SOURCE: Leverenz, David. “Poe and Gentry Virginia.” In The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman, pp. 210-36. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Leverenz situates Poe within the Southern literary tradition.]

Allen Tate's remarkable 1949 essay, “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,” defines Poe as southern not only for his high sense of a writer's calling but because Poe understood better than anyone else that the modern world was going straight to hell, or to the bourgeois, commodifying North. For Tate, a culture not controlled by leisured gentlemen means Dante's Inferno, which Poe rewrites: a disintegration from reason and community into machine-like, alienated egotisms of the will, vampiric women, and cravings for sensations. Tate mournfully concludes, however, that Poe lacked the stylistic and moral control to be a true southern gentleman. His “early classical education and a Christian upbringing” (49) simply did not stick.

Recent southern critics have been considerably more sensitive to the patriarchal and racist idealizations in such elegizing of gentry traditions. They tend to locate Poe's southernness paradoxically and peripherally, in his marginality to gentry status. Louis Rubin links Poe's characteristic vitality of the “beleaguered intellect” to his less than legitimate status as an orphan in the home of John Allan, who himself felt alien to the Tidewater gentry and unappreciated by his wealthy uncle, William Galt. In the five years in which Allan was trying to make his mark in England, for instance, Poe was boarded out from the age of seven. His guardian also made it clear that the boy was not to be treated as a member of the family.¹ Others have made cases for Poe's southernness through his conservative, antidemocratic values. As Stuart Levine has summed them up, Poe was “a reactionary, a snob, and a racist” (Levine 1990, xxx).

Yet Tate's sense of Poe as a kind of demonic, premodernist visionary, at best a marginal or negative southerner, still holds. G. R. Thompson puts the problem succinctly: “Poe is the antebellum South's one original writer, and he is the one writer whose Southernness is suspect” (Thompson 1988, 264). Except for three glancing allusions, Richard Gray leaves Poe out of Writing the South, a mute testimony to Poe's flight from regional entrapment.² Resolutely antiprovincial in nearly every literary way, Poe spent most of his professional life moving from northern city to northern city, vainly seeking capital and cultural authority to edit an elite, five-dollar magazine for civilized gentlemen, in the spirit of Tate's ideal.³

The deconstructive and ideological turns of the past twenty years invite us to read Poe's southernness more thoroughly. This essay argues that Poe was more than a marginal visionary, and that the southern ideal of the gentleman plays a crucial role in his writings as well as in his life. Poe's mix of claustrophobic Gothicism, arcane reasoning, and cosmopolitan satire both exaggerates and undermines the gentry fictions of a doubly dependent postcolonial region. On the productive periphery of the emerging capitalist North, the South also produced tobacco and cotton for the world's capitalist center, in London. There John Allan came close to bankruptcy, much as William Byrd II had failed to make his London mark almost two hundred years earlier. Allan returned to inhabit the compensatory fiction that Byrd had helped establish: a paradoxical self-image of the gentleman in the provinces, proud yet touchy, cool yet combative, masterful yet keenly defensive about any slights to his honor.

In Imagined Communities, an influential study of the interplay between colonialism and nationalism, Benedict Anderson suggests that “tropical Gothic” is enabled by metropolitan capital, and further, that racism is a way to “play aristocrat off center court.” He goes so far as to say that colonialism invented racism, as a fallback strategy to establish and maintain dominance within provincial dependence (1983, 137, 139).⁴ Throughout the South, racism and slavery allowed white English emigrants to foster an Anglophilic social fiction of imitative pseudoaristocracy for squires and would-be squires, and to preserve that fiction in amber against historical change.

William Byrd II helped make Virginia the apex of the pseudoaristocracy's hegemonic arch. After his return from London in 1726, he turned life at his home at Westover into his ideal of what a planter's life in the provinces should be. Witty, urbane, civic-minded, he wrote his History of the Dividing Line in large part for his London friends; it was not published until 1841. Yet as Kenneth Lockridge suggests, Byrd also strove to adopt “a rigid, almost unbending set of poses” defined in part by his struggles at the margins of London's high society. His coded diary became his secret mirror to reassure him that every day, in every way, he did what gentlemen do. Not only his 179,000 acres, from which Richmond and Petersburg were created, but also his public persona as the classic Virginia patriarch secured his position at the top of the provincial gentry hierarchy, despite his enormous debts. When John Allan suddenly inherited his uncle's riches, saving him from ruin, Allan also inherited three large estates: Lower Byrd, Little Byrd, and Big Byrd.⁵

Poe inhabits and undermines gentry fictions of mastery, not least by exposing the gentleman as a fiction. Typically, he displays cultivated narrators unable to master themselves. An “imp” seems bent on their destruction, as if self-directed malevolence rather than socially virtuous benevolence constituted the “sixth sense” of Scottish moral philosophy. Or Poe celebrates masterful intellects, such as Dupin or himself, who keep resentments at bay with their powers to transcend subjectivity through mental mirroring. Poe's narratives exaggerate gentry contradictions, especially the double imperatives of cool reasoning and impulsive bravado. His tales do not simply shame gentlemen of honor; he constructs, then deconstructs, their private lives, by transgressing the great social divide between public displays of mastery and an inwardness felt as alien to oneself. Arabesques of public leisure become grotesque enslavements to obsession. Finally, Poe plays with gentry specters of a debased capitalist future to put his own indulgent yet satiric spin on nostalgia for an idealized aristocracy. He is especially keen to make textuality itself the source for true aristocracy, a status to which only his genius can pretend.

In so doing, Poe gives an American twist to the mode that Michael McKeon has labeled “extreme skepticism.” To simplify the neo-Marxist argument of McKeon's Origins of the English Novel, the rise of the novel reflects and mediates the rise to domination of class and individualism as social categories of self-perception. Capitalist dynamics challenged traditions of status that emphasized deference, kinship, and lineage. To apply McKeon across the Atlantic a hundred years later, Poe expressed “the untenably negative midpoint between these two opposed positions” (1987, 118-19).⁶ Poe negates a progressive ideology of individualism by emptying out the meaningfulness of the self as a social construct. He exposes subjectivity as a collage of derivative literary conventions and a chaos of senseless, self-destructive desires. Simultaneously, Poe negates the regressively prescriptive idealizations of the public man of honor animating Allen Tate's critique yet another century later.

To advance these arguments, I have divided my essay into four parts. The first discusses Poe's life in relation to gentry fictions and contradictions, with a look at reductive northern readings of Poe and the South. The second part considers Poe's playful textuality as his version of true aristocracy. Here I touch on “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and Pierre Bourdieu. In the third part, I apply my reading of gentry dynamics to a more full-scale reading of “The Man of the Crowd,” with some attention to the Dupin stories and “The Cask of Amontillado.” At the end, using “Hop-Frog,” I consider Poe as a gentry trickster.

