inextricably bound up with their broken masculinity and queer homoerotics. Keywords: Edgar Allan Poe, the Gothic, antebellum sensation fiction, negative affect, masculinity, same-sex desire, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler x.

(11) Chapter One Introduction Admittedly one of the most audacious writers in nineteenth-century American literature, Edgar Allan Poe has long received ample critical attention for his grotesque tales of ratiocination and stylistic insights in both poetry and prose. Critics feel compelled to constantly revisit Poe’s life, a perennial source of controversy, which proves to be ineluctably tied to his aesthetics. Nevertheless, the purpose of this study is not to offer yet another reading based upon biographical criticism, but to explore. 政治大 most of which concern primarily the aspects of race, slavery, and femininity. My 立. possibilities which deviate from the interpretations that have been introduced thus far,. study seeks to examine the overdetermined historical relation between masculinities. ‧ 國. 學. and homosocial desire represented in antebellum literature and how it interrogates the. ‧. concomitant privileging of heteronormativity1 and hegemonic masculinity.. sit. y. Nat. To gain a better understanding of antebellum manhood, it is vital to sketch out. io. er. the capitalist market economy of the Jacksonian Era, a catalyst firmly anchored in the construction of aggressive, self-made manhood. The “Panic of 1837,” followed by six. al. n. v i n C hshare of consequences years of depression, has its fair not only in terms of national engchi U economy but the definition of professional masculinity. The late 1830s witnessed a. ubiquitous presence of male debtors who suffer from financial panic as well as failure to embody the ideologies of middle-class individualism. Nevertheless, in Poe’s 1. The term heteronormativity is first coined by Michael Warner in his introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, one of the fundamental works in queer theory. It refers to the social institutions and prevailing structures of thinking that both derive from and reinforce heterosexuality as well as gender differences—as Warner illustrates—“ways of opposing home and economy, the political and personal, or system and lifeworld” (xxiii). Heteronormative culture stratifies sexualities, devalorizes those that fall outside of the normative principles, and circulates in both theory and practice. A social/moral prescription and a privileged institution, heteronormativity has been deeply embedded within the ideological state apparatus, working hand in hand with marriage and reproductivism. 1.

(12) narratives, women have long been considered the quintessential bearers of affect2 as in “Ligeia” and “Morella,” which I argue, is an observation largely based upon undue haste. New modes of feelings emerge in response to drastic socio-economic upheavals, among which fear, paranoia, and melancholy predominate as an integral part in the gender formation of masculinity. In the wake of this social trauma, mass culture helps to ferment a proliferation of sensation narratives which unsurprisingly abound in male figures that are depicted as panic-stricken professionals deeply enmeshed in economic disempowerment. The financial drudgery that drove Poe to move to Baltimore found. 政治大 it came as no surprise that American writers in this era began to explore negative 立. its way to linger throughout the mid-1840s. With the advent of newly developed ethos,. affects with a view to understanding masculinity.. ‧ 國. 學 ‧. 1.1 Critical Background. y. Nat. As its British antecedent, the rise of the Gothic in America epitomized otherness. er. io. sit. ─the ominous shadows that loomed over Enlightenment philosophies, political utopianism, and Transcendentalist futurity. Essentially, the Gothic addresses ancient. al. n. v i n C hof cultural, social,Uracial, and sexual alterity. fears and anxieties codified in the forms engchi Adopting shared settings, motifs, and narrative conflicts, the Gothic nonetheless. proliferated in a wide range and variety of manifestations. The persistence of the Gothic as a genre is demonstrated in the fact that it provides a fertile ground for transgressions; such amorphous multiplicity makes it an unfailing source of scholarly engagements. Principal among these engagements would be studies in non-normative desires and sexualities. As reiterated by critics, encounters with non-normative sexual Joan Dayan’s “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves” probes into Poe’s aesthetics of idealized femininity in “Morella,” “Ligeia,” “Berenice,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “Eleonora” as well as the intertwined metaphysics of romance and servitude revealed by the dominating position of his male narrators. 2. 2.

(13) practices and gender roles, or so-called, “perversions,” may elicit uncanny emotions. Specifically, the uncanny and the terror of the Gothic emerge when the boundaries between gender, bodies, the self and the other become fluid and permeable. Such a liminal moment materializes when barriers can no longer function to differentiate between rational and irrational, institutionally approved and morally illicit emotions. (Coherence 13) In her study of male-male relationships in mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth-century English literature, Eve Sedgwick broaches the notion. 政治大 male bonding—from “homosexuality”—the potentially romantic and erotic, 立. “homosocial desire.” An oxymoron which differentiates “homosociality”—the act of. homosocial desire nonetheless denotes “the potential unbrokenness of a continuum”. ‧ 國. 學. between the two (Between Men 1). Paralleling the ambivalent nature of male. ‧. homosocial relations, a recurrent scene that circulates in the nineteenth-century. y. Nat. Gothic novels is the “male chase,” “the tableau of two men chasing one another. er. io. sit. across a landscape” in which two male subjects share a bond that is either “murderous or amorous” (Coherence ix). Figured in the form of male competitiveness and bitter. al. n. v i n C hhomophobic due U rivalry, this tableau is inherently to “the absence of any felt engchi. specificity of male homosexual desire” (x). The love-hate ambivalence is further explored by George Haggerty in his seminal work Queer Gothic (2006) where same-sex eroticism lurks beneath Gothic tropes. Central to his analysis of the Gothic is male subjectivity defined in loss. For Haggerty, the foreclosure of homoerotic possibilities foregrounds a sense of loss that lies at the heart of many Gothic texts which depend on broken masculinity and eroticized fear of deviant sexualities to bring horror to the fore. Here, horror articulates most distinctively in the form of bourgeois, heterosexual, homophobic paranoia. Albeit tracing its epistemological roots to the English literary convention, the 3.