II

In the late fall and early winter of 1828-29, the Virginia legislature held a constitutional convention to consider the overrepresentation of Tidewater and Piedmont gentry in state politics. Resentful yeoman delegates from the West argued for representation based on the white male population, while plantation gentry delegates from the East argued that representation should also be based on property, including slaves. As the Tidewater delegates declared with special intensity, the gentry on larger plantations feared that more equal representation would slowly shift power westward. Then the great tradition of gentry leadership, symbolized by the presence of the aged James Monroe as nominal presider and James Madison as chair of the key committee, would come to an end.

John Randolph, who probably served as one of the models for Roderick Usher, delivered the climactic gentry speech. Randolph, a delicate, even effeminate man who liked to ride in an old-fashioned English coach drawn by four English Thoroughbreds, affirmed his class consciousness as clearly as the yeoman delegates voiced their class resentments. “I am an aristocrat,” he liked to say. “I love liberty. I hate equality.” His speech warned that stripping the gentry of privileged property status would sound the “tocsin of civil war” (Freehling 1982, 63-64). Randolph meant class war, in Virginia.

Despite Randolph's ominous invocations of Armageddon, the gentry's case for mixed-base representation lost, twice, forty-nine to forty-seven. Finally the gentry salvaged a compromise apportionment based on a favorable 1820 census, after a more progressive motion to use subsequent census reports had been defeated by a tie vote, forty-eight to forty-eight. The final vote was still a cliff-hanger: fifty to forty-six (ibid., 65-69, 70-78).

In Alison Freehling's account of these debates, Drift toward Dissolution, the rhetoric of the convention delegates exposes three or perhaps four Virginias: the empowered eastern gentry from Tidewater and Piedmont; the resentful artisans, farmers, and mechanics of the West; and the more heterogeneous mix in the valley, spilling over into the Piedmont region, including Richmond, the capital, right on the fall line between Piedmont and Tidewater. In Richmond, Poe's hometown and still not much more than a town, these political tensions were exacerbated by other tensions between two kinds of gentry: the old plantation elite, and newer Scottish merchants such as John Allan who were challenging the elite for economic dominance.

After Nat Turner's south Tidewater revolt in August 1831, another special legislative session was held. It ought to surprise northerners, as it did this Yankee, to learn that a great many delegates favored “expedient abolition,” including Thomas Jefferson's grandson and (behind the scenes) governor John Floyd. Not one delegate declared slavery to be a positive good, though many eastern delegates proclaimed slavery indispensable to the gentry way of life. If the Virginia House had been apportioned on the 1830 census, Alison Freehling concludes, the overwhelming proabolition sentiment from the West would have brought the final tally within one vote of success. As it was, the vote was seventy-three to fifty-eight, East defeating West. Everyone agreed that abolition and the recolonization of free blacks and slaves to Liberia should be fully explored. When Jefferson's grandson was subsequently reelected, though only by ninety-five votes, this champion of abolition acknowledged that his support had come primarily from the “poorer” whites sympathetic to his unflinching position against slavery (Freehling 1982, 123-65, 201, 260-62).

In both legislative sessions, the eastern Virginia gentry seemed on the verge of losing a class war, yet preserved their power handily. The dreams of colonization soon failed; the western part of the state eventually seceded in 1861 to become West Virginia. In Southern Capitalists, Laurence Shore argues that again and again the gentry found ways to absorb assaults and justify its right to rule. Part of the gentry's success came from its ability to promulgate an Anglophilic fiction of leisured honor, a fiction masking often conflicting merchant, plantation, and yeoman interests.⁷ It preserved the power of perhaps a twentieth of the adult white men by encouraging other white men to feel mastery over women and African Americans. Slavery gave the gentry ample time to jockey for status, while racism gave status to every white who was not a slaveholder.⁸ In a still broader sense, slavery helped preserve habits of stratification and deference against the growing pressures of class consciousness and entrepreneurial individualism.

By 1830 the code was clear. Any man who owned ten or more slaves and a hundred or more acres of land—the slaves were considerably more important to the title of “master”—could aspire to gentry status. Any man with more than twenty slaves had secured his position as a gentleman. To rise higher up the ladder built on that floor of natural and human property, a man had to display his status publicly, particularly through rituals of virility: “Fighting, horse racing, gambling, swearing, drinking, and wenching,” as Bertram Wyatt-Brown describes young men's mutual testing (Wyatt-Brown 1982, 164).⁹ At the same time, a man had to embody a persona of cool, dispassionate, civic-minded reasonableness.

It was not simply a matter of conscious role-playing and masquerading, Wyatt-Brown argues, that made southerners so famously touchy about their virility. Southern men lived their code of honor as a constant test of manhood (Wyatt-Brown 1982, 35). In the North, normative middle- and upper-class families forsook the rod to internalize self-control through conscience and guilt. Virginia gentry families encouraged contentious acting out, with shame, not guilt, as the mediating agent for social control. It did not draw much comment when a professor at the University of Virginia was hit with a slingshot by a student who then tried to bite off the teacher's thumb. During one of the riots in the school's first year, 1825—Poe enrolled the next year—a student tossed a bottle filled with urine through a professor's window.¹⁰ Nose pulling among adult males was an instantaneous invitation to a duel. In Poe's short story “The Business Man,” a shyster narrator signals his plunge toward dishonor by mentioning that he tried and failed to get someone to pull his nose. The exceptionally large-nosed narrator of “Lionizing” loses his duel for prestige to a baron with no nose at all—which meant it could not be pulled.¹¹

Incipient class conflicts and diffuse social tensions could be subsumed in this ideology of patriarchal, hierarchical honor, with its contradictory dynamics of deference and strutting, dignified gentility and combative competitiveness. Steven M. Stowe details the intricate dance of decorum and insults that led to the death of Hawthorne's friend, Representative Jonathan Cilley, in an 1838 duel (1987, 38-49). It was a resolutely public decorum, as Stowe emphasizes, and a derivative one as well, since it explicitly upgraded the English squire to lordly status with a variety of classical models for civic conduct. George Washington invented himself as that remote, dollar-bill facade by emulating his text for true virtue, Joseph Addison's Cato. Addison's play, which he probably read rather than saw, depicts a heroic Roman who mastered all personal passions to achieve lasting honor through dedication to public duty. Such assiduous self-fashioning to prepare a man for civic leadership depends on burying unpresentable feelings “living in the tomb” (Poe 1984b, 98) of self-mastery, much as the social hierarchy stifled potential challenges from slaves, women, or men with creative imaginations.¹²