(14) Gothic formula discussed by Sedgwick and Haggerty proves to be astonishingly true in Poe’s narratives, wherein male-male relationships are often both amorous and murderous. As critics have noted, lacking the jovial encounters between male bodies that characterize Whitman and Melville’s works, male-male intimacy in Poe’s tales is unsurprisingly understudied in “[the] genealogy of gay-male-affirmative” American literary canon (Stadler, “Poe and Queer Studies” 19). Furthermore, Poe’s first-person male narrators typically exhibit a self-destructive preference for “the Abyss” to “the strong Emersonian self” (Bloom, qtd. in Leverenz 218) while non-normative desires. 政治大 concisely, desires in Poe’s tales are frequently organized around a sense of loss and 立 are most manifest in the forms of secrecy, incompletion, and criminal guilt. Put. mourning for the same-sex.. ‧ 國. 學. In his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” Sigmund Freud defines the. ‧. works of mourning as a reaction to the loss of an object—possibly a loved person, a. sit. y. Nat. nation, or an ideal. Nevertheless, in melancholia, one is unaware of what has been lost. io. er. in an object and exhibits a general cessation of interest in the external world together with a tendency for self-criticism. To be more precise, a melancholic undergoes “an. al. n. v i n C h an impoverishment extraordinary diminution on his self-regard, of his ego on a grand engchi U scale” manifested in the form of self-reproaches (246). The crucial feature that. distinguishes the process of mourning from the state of melancholia is that the latter is “an object-loss . . . withdrawn from consciousness,” whereas in mourning one can clearly recognize what is lost as an object (245). Notably, a melancholic is characterized not only by his excessive communicativeness, but also an overcoming of the instinct of self-preservation. As Freud theorizes it, the determinant that separates the normal process of mourning and melancholia is that in the latter, the loss of a love-object is always an unconscious one. This observation is particularly pertinent to my study, as forms of queer desire in antebellum texts generally operate 4.

(15) on an unconscious level. Problematizing the abovementioned theory, Judith Butler’s revision of the Freudian melancholic underscores the heterosexualized aspect of his hypothesis. According to Freud, melancholic incorporation occurs when the ego identifies with its object in order that a complete loss is averted. Butler calls our attention to Freud’s essay The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, wherein masculinity and femininity take shape through prohibitions that “demand the loss of certain sexual attachments” and that those losses “not be grieved” (Psychic Life of Power 135).. 政治大 on the accomplishment of heterosexuality, this accomplishment dictates a repudiation 立 More specifically, insofar as the preconditions of masculinity and femininity depend. of homosexual attachments. Paradoxically, it is by relinquishing these homosexual. ‧ 國. 學. attachments that the object-loss is preserved as a repudiated identification, an. ‧. identification which can never be complete, hence the heterosexual identity is. sit. y. Nat. established through ungrievable homosexual cathexis. Simply put, heterosexuality,. io. er. based on the Freudian rationale, is always already validated by a prohibition of homosexuality, a melancholic incorporation of the love it can never grieve. Though. al. n. v i n fairly controversial from an C anthropological perspective, h e n g c h i U Freud’s Totem and Taboo. elucidates on the mechanism that underlies the origin of human civilization, which can be traced back to the struggle between a fraternal order and the primal Father. In his account of the ambivalent feelings felt by the fraternity toward their Father, Freud famously argues that by cannibalistically ingesting the Father, the band of brothers complete the process of identification and can finally be freed from patriarchal rein whilst gaining access to the Mother. However, this patricide has its inevitable and prolonged emotional leftovers. As Freud theorizes it, the fraternity experiences their deferred affection for the Father in the form of guilt and remorse. Although the incest taboo enables the brothers to bolster “the organization which had made them 5.

(16) strong . . . [that] may have been based on homosexual feelings and acts” (Totem and Taboo 167), the fraternity is “always already haunted and left bereft by its internalized awareness of the prohibition against the homosexual desires that mobilized it in the first place” (Greven 128). Building on this theoretical framework, I contend that the melancholia of Poe’s male characters, read in tandem with their adamant refusal to achieve Oedipal socialization and their homosocial/homosexual relations, bears witness to the queer loss delineated by Haggerty. Crucially, as I will elucidate later, the internalized prohibition that foregrounds such a sense of loss is prevalent in Poe’s. 政治大 Gothic in that they both present a cannibalistic self-consuming aspect, an emotional 立. male subjects-in-the-making. In many of Poe’s works, melancholia intersects with the. void which serves as a repository of unassimilated loss. Arguably, what. ‧ 國. 學. metaphorically aligns the Gothic and melancholia in Poe is a quality of defiance. ‧. against the Symbolic system’s compensation for such a loss, as evidenced by his male. y. sit. io. er. appears to guarantee.. Nat. characters’ strategic repudiations of normalcy along with the hope and positivity it. Such a position characterized by conscious repudiations of hope and positivity. al. n. v i n resonates with the antisocial turn inC queer theory, which posits h e n g c h i U an intrinsic antisocial negativity within queerness. Formulated by Leo Bersani’s Homos and later. concretized in Lee Edelman’s No Future, the antisocial thesis tactically embraces homosexuality as a perverse, non-reproductive, future-negating force that threatens the social. Insofar as homosexuality fails to reproduce an acknowledged form of familial relations and domestic unions, it fails to perform the social. Specifically, queer subjects epitomize anti-sociality in that they fail to participate in a future represented by the positive image of the Child. As such, the queer figure stands between the heteronormative optimistic investment in utopianism and its determinant fulfillment, emblematic of the system’s ironic incoherence, “the place of the social 6.

(17) order’s death drive” (No Future 3). It disrupts a collective future by exposing its fractures from within. In this respect, queerness functions as the Lacanian Real, the structural fissure within the Symbolic Order that defies intelligibility and inter-subjective recognitions. Insofar as queers stave off teleology, they strike a pose of negativity which unequivocally resists a forward-looking politics that perpetuate the future-oriented logic in both time and space. Edelman’s polemics of queer negativity thereby designate a crucial shift from the redemptive, restorative, identitarian politics toward a self-shattering and antisocial theory of sexuality that. 政治大 Through the lens of this particular strand of queer theory, the present study 立. urges for an undoing of reproductive futurism.. reconsiders the interrelation between queer negativity and the death-driven force that. ‧ 國. 學. repeatedly comes to the fore in Poe’s aesthetics. More precisely, this thesis further. ‧. argues that what Ann Cvetkovich terms “an archive of feelings” manifests itself in. sit. y. Nat. Poe’s works in the forms of refusal, dejection, ennui, grief, and ironic distancing,. io. er. affects integral to the conception of queer negativity. As evidenced by the long established antithesis between Transcendentalism and Poe’s aesthetic theory, negative. al. n. v i n C h of this oppositionUby proposing a politics other than affects stand at the very forefront engchi embracing the elevating and positive emotions that sublimate the individual to an. intersubjective relation of “human within Nature.” Admittedly, the sociability that bolsters queer utopianism and seeks to redeem negative queer experiences which are too often dismissed as sterile, narcissistic indulgences needs itself to be reexamined and taken as a political statement. Overall, this project seeks to tease out the ties between masculinity and negative affects with a focus on fear, paranoia, and melancholia, which play a pivotal role in the construction of the masculine subjecthood of Poe’s male protagonists. By rereading three texts of Poe—respectively, “The Black Cat (1843),” “William Wilson 7.