In his life, Poe frequently adopted the poses of the southern gentleman and his alienated intellectual double, the Byronic poet, often to near parodic excess. At the University of Virginia, the most expensive school in the nation, his extravagant aping of gentry manners ran up at least two thousand dollars in debts in just one year. As Kenneth Silverman's biography displays, Poe also vacillated among the contradictory expectations of gentry roles. He could be charming and courtly with the ladies, including female poets; a bantam cock in contending with his male literary peers; a dandy wearing abstruse learning on his fastidious sleeve; a heavy if intermittent drinker. Only in his seemingly asexual relations with women, including his sisterly wife (appropriately named “Virginia”), did Poe fail to comply with the basic model set by William Byrd so long ago, and present near at hand in John Allan's illegitimate twins. Otherwise Poe loved to brag about his physical prowess, emulating Byron's swimming feats and sometimes inflating his remarkable running broad jump of twenty feet six inches at the university (Silverman 1991, 30, 123, 197, 332).¹³

Not infrequently, Poe conspicuously lost self-control. He prompted at least two fistfights, and launched a full-scale libel suit after the second one, when two men impugned his virility in print. One said Poe was an impotent coward, a forger, and a plagiarist who could not hold his liquor and reneged on his debts. The other published a parodic “Literati” sketch describing Poe as “about 5 feet 1 or two inches, perhaps 2 inches and a half,” instead of his actual five feet eight inches (Silverman 1991, 93, 289-91, 307-15, 327-28). For any southern man attuned to honor and reputation, these were fighting words.

Michael Allen has emphasized Poe's “acquired Southern values and haughty temperament” as one of his key strategies to secure aristocratic status for gentleman poets (1969, 201). Poe's journalism also fed the market's avidity for fighting words.¹⁴ As Poe confidently told the first magazine publisher who employed him, Virginians thought they wanted “simplicity” but really enjoyed what the English magazines supplied: sensational subjects in a heightened style (Silverman 1991, 101). Poe's Eurocentric role as a cosmopolitan man of letters rather than provincial apologist seemed grossly ungentlemanly, especially to the writers he gored. His “tomahawking” reviews lacked southern courtesy, tact, or generosity, William Gilmore Simms tried to tell Poe ten years after receiving one of the tomahawks (Rubin 1989, 131). Yet Virginia gentry contradictions impelled his choice of weapons in his fight to fulfill his enormous desire for a high-status literary reputation. In creating “sensations” through his pugnacious reviews, Poe acted the adolescent Hotspur, while his otherworldly poems presented him as a Byronic southern Hamlet.

From a distance, the contradictions and derivativeness in Poe's behavior seem less striking than the childishness. This too was conventional. One of Emerson's most supercilious journal entries records his response to a young “snippersnapper” from the South who “demolished me” in public (Emerson 1982, 170). The southerner, he vengefully mused on 8 October 1837, is “a spoiled child … a mere parader. … They are mere bladders of conceit. … Their question respecting any man is like a Seminole's, How can he fight? In this country, we ask, What can he do? His pugnacity is all they prize, in man, dog, or turkey.” Emerson's comparisons reduce the southerner to a child, an Indian, a turkey, or just hot air, filling “bladders of conceit.”¹⁵

Venting his own conceits on southern heads restores Emerson's dignity. More subtly, his sense of North-South power relations emerges through clashing ideals of manliness, as Emerson's most telling phrase, “In this country,” intimates. The phrase sets two postcolonial regions on a collision course. Yet New England, or “we,” represents the only true country. We have men who do and talk, not children who fight and parade. New England has “civil educated … human” adults, Emerson says elsewhere in the entry; southerners act like Indian braves and barnyard brats. In later journal meditations, Emerson sometimes worries that the southern politician's “personality” and “fire” will dominate northerners in Washington (Emerson 1982, 411). At bottom, however, he has the calm of an absentee landlord. As he wrote in May-June, 1846, if the southerner “is cool & insolent” while northerners “are to tame,” “it is because we own you, and are very tender of our mortgages, which cover all your property” (ibid., 358).

Emerson's landlord presumption helps explain Poe's vitriolic attacks on the Boston literati, especially Longfellow. Repeatedly asserting his public “personality” with “fire,” Poe accuses Longfellow of gross plagiarism as well as bad writing. In the context of Emerson's entry, the controversy dramatizes two regional codes for the gentleman. On the Virginia side, an ambitious, insecure provincial aggressively lords it over his big-city betters. On the Massachusetts side, both Emerson and Longfellow attempt to respond with a studied calm, at least in public. One of the most astonishing moments in Silverman's biography comes after Poe's death, when Longfellow actually visits Poe's beloved mother-in-law, “Muddy” Clemm, tells her that Poe had been the greatest man living, and invites her to visit him in Cambridge, which she does.¹⁶ Longfellow's generosity went far beyond Emerson's public serenity and private snottiness.

Emerson's South-baiting anticipates a recurrent note in criticism of Poe's work: a thinly disguised critical disdain for the writer's poses and posturings. Harold Bloom all but accuses Poe of being unmanly: he “fathered precisely nothing” (1985, 5), and his criticism was right only about silly women writers, for whom he was “a true match” (ibid., 12). These innuendoes buttress Bloom's claim that, like others in the South, Poe preferred “the Abyss” to the strong Emersonian self (ibid., 11). Such snide strictures about unmanly behavior and weak writing miss Poe's exaggerations of gentry postures. Bloom's New England mode of high seriousness about the self also misses Poe's profoundly skeptical play with social fictions of self-making. What Bloom calls the Abyss needs to be historicized rather than dismissed.

A complementary New England tradition searches for the presence of secret guilt in Poe's writings. In the late 1950s, for instance, Harry Levin first suggested that Poe displaced concerns about slavery onto blackness, and that “The Fall of the House of Usher” can be read as an allegory of feudal plantation culture in its death throes (1958, 160). The latter still seems right. One could expand Levin's insight, using Rhys Isaac's Transformation of Virginia, since the web-work of fungi defining both Roderick's house and Roderick's hair parallels the gentry's fashionable display of twining vines on their plantations, modeled on English country houses (1982, 35-39). Even so, the sociological allegory remains just what Daniel Hoffman says it is: a “ripple of meaning” (1972, 315-16), more tangential than primary to the hyperliterary vortex that disorients the narrator's senses.

Psychoanalytic investigations of incest have yielded at last to more sophisticated explorations of Poe's mourning for lost mothering. But postabolitionist expectations of hidden gentry guilt about slavery continue to shape northern attitudes to the South as well as to Poe. I was first disabused of the presumption of such guilt when reading a diary entry written by a young Englishman who visited a Virginia plantation in the 1780s. Robert Hunter's day began with Montesquieu, then tea, then fun with friends. At the end of the day, “we supped en famille, played some tricks at cards, gave the Negroes an electrical shock, and went to bed at eleven” (May 1976, 136).

Faced with moments like that, modern democratic certainties about slavery and guilt falter. Various of Poe's writings reflect a pervasive gentry opinion that humans with black skins were less than human, though other tales, such as “The Man that Was Used Up” or “The Gold Bug,” can be read more ironically at the gentry's expense. Critics who have read a great many southern diaries report with some wonder that slaves and free black people are rarely mentioned, even in passing.¹⁷ If Poe's scrabbling, marginal life intermittently imitates gentry codes of behavior, his fictions put his culture's greater fictions at risk.