(18) (1839),” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837)—I contend that Gothic tropes in Poe’s works essentially depend on the homosociality between his male characters to develop and function as a critique of gender normativity. To begin with, this thesis interprets the homosocial relationship between the narrator and Pluto in “The Black Cat” as a testimonial to the unattainable ideals of Jacksonian manhood and its oppressive continuum with the heterosexual domestic sphere. Critics in the past emphasize the link between financial crisis and the narrator’s failed domestic manhood, thereby interpreting the resolution of the story as a failed reassertion of his. 政治大 him “weak, faint-hearted, and emasculated” (Bliss 98). I argue that the narrator’s fear 立 intimidated masculine power in the guise of hypermasculine violence which renders. and self-destruction can be seen as a productive locus of queer potentiality which. ‧ 國. 學. reveals the claustrophobic constraint of heterosexual domesticity when read in tandem. ‧. with his ambivalent feelings toward the two black cats.. sit. y. Nat. Critical assessments bifurcate into three directions: psychoanalytic readings that. io. er. identify the black cat as the domestic uncanny, a signifier of the invasion of a psychological trauma into the private interior (Møllegaard 12); racial studies that. al. n. v i n C hperpetuated by Poe’s examine the South’s proslavery rhetoric representations of engchi U. master/slave relationships and bestialized black bodies (see Morrison and Ginsberg for example); feminist investigations which view the story as Poe’s negotiation with gender and domesticity, thereby identifying it as a problematization of the Victorian ideology of separate spheres—an observation which proves valuable to my analysis of the vicissitudes of manhood. Frequently read as a coded biography that embodies the author’s struggles to live in accordance with the ideal of the antebellum Southern Gentleman (Leverenz 216), “The Black Cat” has nonetheless yet to receive much critical attention to Poe’s authorial treatment of male-male relationships, an integral part in the construction of 8.

(19) antebellum male identity. From a closer scrutiny of male identity represented in the story, critics note that the anxiety-ridden selfhood recurrent in Poe’s oeuvre testifies to a “rigidly gendered mode of behaviour . . . staged repeatedly in his poetry and fiction, in which Poe/the male protagonist/the I-narrator either falls into abjectly dependent relationships with dead or dying women or engages in hostile encounters with men” (Kennedy 539). Leland S. Person, for instance, observes that the female character, confined in a household setting, becomes the victim of the Victorian separate sphere ideology where “The Angel in the House” almost always ends up “the Dead Wife in. 政治大 As if parodying the reforming power of domestic values, Poe’s work presents the 立. the Basement” (“Poe and Nineteenth-Century Gender Constructions” 134).. home as “the nightmarish site of barely repressed hostility between men and women”. ‧ 國. 學. (134). Also acknowledging the culturally determined gender norms of Poe’s time, Ann. ‧. Bliss reads the black cat Pluto as the narrator’s surrogate child who rejects his. sit. y. Nat. maternal affection. She further emphasizes the link between the narrator’s financial. io. er. crisis and his failed domestic manhood, thereby interpreting the resolution of the story as a thwarted reassertion of intimidated masculine power in the guise of. al. n. v i n C hrenders him “weak, hypermasculine violence, which faint-hearted, and emasculated” engchi U (98).. As illuminating and persuasive as these readings prove to be, they downplay the role of male-male relationship in constructing Poe’s critique of the heterosexual matrix by situating the problem with domesticity at the center of gender differences and examine it within the framework of dichotomized relations between men and women. While it may be true that his female protagonists too often become “objects of uncontrollable fascination” whereas male narrators find themselves constantly caught up in antagonism which involves another man who evokes “mistrust, deceit, or violence” (Kennedy, qtd. in Person 131), an indisputable fact should be brought up: in 9.

(20) certain works, Poe stages his familial fiasco by emphasizing the relations between his male characters rather than dwelling upon a bygone heterosexual romance. This viewpoint can be located in a more pertinent theoretical framework when we consider David Anthony’s endeavor to contextualize the Jacksonian Gothic within the cultural work of discursive constructions. In the wake of the Panic of 1837, the affective effusion often found in sensation novels shows that incipient modes of emotional expressions, male fear and panic in particular, are in fact discursive constructions as a response to socio-economic crises, which brings Ann Cvetkovich to. 政治大. the conclusion that “[t]he middle-class subject . . . is constructed as a feeling subject” (qtd. in Anthony 729).. 立. What this actually entails is that the dangerous affective experiences provided by. ‧ 國. 學. sensation literature during the mid-nineteenth century do so by commodifying and. ‧. exchanging experiences that “appeal to baser animalistic, instinctual impulses” which. y. Nat. are often depicted as “an “appetite” or “craving,” occasionally to the point of. er. io. sit. “addiction” and “perversion” (Cvetkovich 20). It is precisely based upon this rationale that literary genres which depend on the arousal of negative affect to relieve anxieties. al. n. v i n C hto the Victorian belief are often deprecated and held anathema in perpetual progress. engchi U Sensationalism, and more specifically, Gothic fictions, are relegated to an. aesthetically inferior genre precisely owing to an unmistakable hierarchized split wherein body and emotion are assigned a subordinate position to mind and reason. The cultural premise that literature should appeal to “higher faculties” thereof, masks a political maneuver as well as an ethical discourse which perpetuate the marginalization of cultural taste and forms that speak to a certain multitude, in this case, the working class and women. Simply put, the anxiety toward the rapid proliferation of sensation novels to a great extent “prefigures resistance or transgression of social strictures” (Cvetkovich 22). 10.

(21) Whether mass culture consumption is capable of producing transgressive power as such and therefore works to shape a counternarrative against Victorian progressivism still remains a contestable ground for many. Taking Cvetkovich’s perspective as an anchorage point, David Anthony further maps out the interplay between male affect and sensational narratives by calling our attention to Michael Milner’s discussion of a sensational text, in which he stated that the transgressive potential pertaining to the antebellum Gothic, are in actuality, integral to sustaining a “normative and privatized form of liberal masculinity” (qtd. in Anthony 729). Readily. 政治大 as he concludes with a rather pessimistic argument that albeit seemingly emblematic 立. identifiable, the Foucauldian premise of repressive hypothesis is not lost on Anthony. of emancipatory forms of desire and sexuality, the figure of the debtor recurrent in. ‧ 國. 學. sensation literature was, in fact, “refashioned into a submissive subject, one who, inter. sit. y. Nat. feminized form of middle-class masculinity” (729).. ‧. alia, ends up more fully incorporated within the spheres of a genteel and often. io. er. Positing my argument against Milner and Anthony’s theoretical stances, I argue that these readings, while highlighting the risk of granting sensationalism an. al. n. v i n C hall too hastily dismiss inherently subversive position, the potentially productive nature engchi U of affective bodies and the political agency that accumulates within the didactics. between mass culture and aesthetic practices. By this statement I do not intend to suggest that “culture merely reroutes affect rather than actively constructing it,” or that affect exists as a “prediscursive entity” which can be considered exterior to the cultural subtexts that structure and produce it,” as Cvetkovich argues against in a slightly different context (Cvetkovich 28). While I agree with her characterization of mass-cultural texts as not merely a conduit for emotions but apparatuses that actively construct affective experience, I nonetheless believe that representations of non-normative desire in sensational literature may open up multiple sites for 11.

(22) resistance and that the activity of the reader, together with that of the critics, form the locus of mobilizing emotions. Indeed, literary works are not intrinsically saturated with transformative power, but the act of interpreting and analyzing them not only contributes to the mobilization of affect and pleasure, but radically shifts the paradigm of literary criticism. Notwithstanding the fact that scholarship began delineating manhood by studying its part independently of men’s complex societal relations, critical attention has been developed to reexamine masculinity in dialogue with other social. 政治大 literature has endeavored to enrich the inquiries into “non-normative sociality,” as 立. constructions. As a matter of fact, feminist criticism of nineteenth century American. Neff specifies (5). More precisely, recent studies have accentuated the. ‧ 國. 學. intersectionality of race, class and the formation of masculinity by examining the role. ‧. of women alongside and against the role of men, a tendency which hitherto renders. sit. y. Nat. same-sex desire in American Gothic fictions significantly understudied. In this project,. io. er. I seek to reinvigorate current researches by delving into the role of male homosocial desire in relation to emotions—with a focus on fear, paranoia, and melancholia—and. al. n. v i n C hof Jacksonian masculinity how they shed light on the construction in Poe’s tales. engchi U. Brian Neff’s theorization of male affect offers richly divergent, heterogeneous. tools in this respect. With regard to the role of fear in the construction of masculinity, Neff calls our attention to the intersections of Sedgwick’s contention that Gothic terror is constituted by the fear of disrupted boundaries and Butler’s diction in a context where she poses a question regarding the fear of alternative sexual practices: “Is the breakdown of gender binaries . . . so monstrous, so frightening, that it must be held to be definitionally impossible and heuristically precluded from any effort to think gender?” (qtd. in Neff 4) One is tempted to go so far as to claim that this is the moment when homosexuality comes to embody a source of genuine anxiety for men 12.

(23) who attempt to navigate their roles in a society. 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 which all otherness is defined.. 政治大 longer suffices, one has to become “the appropriate type of man.” While 立. The crux of this gender indeterminacy lies in the fact that to be “not-female” no. homosexuality as an identity category has only emerged during the late nineteenth. ‧ 國. 學. century, one can gain a glimpse of its engagement with the anxieties and fear inherent. ‧. in antebellum masculine identities. As Neff cogently claims, “whereas the twentieth. sit. y. Nat. century saw a correlation between the advent of homosexuality as an identity and new. io. er. challenges to masculinity, the nineteenth century was the period during which many of these changes were first taking place” (9). Indeed, being a man in the antebellum. al. n. v i n period requires the ability toC identify homosexuality h e n g c h i Uand preclude any probabilities of becoming a homosexual. Therefore, the capability to recognize and differentiate the. dreaded homosexual is connected to a man’s qualification as a masculine man. In this study I argue—at the risk of appearing anachronistic—that Poe’s works both anticipate the emergence of non-normative desires and presents a critique of canonized gendered behaviors. It has now become commonplace for critics to interpret Poe’s short stories by applying the Lacanian psychoanalytic approach. Nevertheless, the psychosexual interpretation of Gothic tales, always already based on the heterosexualized Oedipal. 13.

(24) model that sets out to degothicize the Gothic as well as restore normality3, is known to occasionally naturalize the false dichotomy of masculine power and feminine victimhood. Among the few attempts to engage queer theory in Poe studies, Gustavus Stadler’s commentary undoubtedly stands out as one of the most enlightening. An astute observation, Stadler’s argumentation points out that psychoanalytic readings exhibit an inclination to pinpoint registers of non-normative desire, development, and behavior by singling out “hypostatized categories such as ‘the’ perverse, ‘the’ other, ‘the uncanny’—nebulous terms that generally imply their indefinite interconnections. 政治大 contribute to a queer studies that works to historicize concepts of erotic normativity 立 with queerness, but “whose very vagueness severely limits their potential to. and non-normativity” (20).. ‧ 國. 學. While this serves as an insightful reminder of the evident limitations of my thesis,. ‧. the primary focus of this project is to interrogate the problematic assumption that. y. sit. 3. Nat. certain facets of sexuality exist as aprioristic substance rather than performatively. n. al. er. io. This is pointed out by Jack Halberstam in his reconsideration of Dr. Daniel Schreber’s case, wherein he offers a powerful critique of Freud’s treatment of paranoia as a universalized model for pathological fear. Fear, as he reiterates in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, is not only gendered, but race- and class-specific. Schreber recounts his fantasies of persecution in which he undergoes a transsexual bodily transformation, followed by a firm belief that by submitting to the rays of God, he can reinstate the world to a “lost state of bliss” (109). As Halberstam notes, Schreber’s feeling that numerous ‘“female nerves’ have already passed over into his body, and out of them a new race of men will proceed through a process of direct impregnation by God” is translated by Freud into a desire to reproduce without his female counterpart, and more importantly, a pathologization of this desire (109). In Freud’s reading, Schreber’s “rays of God” which are constituted by “spermatozoa,” are in fact “nothing else than a concrete representation and external projection of libidinal cathexes” (“On the Mechanism of Paranoia” 78). Reducing pathological fear to the workings of deformed male sexuality while accepting it as a universal model for paranoia (the same model is taken as given in Freud’s diagnosis of paranoia in a woman), Freud seems to build his theory on a streamlining of affect devoid of any gender specificity. In addition, by defensively subsuming all paranoia into a heterosexualizing master-narrative of sexual pathology which prescribes a refusal of identification with the female subject position, Freud’s psychoanalysis assigns itself the role of “the monster killer” that sets out to restore “normality” (Halberstam 108).. Ch. engchi. 14. i n U. v.