In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain inflates a cultural insight as well as the power of writers when he blames Sir Walter Scott for having caused the Civil War (Twain 1980, chaps. 40, 46). Scott's model of medieval chivalry provided only one of many sources for the gentlemanly roles encouraged by the Anglophilic fiction of patriarchal honor. George Washington might read Cato, and James Madison might read Roman histories, but when the Virginia squires turned antisocial enough to read at all, they were most likely to pick up Tom Jones.¹⁸ Most members of the gentry lived the fictions they rarely read. After learning to read his culture, Poe shifted the ground and raised the stakes for the game of being a provincial gentleman.

III

Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction can help situate Poe's writings in their post-aristocratic context, beyond dismissive Yankee dichotomies of childish versus adult, play versus high seriousness, Abyss versus self. Bourdieu's presumption that court society persisted in the Parisian haute bourgeoisie of the 1960s has considerably more applicability to antebellum Virginia than to the contemporary United States. In a postaristocratic society, he argues, “cultural capital” secures and conveys the highest social status. Aesthetic aptitude “rigorously distinguishes the different classes” (1984, 40) by dividing the naive from the sophisticated. Aesthetic detachment brings distinction: “a distant, self-assured relation to the world” (ibid., 56).

Bourdieu's emphasis on the uses of cultural capital to gain social distinction seems to have almost nothing to say about the flagrantly anti-intellectual behavior of many members of the antebellum southern gentry. As William Gilmore Simms memorably concluded, being a southern intellectual was as rewarding as “drawing water in a sieve” (Faust 1977, 148). Despite the examples of Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and others, cultural capital flowed more from cock fighting than from the writing of poems. To apply Bourdieu's principles is to expose the pseudoaristocratic norms generating the South's postaristocratic stratification. Beginning with his youthful pose as a Byronic poet, Poe sought relatively conventional ways of aggrandizing his marginal status through cultural capital, or at least literary image making, much as Simms and other intellectuals invoked Byronic genius to exaggerate their feelings of exile and dislocation. Only Poe, however, took a decisive step beyond provincial conventions of cultural capital, by making textuality itself the source of true aristocracy.

One of Bourdieu's most provocative passages illuminates the sheer sport accompanying Poe's textual poses. “The petit bourgeois do not know how to play the game of culture as a game. They take culture too seriously to go in for bluff or imposture or even for the distance and casualness which show true familiarity.” Because such people anxiously identify cultural capital with the accumulation of knowledge, Bourdieu continues, “they cannot suspect the irresponsible self-assurance, the insolent off-handedness and even the hidden dishonesty presupposed by the merest page of an inspired essay on philosophy, art or literature. Self-made men, they cannot have the familiar relation to culture which authorizes the liberties and audacities of those who are linked to it by birth” (1984, 330-31).¹⁹

If we transpose these observations from fact to wish-fulfillment, we have the right context in which to explain a wide range of Poe's literary styles, from his plagiarisms to his critical panache to his fascination with style itself. His claims for beauty and aesthetic purity against the New England heresies of the didactic and the moral exalt abstracted intellectual control to an invulnerably elite status, beyond any taint of subjectivity or bourgeois values. Poe's intellectual audacities and insolent irresponsibilities authorize the rebirth of his family romance, much as the narrator of “Ligeia” invokes “Romance” to preside over his first marriage, which gave him both upward mobility and the adoration of a learned, passionate parent-spouse. No longer one who was born in Boston of disreputable parents in the theater, Poe uses his offhanded familiarity with European cultural capital to leap beyond the Virginia squirearchy. Using textuality as capital, he transforms mourning and marginality into the kind of cultural play that signifies aristocratic status.

One can see this, for instance, in Poe's intellectual strutting, the leisured glitter of high-culture allusions unmaking their meanings. From Mallarmé and Baudelaire to Derrida and Lacan, Poe has been cherished in France for just what normatively American readers—even expatriates such as James and Eliot—try to reduce to adolescent posturing: his hoaxie-Poe trickeries, his melodramas of intellectual excess, the mind games. Poe fuses the bogus with the serious. His moments of maximum horror are also moments of maximum literary artifice. “Madman! I tell you that she now stands without The Door!” (Poe 1984b, 335). Capital letters—a typographical frisson as well as a cry. “Madman”—a more startling surprise, since mad Roderick now accuses the commonsensical narrator of having lost his sense. But “without the door”?

The meanings surge in, to be sure. The “tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne” prefigured in Roderick's rhapsodic poem about “monarch Thought” (ibid., 326) culminates in a further confusion of “his” and “her,” as Madeline falls “heavily inward upon the person of her brother” (ibid., 335). In this Gothic plantation house, being a (male) “person” depends not only on property and patriarchal lineage, but also on internal doors that divide honor and reason from passions and the body. In Roderick's poem, a “throng” of forces (ibid., 327) imagined as lower class and chaotic overwhelms the house of the rational mind from within. Now the assault returns as the still more intimate threat of a dead-undead sister who falls inward on the dichotomies that have constructed some persons and dispossessed others. Madeline's body, too, has lost its “door,” suggesting both coffin and hymen, and further implying incest. Yet “without” sounds ridiculously hyperliterary, as if Roderick had become spellbound by the “Mad Trist.” The climactic moment's linguistic posturing undercuts its Hawthornean proliferation of meanings.²⁰ The horror builds on a pun; the pun trumpets textuality.

What Poe exposes in such moments, and they are legion, is a sudden Lacanian estrangement from words themselves. The reader's mind—like the narrator's—has been reduced to an infant's cribbed gazing, as if the endless incomprehensibility of big people's overly big words buzzes about a vacuum of staring. Poe does not make readers feel adult, the way Hawthorne and Emerson can do. Instead of offering complex self-reflexiveness, Poe builds to disorienting theatrics of helplessness or mastery, in which language itself becomes alien and theatrical. In Louis A. Renza's fine phrase, Poe's stories are “self-distracting artifacts” (Renza 1985, 82).

If the pleasure in aesthetic detachment consists of “refined games for refined players,” as Bourdieu puts it (1984, 499), Poe's erudition ostensibly intensifies the sense of “membership and exclusion” on which distinction depends.²¹ Yet his texts grossly flirt with the vulgar. His gentlemen come to look like apes and criminals. Although the elevated style of Poe's narratives keeps lay readers at a respectful distance, just as Bourdieu says it should do in Language and Symbolic Power (1991, 152-53), the narratives undercut their own philosophical dignity by employing excessive artifice as well as grotesquely shameful characters. Not by accident has Poe's work become most honored in France, the greatest postaristocratic residuum in the Western world. Poe's theatrics of horror also circulate as mass-market cultural capital. Contemporary opposition between “high” and “vulgar” uses of Poe can be historicized as a dynamic embedded in his own uses of aristocracy, toward the end of the long historical moment that challenged the social constructions legitimating aristocracy as the ultimate symbol of high status.

For Poe and the gentry, aristocracy signifies an idealized realm dislocated from specific social contexts. Like Romance, it functions as what Michael McKeon calls an antithetical simple abstraction, used to elevate high culture above history. If the romance of the gentleman displaces a yearning for high metropolitan status, its theatricality signals self-consciousness about social conventions that were beginning to seem more alien than natural (McKeon 1987, 45-46, 168-89). Unlike the gentry's chivalric posturings, Poe's aristocratic textuality intimates not simply a muted inauthenticity but its own self-destruction.

In the opening paragraph of “Ligeia,” for instance, Poe flamboyantly transfers aristocratic status from property, lineage, and kinship to a world elsewhere in the pure textuality of Romance. The narrator declares his transcendent mastery of cultural capital by not being able to remember any details that linked his adored first wife to the world, not even her paternal name. He recalls the full name, place, and kin of his despised second wife, “Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine,” without effort. In subverting the traditional underpinnings of aristocracy, Poe exalts his narrator's conception of true aristocracy as abstractly textual. Like Roderick Usher, the world's first abstract expressionist painter, Poe's narrator implies that the highest status can come only from an art of aesthetic detachment, with no sordid connections to family, money, bodies, or social status.

Yet “Ligeia” becomes a story about inheritance, property, and various kinds of “will”: Ligeia's will to resist and conquer death; Ligeia's will bequeathing vast riches to a narrator seemingly above such concerns; the will of faceless, spiritless Rowena's family, who “permitted” their daughter to marry him “through thirst of gold” (Poe 1984b, 270). Most undecidably, the hidden will of the antipatriarchal narrator may have led him to the ultimate patriarchal act of killing one or both wives. Cynthia Jordan suggests that the narrator may have willed Ligeia's death and carried it out, the act being hidden from his consciousness as well as his narrative (1989, 135-39).²² One need not go that far to see that the narrator deconstructs as well as dishonors his own subjectivity. He presents himself first as an antipatrilineal exaltation of childish dependence on textuality, personified as Mother Wisdom, then as two incompatible versions of possessed destructiveness: a drugged, hallucinating murderer, or a medium for a demonic woman's will. In either case, the narrator has been reduced to a craving for two black eyes.

“The essential Poe fable,” writes Michael Davitt Bell, “is a tale of compulsive self-murder” (1980, 99). Placing Poe's dramas of self-murder in their gentry context highlights Poe's transgression of the gendered border between public and private life. In the vortex of Poe's yearning skepticism about aristocratic status, female self-empowerment becomes an alien signifier for contradictory psychological and social meanings: uncontrollable passions, and uncontrollable patriarchal decay. Poe's tales of self-murder expose gentlemen in private, often doing and being done to by women, whose bodies if not voices struggle to be felt at the tales' destructive centers. “Berenice, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “Ligeia” can be read not only as allegories of the male psyche's attempts to confront the inward female, but as deconstructions of how antebellum gentry culture produced the categories of “gentleman” and “lady” along with its production of the more starkly binary opposition, “black” and “white.”

IV

My argument implies the paradox that we can tease out Poe's historicity more fruitfully through the seemingly ahistorical linguistic pleasures celebrated in Poe's long-running French connection than through an analysis of his conscious southern values, his unconscious childhood or social guilts, or his indirect dramatizations of master-slave issues. As a self-made aristocrat, Poe uses textuality to improve his status while subverting the meanings of status stratification. Poe's best tales invite an undecidable doubleness of interpretation, pointing simultaneously to idealized gentry traditions of aristocratic contemplation and demonized mass-market conditions for literary production.

Four stories from the early and mid-1840s illustrate Poe's making and unmaking of gentry meanings. “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Purloined Letter” (1845), and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) each dramatize a gentleman down on his luck, who sees a modern urban world threatening the hierarchies on which he depends for social status. Each man tries to resurrect his sense of mastery, or self-respect, with what amounts to a solo duel. A displaced clash between northern and southern values frames the success or failure of each duel. Or rather, the stories present the northern future as versions of Allen Tate's myth of the Fall into a rootless chaos of mobile urban masses avid for sensations. Perhaps not surprisingly, most modern critics read these stories—especially “The Man of the Crowd”—forward into 42nd Street, not backward into gentry Virginia.

The first half of “The Man of the Crowd,” as almost every critic has noted, presents what seems “a stable hierarchy” of descending social types, all “based on an aristocratic set of assumptions,” in Jonathan Auerbach's words (1989, 28).²³ The narrator begins as a conventional man of the Enlightenment, classifying “the tumultuous sea of human heads” outside his coffeehouse window with “abstract and generalizing” observations (Poe 1984b, 389). Soon he “descended to details,” in order to produce a hierarchy of types. His first two groups set the standard for “the decent,” or what he later calls “gentility.” Strangely, his details disorient the stability of the hierarchy he thinks he asserts.

The first large group “had a satisfied business-like demeanor,” the narrator summarizes. Yet “their brows were knit, and their eyes rolled quickly,” whenever they felt pushed. Nevertheless, showing “no symptom of impatience,” they “adjusted their clothes and hurried on.” To say “symptom” rather than “sign” implies that any sign of feeling, especially annoyance, betokens disease and disorder. Even at the top of the social hierarchy, bodies betray what adjusted clothes conceal, while a “business-like demeanor” belies gentility (Poe 1984b, 389).

The second large group of “the decent” intensifies the tension between bodies and self-control. These people seemed “restless,” with “flushed faces,” “muttering” and redoubling “their gesticulations” when the crowd impeded them. They bowed “profusely” when jostled, “and appeared overwhelmed with confusion.” Having said all that, the narrator finds “nothing very distinctive about these two large classes.” Their clothes enable him to blend “two classes” into one class: “Their habiliments belonged to that order which is pointedly termed the decent” (ibid.).

Already contradictions abound. Two hierarchized groups, or classes, are really one class; men who have businesslike self-control also have bodies out of control; the narrator defines them as the standard, yet those who represent the standard have “nothing very distinctive” about them; decent clothes stabilize perception, yet behavior seems on the edge of both hotheadedness and excessive deference. Moreover, the word habiliments implies a dressing up for public display, as if looking decent requires a facade.

Next he undermines the division he has tried to reestablish. “They were undoubtedly noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stock-jobbers—the Eupatrids and the commonplaces of society—men of leisure and men actively engaged in affairs of their own—conducting business upon their own responsibility. They did not greatly excite my attention.” A finely tuned, five-rank hierarchy briefly supplants the two groups. Clearly “noblemen” are at the top, while “stock-jobbers” and “tradesmen” are at the bottom. But where do “merchants” and “attorneys” go? Where did John Allan fit, in London? With “Eupatrids,” or with “commonplaces”?