(25) enacted signification. By articulating same-sex desire in Poe with an emphasis on the social milieu and historical context that structure his works, I aim to confront the erroneous belief that sexuality is ever coherent enough to demarcate “normality” and “abnormality.” Whereas most readings tend to associate the collapse of the Symbolic with Poe’s aesthetics in his works4, my project undertakes a queer analysis of the ostensibly de-sexualized representations of male-male relations and the act of male bonding in literature. As explicated in the subsequent chapters, this literary desexualization hinges on a broader structural problem, a compulsorily heterosexual. 政治大 As elucidated above, the major purpose of my research is to lay bare the 立. masculine image of men.. discursive effect of nineteenth-century gender normativity within a modern. ‧ 國. 學. socio-political framework by reexamining Poe’s works in dialogue with the myriad. ‧. efforts to understand the text thus far. With the intention to effectively expand the. sit. y. Nat. scholarship, this thesis broaches afresh two questions: in what ways are male. io. er. sexuality and homoerotic desire revealed/concealed and interact with one another in the convention of nineteenth-century Gothic and sensation narratives? What are some. al. n. v i n alternative ways to decipherC Gothic narrative structures h e n g c h i U other than the humanist. investment in the dichotomy of “monsters and men” which leaves the interpretive strategies that stabilize the threshold of “otherness” always unchallenged?. 1.2 Gothic Masculinity and Romantic Camaraderie Arguably the most representative short story of Poe’s, “The Black Cat” carries much more than the ostensibly didactic connotations which its retributive denouement seems to suggest. In this story, the narrator recounts how he is continuously mocked For a comprehensive background of Poe’s aesthetics, see “The Æsthetic Theory of Edgar Poe” by Summerfield Baldwin and Marvin Laser’s “The Growth and Structure of Poe’s Concept of Beauty.” 4. 15.

(26) as a child by his peers for his “tenderness of heart” and “[fondness] of animals” (192). This peculiarity only grows as the narration progresses into his adulthood and becomes “[his] principal sources of pleasure” (192). The nurturing character and affective effusion are counteracted by his murderous acts in the latter part of the story when he strangles his beloved black cat Pluto and walls up his wife after killing her under the influence of alcoholism. As argued previously, the repetitive substratum of male competitiveness and the recurring theme of such antagonism are what undergirds the compulsory nature of antebellum male-male relationships, which. 政治大 values. Paradoxically, homosociality during antebellum times also serves to prepare 立. consequently give rise to variegated forms of resistance to heteronormative domestic. one for, rather than defer one from, the trajectory of heterosexual marriage. It follows. ‧ 國. 學. that “[for] men trying to navigate their gender roles, homosexuality presented a. ‧. difficult problem; it now became necessary . . . for men to be able to discern the. sit. y. Nat. sexuality of other men in order to properly navigate their relationships” (Neff 7).. io. er. However, to posit a single, coherent male identity would be not only a daunting task but a downright impossible one. What makes Poe’s representations of antebellum. al. n. v i n C“male masculinity Gothic is the fact that his seeking emotional stability and U h e n[subjects] i h gc self-possession in fiscal security [ . . . are simultaneously those who find themselves] dispossessed and haunted by the uncanny spectral world of the Jacksonian marketplace” (Anthony 725). One aspect which distinguishes the narrators of “The Black Cat” and “William Wilson” from other Jacksonian sensation narratives is their anonymity. Neff’s analysis of the market economy proves to be illuminating here. During the time Poe completed “The Black Cat” he lived in Philadelphia, an urban space saturated with economic instabilities which dictated that a man “make a name” in order to attain a normative, bourgeois masculine identity. The utter lack of name characterizes Poe’s narrators as 16.

(27) invisible by definition of both the market economy and proper manhood, “only identifiable by [their] crimes and [their] economic trappings” (Neff 80). What this actually entails is that both childless and unemployed, the narrators are incapable of successfully navigating manhood, and therefore exist outside the antebellum market as an embodiment of alternative, non-conforming modes of living. Throughout the story, the narrator of “The Black Cat” never mentions his relationship with or his desire for his wife, but spends most of the time depicting his affection for Pluto. In addition, he consistently refers to the taverns he frequents to. 政治大 reminds the reader of a spatial uncanny double as opposed to the middle-class 立. socialize with other men at night as “[his] own haunts” (193), an imagery which. domesticity, a place haunted by drunkards and men who seek temporary liberation. ‧ 國. 學. from their domestic lives through the act of male-bonding. During the antebellum. ‧. period, it is characteristic of men to drink with other men of the same class and. sit. y. Nat. profession, which creates a sense of camaraderie integral to the formation of manhood,. io. er. especially in urban spaces. Notably, it is through his habitual visits to a tavern that he meets the second cat, whom he takes home as a substitute for Pluto.. al. n. v i n C h and the act of male-bonding Nineteenth-century tavern culture are crucial in that they engchi U work hand in hand to construct the male bourgeois identity. Yet paradoxically, it is. precisely through homosociality as a release valve that they can return to the domestic sphere and play the part of an appropriately masculine husband. This, in turn, transforms the home into a site of repressed non-normative desires. As the narrative progresses, the interactions exchanged between the narrator and the male cat he picks up at the tavern gradually become permeated by homoerotic overtones. Whilst recounting his dread and repulsion elicited by the sight of this animal, the narrator discovers a heightened affection on the animal’s part: “Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my chair, or spring upon my knees, covering me with 17.