Eventually, the dichotomy between “leisure” and “business” all but disappears. At least, the narrator forces a paradox: only leisured noblemen and Eupatrids truly exhibit “a satisfied business-like demeanor.” The actual men of business, from merchants on down, look increasingly unsatisfied and anxious. On the other hand, even stock-jobbers threaten the edge of true gentility. No wonder all this bores him; to analyze it would be to expose gentility as both normative and nonexistent.

The narrator has already described himself in doubled terms, as a leisured gentleman at his coffeehouse, recovering from illness, on the edge between ennui and happiness, pain and pleasure, looking at “two dense and continuous tides of population.” Now he has come close to emptying out his simplifying dichotomies. Worse, he also implies that only clothes can be “read” without contradiction. His act of reading, and only his act of reading, makes gentility seem stable and commanding. At the top, not one person he sees inhabits that category without ambiguity, either between clothes and body movements or between business and leisure. The narrator's reading of types shows him not only imposing an uninhabited yet hegemonic social abstraction, the ideal gentleman, but reinventing the fiction with greater and greater assurance as his types deviate from his imagined norm.

Such ambiguities characterize a pseudoaristocrat, in terms close to those used in Richard Gray's history of the gentleman-planter ideal in early Virginia. As “a compound of gracious feudal patriarch and bluff English squire,” the planters were “always primarily businessmen” and “entrepreneurs,” yet “anxious to assume the trappings of an aristocracy.” In the early nineteenth century, those who sought to inhabit that contradictory, imported ideal were “a conscious and declining minority,” as the two constitutional conventions in Richmond signify (Gray 1986, 9, 12-13, 23). The narrator's assessment of London's two standard-bearing groups expresses tensions in Virginia, not only in status ranking and class conflict but among hotheadedness, deference, and respectability.

Two more Virginia gentry tensions intensify as the narrator describes London's lower orders. First, he scorns the ungenteel, yet relishes their attempts at upward mobility. Second, he shows inordinate contempt for men who work with their hands, while he defines women who work as prostitutes in the making. Significantly, the words “gentility,” “gentlemen,” and “gentry” do not appear except as stabilizing fictions of scheming aspiration for the hopelessly deviant. On “the scale of what is termed gentility” (Poe 1984b, 391), various groups display “idiosyncratic” efforts to “be mistaken for gentlemen.” Junior clerks who “wore the cast-off graces of the gentry,” and senior clerks with the “affectation of respectability” (ibid., 390), struggle without success to measure up. Further down the scale, the narrator comfortably calls pickpockets “these gentry,” and gamblers “gentlemen who live by their wits” (ibid.). Their fraudulence licenses his mocking labels while subtly exposing the cultural fiction.

Then come “Jew pedlars,” street beggars, invalids, and at last, women, all of whom work: “modest young girls returning from long and late labor,” who shrink “more tearfully than indignantly” from presumably leering and lustful men. The girls' lack of anger signals their coerced, sexualized future in the world's oldest profession, already paraded by “women of the town … [their] interior[s] filled with filth,” and the “paint-begrimmed beldame,” no better than an “utterly lost leper in rags” (ibid., 391). Women who use their bodies for money—what worse violation of patriarchal protectiveness could there be?

Only one type is in fact lower on the narrator's scale: white men who work with their hands. Here Virginia gentry values become most manifest, diverging strikingly from urban class consciousness. Subhumans—that is, slaves or animals—should do physical labor. But the narrator sees a disorienting profusion of workers, none of whom seems to have the slightest regard for gentility: “pie-men, porters, coal-heavers, sweeps; organ-grinders, monkey-exhibitors and ballad-mongers, those who vended with those who sang; ragged artizans and exhausted laborers of every description, and all full of a noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear, and gave an aching sensation to the eye.” What would excite Walt Whitman, romantic “artizans” who sell and sing, makes the narrator feel depersonalized—“the ear,” “the eye”—as well as “jarred” and aching, pushed against by the crowd for the first time, through his glass window. “As the night deepened,” and the crowd's “harsher” features displaced the “gentler” and “more orderly portion of the people,” he felt almost enslaved by “wild” light upon blackness: “All was dark yet splendid—as that ebony” of Tertullian's; it all “enchained me … to the glass” (Poe 1984b, 392).

“To work industriously and steadily, especially under directions from another man,” wrote Frederick Law Olmsted in 1861 in The Cotton Kingdom, “is, in the Southern tongue, to ‘work like a nigger’” (1984, 19). William Byrd II anticipated the danger of this attitude in a 1736 letter: slaves “blow up the pride and ruin the industry of our white people, who, seeing a rank of poor creatures below them, detest work for fear it should make them look like slaves” (Simpson 1989). Not surprisingly, then, Poe's narrator brings closure to his list of social types by sliding from manual labor down to blackness. As Olmsted later pointed out, members of the Virginia gentry typically denied their immigrant origins as indentured servants, “tinker and tailor, poacher and pickpocket.” Lacking true “manners” and “lineage,” most wealthy planters struck him as more “ridiculously” pretentious than Fifth Avenue's “newly rich … absurdly ostentatious in entertainment, and extravagant in the purchase of notoriety” (1984, 562-63). While Olmsted's assessment exudes an Emersonian scorn at the edges, Poe's narrator confirms the young traveler's sense of the inauthenticity of the gentry.²⁴

A progressive reading of “The Man of the Crowd” could build an incipient class conflict here. Only the workers reject upward mobility toward the culture's hegemonic fiction of “the decent” as a mode of self-definition, and only the workers teem with vital, singing, romanticized life. Threatened into individuality and class consciousness by such a spectacle, so the argument could run, Poe's narrator experiences “a craving desire” to keep in view the strange old man who embodies the now “wild” extremes of the crowd, as if class conflict could be avoided by reading the man's compounded energy. But the story quickly abandons workers to their “temples of Intemperance” (Poe 1984b, 396). The old man's unreadable idiosyncrasy prefigures urban anomie, not class war. Wearing dirty yet beautifully textured linen, hiding a diamond and a dagger, anomalous to every category yet rushing from aloneness, the old man reduces progressive readings of individuality and class to a spectacle of unresolvable contradictions. He, too, is a self without subjectivity.

To the narrator, the old man represents something much more unsettling than one of the urban homeless produced and abandoned by capitalist dynamics. As the narrator's double, the old man represents the contradictions already half-voiced at the generative center of the gentry hierarchy. In provincial Virginia, the display of face and clothes required not only a collective fiction of gentry honor and shaming rituals, but also an envious, imitative group of white men below the elite, a petty bourgeoisie of clerks, schemers, and frauds, as the narrator contemptuously describes their urban equivalent. Otherwise, the gentry's pseudoaristocratic pretensions would lose cultural legitimacy.