(28) its loathsome caresses” (197). At other times, the cat would “[fasten] its long and sharp claws in [his] dress, clamber [ . . . to his breast]” (197). Markers of homoeroticism as such abound in this tale, combined with thwarted attempts to meet the ever-changing criteria of “appropriate manhood” created by a new market economy. The story ends in a climax which symbolizes vehement resistance to normativity—an utter disintegration of the heterosexual domestic realm. Alcoholism, the “Fiend Intemperance” with which the narrator acquaints himself during his time spent with other men, to the extent that he “[blushes to confess it],” becomes the. 政治大 murders is, according to the narrator himself, “the spirit of PERVERSENESS . . . the 立 catalyst for murdering Pluto and his wife (193). Yet the ultimate momentum of his. unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself . . . to do wrong for the wrong’s sake. ‧ 國. 學. only” (194).. ‧. Thus the narrator’s violence is not so much the natural consequence of “a series. y. Nat. of mere household events” (192), as he claims in the opening scene of the story,. er. io. sit. wherein “the killing of Pluto, the favorite ‘son’ so to speak, makes sense in an inverted Oedipal framework where the jealous father sees Pluto and his Doppelgänger. al. n. v i n C hlike Kronos, the archetype as obstacles to the wife’s affection and, of the devouring engchi U father, eliminates the sons he cannot bear to share his wife’s affection with”. (Møllegaard 7). Nor is it a “recourse . . . to move beyond boyish cruelty . . . [and remove] all shameful reminders of his loss [as a man who failed to reassert his masculine power]” (Bliss 98). On the contrary, it is a radical gender protest against the dismal status quo in which the narrator’s violent outburst embodies the ineluctable aftermath of any attempt to reconcile domestic life and homoerotic desire in a patriarchal society. While I agree that the black cats can be seen as a psychological intrusion of trauma, such a trauma is not so much derived from Oedipal jealousy as the irrational 18.

(29) fear of emasculation that harks back to his childhood and the potential shame of dehumanization linked to human-animal intimacy. Above all, the narrator’s bruised and battered boyhood becomes the fabric that makes up the nucleus of his trauma, reinforced through a series of reenactments of the original traumatic event later in his life. On the one hand, this trauma is characterized by unintended repetitions that are not immediately perceptible to the narrator and thereby understood as a present event despite its remote familiarity. On the other hand, such repetitions, albeit unwanted, are paradoxically governed by a perverse intentionality that is basic and defies analysis.. 政治大 working-through and ensures its repeated failures. 立. Such perverse intentionality is malevolent in that it works against the narrator’s. In essence, the repetition compulsion that characterizes trauma riffs on the. ‧ 國. 學. perversity that is structurally omnipresent in “The Black Cat.” To begin with, an. ‧. intrusive, assaultive, pain-inducing memory that has its root in a preceding prototypic. sit. y. Nat. scene sets trauma in motion. In search of opportunities to correct the past, the subject. io. er. arduously seeks for occasions to reestablish control over the event he was previously vulnerable to. This tendency typifies a mindset that dictates persistent repetitions of a. al. n. v i n Cachieved, failed attempt until success is coerces the subject to reach a U h e n gwhich i h c. constantly redefined competence and transforms the subject’s former terror into exhilaration. The fact that this transformation is accompanied paradoxically by an inevitable return to a familiar, unsettling feeling should be noted when we consider the trauma of Poe’s narrator. In “The Black Cat,” hallmarks of trauma present themselves in a powerful, self-destructive, retraumatizing force that is at work within the subject. From a more social perspective, trauma poses a substantial impediment to developments of emotions and intersubjective relationships in that it gradually becomes a systematic dysfunction. Insofar as trauma stands in lieu of these interrupted relationships, it can 19.

(30) also be understood as a constant pursuit of an object to reattach itself to, to the extent that the object effectively functions as a surrogate for its traumatizing predecessor. This compulsive repetition finds a vent through circumstances reminiscent of the traumatizing event, experienced in a desire to return to an earlier state of things in hope that it might result in a belated sense of mastery. Internalizing the belittlement that he is indeed “not man enough,” the narrator later seeks comfort in the companionship of cats, who serve as symbolic stand-ins for temporary mastery over the same sex. More succinctly put, the manifestations of trauma alter, yet the essence. 政治大 Hence the gouging out of Pluto’s eye may well represent the narrator’s 立. remains unchanged.. endeavor to retrieve his threatened masculine power, yet such a symbolic act of. ‧ 國. 學. castration is not executed to eliminate the menace posed by “the ersatz ‘sons’”. ‧. (Møllegaard 17), but to disavow a former selfhood, an emotional injury that proves to. sit. y. Nat. have a significant repercussion later in his adult life. Essentially, what the relationship. io. er. between the narrator and his cats unveils is not an emblem of a nurturing mother-child relationship as Ann V. Bliss argues (96), but the oppressive structure of a. al. n. v i n C h form of male homosociality. heterosexualized, thus properly masculine By revealing engchi U the claustrophobic nature of familial bonds, “The Black Cat” problematizes the. gendered division between the public and private spheres—if the wife’s death betrays the destructive forces latent in a holy union always already exclusive to the privileged few, the hideous beast that the narrator accidentally walls up with the corpse signifies the perpetually haunting presence of a repressed homoerotic longing. Another text under analysis in this project that serves as a testimonial to the contradictions and compulsory nature of Jacksonian manhood is “William Wilson.” However, in this story, the fear of being a man is codified in the form of competitive antagonism which merges with paranoia. If “The Black Cat” reveals the gruesome 20.