Finally, the narrator's traditional status orientation blocks his ability to read “crime” in the modern way, as individual guilt. Rather, the narrator defines crime as a refusal to be alone. The old man's wild behavior continually animates yet empties out progressive and regressive readings of his motives, because his mobility seems neither downward nor upward, but rather a simple and continuous desire to belong to a group, any group. At the interface between two comprehensive, antagonistic modes of social knowing, the old man comes to represent the narrator's own fear of solitary individuality.

Trying to regain interpretive mastery, the narrator conflates the old gentry role of duelist with the new lower-class role of gumshoe detective, unwittingly mirroring the contradictory mix of diamond and dagger in the old man's clothes. His self-stabilizing abstraction of gentility disappears in his increasingly frenzied bodily behavior, just as the opening details about him anticipate. The narrator ends in the doubled place of the title figure, on the other side of the glass. Moreover, he all but dares genteel readers to “read” either man of the crowd better than he can, by proclaiming at the beginning and the end that his story “does not permit itself to be read.” As the readers puzzle themselves about that, he tauntingly solicits their own craving to fend off their self-deconstruction.

What Auerbach nicely calls Poe's characteristically disembodied first-person self that lacks a self (1989, 21) also fits M. Dupin, whose interpretive mastery depends on his ability to empty out his subjectivity and make his mind exactly congruent with that of his opponent. Sociologically, Dupin seems ripe for intense status anxiety. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” introduces him as a “young gentleman” who “had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir himself in the world” (Poe 1984b, 400). Where conventional gentlemen would feel humiliated and vengeful, Dupin merely uses his small “patrimony” to live as a leisured, bookish gentleman, drawing the narrator into a world of his own. Soon, however, he becomes “enamored of the Night,” with her “sable divinity.” The pliable narrator yields to Dupin's “wild whims,” much as the loyal friend of Roderick Usher feels insensibly caught up. The two men “counterfeit” the night by day in their “grotesque mansion,” and then walk the streets in “true Darkness” to seek an “infinity of mental excitement” (ibid., 401). If the night is a black, beautiful woman, then out of wild womanly blackness, like an uncanny womb, comes Dupin's analytic vitality.

As Jordan points out, Dupin's receptivity to androgynous images gives him mental resources beyond those of conventionally socialized people (1989, 145-49). When he was at the highest pitch of observation, Dupin seemed “a double Dupin—the creative and the resolvent.” He became “frigid and abstract; his eyes were vacant in expression”; his voice, usually “a rich tenor” though with an oddly “low chuckling laugh,” sometimes “rose into a treble,” and he looked at ordinary men as if they “wore windows in their bosoms.” His doubled or emptied subjectivity gives Dupin the ability to reconstruct the behavior of orangutans, or outfox men of genius.

The argument for Dupin as an androgynous figure can be joined with John Irwin's analysis of Dupin as a “fallen aristocrat” (Irwin 1992, 205).²⁵ In my reading, he taps alternative, subversive sources of intellectual power in blackness and femaleness only when those qualities have been abstracted and textualized. A contemporary critical tendency to dichotomize these moments in Poe as a struggle between masculine and feminine modes needs to be situated more particularly in relation to the antebellum gentry's construction of gender and racial dichotomies. Dupin appropriates blackness and womanly night not to attack masculinity but to remasculinize his mental powers as a gentleman of leisure, in a world that disempowered that gentry role. Transforming marginality into intellectual mastery, Dupin becomes the letter and spirit of pure reasoning, with just a touch of revenge.

At the climax of the second tale, the armchair gentleman defeats his unwitting double and adversary, Minister “D—,” by substituting a “letter,” to the book-length delight of Lacanian and Derridean critics. Dupin's success depends on his ability to be a poet and mathematician, a mirror for the minister's mind, and a duelist without the minister's knowledge. As in “The Man of the Crowd,” a gentleman seeks to read, which is to say master, a character at the center of social dynamics, either urban life or court politics. Unlike the earlier story's narrator, Dupin triumphs, with no less than a gunshot. The musket's explosion not only lures the minister to the window, enabling Dupin to substitute his letter, but also signals the symbolic culmination of the “solo duel.” In patiently waiting to avenge himself for an insult long forgotten by his dupe, Dupin fulfills gentry expectations about honor and shame. At the same time, as if to reverse Irwin's ingenious explication of “low-to-high” associations in the tale, Dupin debases ritualistic dueling to the level of mobocracy on the streets. Moreover, the musket proves “to have been without ball” (Poe 1984b, 697).

“The Cask of Amontillado” similarly turns on a duelist, one with a more ambiguously successful revenge. Though the story is displaced to Renaissance Italy, Montresor's grievances reflect gentry tensions between old and new money, subsumed in a rhetoric of honor. Like Dupin, Montresor has borne the “thousand injuries of Fortunato” with suppressed resentment. Then a nameless “insult” spurs Montresor to plan revenge (ibid., 848). Luring his unwitting antagonist by asking whether a wine is genuine or fraudulent, Montresor describes Fortunato as a successful social fraud, like the new men who have merely “adopted” enthusiasm about wine in order “to practice imposture upon the British and Austrian millionaires” (ibid.). Yet Fortunato cannot quite be reduced to such a category, at least in wines. “In painting and gemmary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack,” presumably practicing his arts on rich foreigners. But “in the matter of old wines he was sincere.” Wearing carnival “motley,” with “a tight-fitting parti-striped dress” and “conical cap and bells” (ibid.). Fortunato fits all modern convivial occasions, as a man of “fortune” should, yet with motley ties to the old aristocratic order.

Montresor lives on the edge of his social category, but not by choice. Like Dupin, he is a fallen aristocrat, barely able to hold on to his palazzo; unlike Dupin, his dignity lies only in his past. His sense of the cultural insult to his position slowly emerges in his dialogue with Fortunato, as Montresor entices him deeper and deeper into the palazzo's wine cellar. “You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was. You are a man to be missed. For me it is no matter” (ibid., 850). Fortunato drinks “to the buried that repose around us”; Montresor drinks, with several kinds of irony, “to your long life,” while noting that the Montresors “were a great and numerous family” (ibid.).

Then comes a dramatic moment that encapsulates the clash between old and new money in nineteenth-century Virginia gentry terms. Fortunato drank, and “threw the bottle upward with a gesticulation I did not understand.” He repeated the “grotesque” movement, clearly surprised. “You do not comprehend?” It is a secret sign of “the brotherhood.” Still Montresor did not comprehend. “You are not of the masons.” “Yes, yes,” Montresor responds, and with one of Poe's most infamous puns, he produces a trowel.

The simple irony is that Montresor will as an artisan mason use the trowel to wall up Fortunato, burying him alive. The complex social irony exposes Montresor as bewildered by the new rituals solidifying male bonds and alleviating tensions in the power elite. Montresor's revenge against Fortunato avenges the outsider status of old money, displaced by men who wear urban motley and deal in international finance.