(31) aspects of marriage and gendered spatiality, “William Wilson” is a tale about closeted angst and the fear of exposing the unnaturalness of one’s own gender. By assuming the alias “William Wilson,” the first-person narrator in this story relinquishes his paternal ties, only to find himself constantly haunted by his spectral namesake. In the beginning of the story, the narrator confesses his general detestation for the stranger who bears the same “uncourtly patronymic, and its very common, if not plebeian praenomen” (174). However, as the narrative progresses, his emotional response toward the second Wilson is further complicated by their interactions: “It is difficult,. 政治大 motley and heterogeneous admixture;—some petulant animosity, which was not yet 立 indeed, to define, or even to describe, my real feelings towards him. They formed a. hatred, some esteem, more respect, much fear, with a world of uneasy curiosity” (174,. ‧ 國. 學. emphasis added).. ‧. Undoubtedly, what constitutes fear for the narrator is the fact that not only do. sit. y. Nat. they share the same name, but they have the same height, birthday, and physical. io. er. features. To put it more succinctly, Gothic terror here is manifested in the erosion of barriers between self and other, allowing the narrator a glimpse into the liminal. al. n. v i n C h between familiarity moment that delimits the boundary and fear—the moment when engchi U masculine identity becomes indecipherable. The ambivalence of this relationship. reaches its zenith when a quintessentially queer moment arises: as the narrator relates, “[he] could not help observing, with a feeling made up of wonder, abasement, and pique, that [Wilson] mingled with his injuries, his insults, or his contradictions, a certain most inappropriate, and assuredly most unwelcome affectionateness of manner”, to which he “could not bring [him]self to hate him altogether” (173, emphasis mine).. 21.

(32) Previous critical assessments5 tend to read the second Wilson as the narrator’s completely alienated conscience that “has been banished and returns as an externalized force that is perceived as perverse and destructive by the narrator” (Monnet 42), or in the Freudian sense, a materialized super-ego. For the purpose of this study, I will focus on Poe’s hypostatization of the homoerotic undercurrent in the formation of the super-ego, exemplified by Wilson’s identification with the superego’s punitive force and its sadomasochistic aftereffect. As much as his counterpart is abominated and dreadful, Wilson cannot bring himself to hate him and acknowledges. 政治大 wisdom, was far keener than [his] own” (176). Furthermore, the narrator stresses that 立 that his rivalry possesses a “moral sense . . . if not his general talents and worlds. if he has not dismissed “the counsels embodied in [the second Wilson’s] meaning. ‧ 國. 學. whispers,” he might have been a “better . . . [and] happier man” (176). Together, these. ‧. depictions shape his rivalry as an ego-ideal that the ego can never live up to, later. y. Nat. becoming the repository for the death drive. As noted by critics, conscience has. er. io. sit. played a curious role in antebellum representations of self-discipline; yet in “William Wilson,” it becomes a totally alienated and externalized critical agency. Wilson’s. al. n. v i n self-destruction in the end can thus C be seen as a consequence h e n g c h i U of a broader. dissatisfaction and frustration derived from the normativity of masculinity which. For instance, Peter K. Garrett disagrees with the interpretation that the narrator finally obliterates his conscience by killing his doppelgänger. In addition, he calls attention to the fact that throughout the narration, the narrator’s tone has remained guilt-ridden, which is also the major impetus for him to confess in the first place. A more politically-focused research can be found in Thomas Peyser’s “Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ and the Nightmare of Equality,” wherein he views the story as a political allegory of democratic predicament instead of a psychological tale by establishing a link between the epigraph in “William Wilson” and Alexis de Tocqueville’s commentary in Democracy in America (1835) on the political circumstances of America in Poe’s time. One thing noteworthy but not directly relevant to my study here is that Tocqueville observed a “strange melancholy” prevalent among American men, characterized by an anxious fervor to invent themselves in the epoch of self-made manhood (qtd. in Greven 125). 5. 22.

(33) underscores self-control, discipline, and virility. As such, normative manhood enforces an inhibition of even the subtlest traces that hint at the presence of homoerotic desire, signified by Wilson’s evident affection toward his namesake. To rewrite Sedgwick’s account of “the male chase,” I contend that male competition in “William Wilson” is both murderous and amorous (ix). In a different but not unrelated context, Sedgwick demarcates an ambivalent curiosity and vengeance-ridden sentiment that pertinently characterize the male-male relation in “William Wilson”: Paranoia seems to require being imitated to be understood, and it, in turn,. 政治大 you can do (to me) I can do worse, and Anything you can do (to me) I can 立 seems to understand only by imitation. Paranoia proposes both Anything. do first—to myself. . . . paranoia refuses to be only either a way of. ‧ 國. 學. knowing or a thing known, but is characterized by an insistent tropism. ‧. toward occupying both positions . . . (“Paranoid Reading and Reparative. sit. y. Nat. Reading” 131). io. er. If we consider the second Wilson’s indeterminate male identity, his imitation of the narrator’s dress, gait, general manner and voice, together with the fact that the. al. n. v i n narrator, in a fit of inflamedC anger, “murders himself” h e n g c h i U in the ending, a tableau of male. paranoia is vividly presented. Yet, this thesis is not a recourse to the classical Freudian interpretation wherein paranoia is seen as a distinctively homosexual disease. What really comes under scrutiny here is not how homosexuality is intrinsically bound up with paranoia, but how the systemic oppression of homosexuality works, or more specifically, as Guy Hocquenghem would reason, “[i]f paranoia reflects the repression of same-sex desire . . . then paranoia is a uniquely privileged site for illuminating not homosexuality itself, as in the Freudian tradition, but rather precisely, the mechanisms of homophobic and heterosexist enforcement against it” (qtd. in Touching Feeling 126). 23.

(34) In this project, I intend to call forth the interconnections between the second Wilson’s imitation and the constructedness/performative nature of antebellum Southern gentry manhood. To begin with, Poe’s vehement mockery of the market economy seems most prominent in this story when a “young parvenu nobleman, Glendinning” is introduced, whom the narrator observes to be “rich . . . as Herodes Atticus—[whose] riches, too, as easily acquired [but is soon discovered to be] of weak intellect, [thus marked as] a fitting subject for [his] skill” (180). Poe’s treatment of this character and his later falling victim to the narrator’s ruse in gambling are. 政治大 socio-economic class—eager and competitive in money-making, and yet lacking the 立 arguably the most pronounced evidence of his mockery targeted at newly developed. respectable manners or intellect to match their social status. In a similar vein, this. ‧ 國. 學. purposefully derogatory depiction concurs with the narrator’s paradoxical impression. ‧. of Reverend Dr. Bransby, a pastor who is also the principal of the school Wilson. sit. y. Nat. attends. As the narrator recalls, Dr. Bransby is “a reverend man, with countenance so. io. er. demurely benign, with robes so glossy and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast,—could this be he who . . . with sour visage, and in. al. n. v i n C hin hand, the Draconian snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule laws of the academy” engchi U (170)? This Janus-faced character evokes an image of “the well-regulated masculine. façade of Wallstreet and the slovenly ‘dishabille’ of a man on his own free time” (Neff 1), who comes to signify the Gothic moment when the boundaries of identities and bodies become porous and mutable. Just like William Wilson’s ghostly double, the Jacksonian gentry male identity is revealed to be self-contradictory and saturated with instability. Indeed, it is precisely the indeterminacy of masculine identity that elicits the narrator’s deepest fear which lays bare the Gothicness of being an antebellum man. As I will explicate in the subsequent chapters, the perverseness of the faceless 24.

(35) narrator in “The Black Cat,” the “ungovernable passions” and “evil propensities” (169) pertaining to William Wilson, are both resonated by Arthur Gordon Pym’s self-destructive urges and queer desires. Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, though frequently compared to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick6, I argue, is a narrative about the melancholy of gender. The narrative encapsulates a thwarted notion of manhood different from “William Wilson” and “The Black Cat” in that hegemonic masculinity here is codified not in fear, but in the form of gender melancholy. In early studies, the spectral haunting presence of solitude. 政治大 evacuates any gender specificity of the narrative, hence rendering the grotesque 立. and melancholia in Pym are often interpreted as a universal human condition, which. aspects of Poe’s story purged and normalized. In this respect, the possibility of. ‧ 國. 學. successfully overcoming self-destruction and recuperating male agency in an erotic. ‧. relationship is altogether foreclosed. Critical responses to Pym have continued to. sit. y. Nat. bifurcate nonetheless—whereas the rhetorical and stylistic incongruities of Pym cause. io. er. considerable interpretive problems, critics seem to agree on one thing: that nothing about Arthur Gordon Pym is stable. His personality seems curiously “passive, obtuse,. al. n. v i n and static” (Harvey 9) and inCmany ways the narrative h e n g c h i U (or Pym himself) has no. memory other than the fragmentary events documented in the maritime journal (8). Some myth- and psychoanalytic readings even postulate that Pym never actually develops a subjecthood throughout the narrative, as nearly little interpretation is offered by him about the bizarre experiences during and after his travels, while on other occasions his peculiarly detailed accounts of the gruesome experiences on the. The thematic parallels between Moby-Dick and Pym have been noted by several critics—Patrick F. Quinn for instance, even expresses his belief that “if Melville did not long and seriously study the essential drift of [Pym], then the similarities that exist between that book and Moby-Dick must be accounted one of the most extraordinary accidents in literature” (585). 6. 25.

(36) wrecked ship Grampus, his encounters with the Tsalalians, and a series of fauna, are simply devoid of emotions. Scholarly attention has focused on Pym’s inconsistent language, which occasionally resembles that of juvenile literature but is quickly replaced by a “contrastingly sober scientific-reportorial voice,” “[t]ransposed against extravagant, extended descriptions of irrational states of mind—terror, delirium, etc. . . ” (Harvey 10). More conspicuously, the subsequent scenes in Pym’s narration after Augustus’s death lapse from a state of barely perceivable mourning to “a pedantic [emotional]. 政治大 naturalist observations of fauna and charts of nautical information” (Greven 132) with 立 blankness,” characterized by bewilderingly elaborate accounts of “pseudoscientific,. no mention of the crew’s reactions to Augustus’s demise. I argue that the physical and. ‧ 國. 學. emotional unavailability of Poe’s Jacksonian men on the make can be seen as a result. ‧. of the unattainable social ideal of normative masculinity. Read in tandem with Pym’s. sit. y. Nat. sense of queer unbelonging, male affect in this narrative exemplifies many aspects. io. er. pertaining to a Butlerian melancholic.. In the subsequent chapters, I argue that the inexplicable longing of both. al. n. v i n C and Augustus and Pym for precariousness over settled paths can be viewed as h edeath ngchi U. transgressions against heteronormativity and that Pym’s “desires” inform an outlawed emotion closely akin to what the narrator in “The Black Cat” terms “the spirit of perverseness,” a primitive faculty inherent in human nature which betrays the “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself” and propels it “to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only” (194). Notably, it is under this impulse of perverseness that he commits the atrocity of killing his wife, a symbolic act to disengage from domesticity. In both cases, the desires of Poe’s male protagonists are quintessentially counter-reproductive and simultaneously intertwined with fear and melancholy, sentiments crucial to my analysis of male homosociality in this project. 26.

(37) As I will return to elaborate in Chapter Four, Poe’s male-male relationships do not end with harmonious spiritual communion—as is often the case in Transcendentalist narratives—nor do they anticipate a rosy redemptive future, but are laden with excessive corporeality and death drive. By juxtaposing Pym’s traumatic break from his patronymic ties and the queer sentiments underlying his relationships with Augustus and Peters, I propose to read the interminable male group mourning in the latter part of the narrative as a form of the fraternal order’s remorse over their patricidal act, which informs a significant radicality of gender revolt. In a similar vein,. 政治大 male bonds in patriarchy. These bonds are made palpable through Pym’s inability to 立 the literal absence of male companionship can be interpreted as an allegory of lost. articulate and acknowledge the object of his mourning, an object that is always. ‧ 國. 學. already lost and forsaken. The textual absence and Pym’s “visions . . . of the. ‧. melancholy among men” together evoke a vivid image of the Butlerian melancholic,. sit. y. Nat. who grieves a “preemptive loss,” “a mourning for unlived possibilities” (The Psychic. io. er. Life of Power 139).. On the other hand, Pym’s traumatic break with the patriarchal order in its. al. n. v i n C h informs a potentially metaphorized form as “the Father” queer connotation in that this engchi U. escape is joined by other young men who likewise reject the Oedipal socialization that prepares them to be normative male subjects. This is demonstrated by Pym’s rejection of his maternal grandfather, who signifies normative manhood throughout the story with his “wealth, power, station, industry, customs, lineage, primogeniture, and tradition” (Greven 136). In addition, the novel’s handy disposal of its male authoritative figures such as Captains Barnard and Guy also reaffirms that Pym and his comrades are a deviant fraternity. Viewed in this light, Pym’s league with Augustus can be seen as a fraternal revolt against patriarchal normativity, one that is most manifest in the Grampus mutiny initiated by a group of murderous mutineers 27.