Psychologically, one could build a strong Oedipal reading from John Allan having been a Mason (Silverman 1991, 13). Sociologically, the growth of the Masons in American urban centers began to take off in the 1830s and 1840s, reaching its golden age after the Civil War. Literarily, as Silverman argues, the story takes Poe's revenge for the “thousand” insults the writer had endured at the hands of reviewers (ibid., 316-18). Ideologically, Montresor's trowel could represent an idealized union of gentry and artisan values now threatened by a new world of mobile fakes and fortune hunters.

That fourfold allegorical reading, however, depends on readerly sympathy for Montresor. At the end, the revenge preserves the allegories while emptying out subjective coherence on both sides of the wall. As Montresor began to place the last stone, he heard “a low laugh that erected the hairs upon my head. It was succeeded by a sad voice, which I had difficulty in recognizing as that of the noble Fortunato” (Poe 1984b, 853). Previous screams and clanking chains, eerily evoking slavery, had made Montresor hesitate, then redouble his strength. Soon disparate sounds became not-Fortunato, subsiding to an absence of voice, “only a jingling of the bells.” The narrator's “heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so” (Poe 1984b, 854).

Then he reinforced not only the wall but the social allegory: “Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones” (ibid.). If Montresor's “re-erected rampart” subdues not only the “new masonry” elite but also his “erected hairs,” it does so by walling up his own heart and burying himself in the past, with the “old bones” of his ancestors. Stripped of subjectivity, Montresor's family bones parallel Fortunato's disintegration into sounds, then silence. Montresor's last line—“In pace requiescat!”—wishes R.I.P. to himself as well, in a dead language.

V

Poe fails at longer narratives, whether philosophical or fictional, especially in his arbitrary plotting of The Voyage of Arthur Gordon Pym—a story that only critics relish, for what they can do with it. His emptying out of “character” into detached intellectual mastery or passionate self-destruction cannot generate momentum in a longer genre. What can be riveting or shocking in the short story seems nihilistic and capricious in the novel. Faced with incipient bourgeois expectations for linear narratives about the social and moral education of complex selves, Poe presents a new aristocracy, one of intellects without subjectivity, or an old aristocracy that uses reason to be sensationally unreasonable. Yet Poe also toys with gentry expectations of status hierarchy by teasing out the unstable fictionality of gentry self-constructions. Not even textuality can sustain his cultural elitism for long.

Poe's contradictory mix of textual aristocracy and falling aristocrats puts regressive and progressive stabilizations of subjectivity into linguistic difficulty. To return to McKeon's analysis of “extreme skepticism,” the postcolonial elite with which Poe consciously affiliated himself tried to fend off the social dynamics at stake a century earlier in England by preserving its status hierarchy through the institutions of rural household patriarchy and slavery. In Michael Allen's summary, Poe grew up “in a South that was extending an aristocratic code from the original Virginia gentry to the whole region to consolidate it against Northern pretensions” (1969, 133). British sources and models were crucial to the consolidation. On the edge between northern journalist and southern gentleman, Poe exaggerated the honor and dishonor of the cultivated mind at leisure, a distinctive role enabled by slavery and urged by southern intellectual reformers as the height of social aspiration. Although he shared their delusive dreams of elitist intellectual community, Poe's more profound hopes for aristocracy lay with the gentleman-genius, ultimately a club with one person as member.

Poe's ideal gentleman, as Allen astutely observes, should be a reader, not a writer, since writers have to work with their hands. But Poe's definition of such a gentleman insists on a circular fictionality. For him, “gentlemen of elegant leisure” are those “who can live idly and without manual labour, and will bear the port, charge, and countenance of a gentleman” (ibid., 192). Poe's language itself bears a redundant “port” and “charge,” intimating contradictory imperatives: a genius needs an audience of gentlemen, yet writers forsake that status; elegant leisure requires a strenuous charade. These tensions also characterize his skepticism, which continuously veers toward solipsistic grandiosity, then settles back to a kind of transcendent despair that his mind has nothing authentically in common with any order of empirical or fictional validation. McKeon's argument for extreme skepticism as a double reversal, parodically undermining both romance idealism and naive empiricism, complements Joan Dayan's analysis of Poe's linguistic despair, and Stanley Cavell's suggestion that Poe's skepticism betrays his need for love and his fear of being loved.²⁶

Historicizing Poe's skepticism need not diminish its force. In a prize-winning essay, Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues that the southern “Sambo” figure plays a role common to all honor-shame cultures: the shameless trickster. Sambo's mimicry of his unpredictable master acts as a signifying mirror for the “patriarchal, male-dominated, honor-obsessed” pecking order (Wyatt-Brown 1988, 1246).²⁷ To extend Wyatt-Brown's argument, such mirroring becomes a central mode in Poe's narratives, with a difference: he mimics mastery in decline. Honoring and undermining gentry constructions of social identity, Poe's textuality also subverts its own aggrandized aristocratic status. In effect, he plays a trickster role at the alienated margin of gentry culture.

In Poe's hypertextualized world, his fictions invite a skeptical indeterminacy collapsing the southern past and the northern future. More accessibly to us, he satirizes emerging mass-market culture, already filled with readers like the crass king in “Hop-Frog” (1849), who shouts to his trickster-jester, “We want characters—characters, man—something novel—out of the way.” “Capital!” roars King Audience, when Hop-Frog suggests a game that will turn them into chained orangutans; “I will make a man of you” (Poe 1984b, 904). In sending up these capitalist constructions of manliness and individuality, Poe simultaneously plays with gentry constructions of master-slave relations. By the end of the story, after Hop-Frog grinds his “fang-like teeth” above the masters he has tarred and torched, the trickster becomes a monstrous yet uninterpretable absence. His low-to-high exit through the roof leaves behind eight blackened bodies, whose undecidable identities fuse southern pretenders with northern philistines.

The vengeful allegorizing here, as in “The Cask of Amontillado,” bespeaks Poe's writerly rage. It may well be, as Silverman surmises, that Poe's desperate last years drove his final stories into obsessive revenge plots, as if high literary status could be gained only through overkill (1991, 405-7, 316-18). Yet Hop-Frog's trickster escape can stand as a metaphor for Poe's extreme skepticism. While upending idealized southern aristocracy, Poe's fictions depict a world without gentlemen as a descent into Allen Tate's rootless, urban hell. More precisely, trapped between a phantom gentry culture and the mechanistic demands of urban capitalism, gentlemen-narrators discover that their own poses are as nightmarish as the vulgarian scrambling that has contaminated their world.²⁸

“The glory of the Ancient Dominion is in a fainting—is in a dying condition,” Poe wrote in 1835 (Hovey 1987, 347). By the mid-1840s, his fiction not only deconstructed idealized British models of the gentleman but dramatized the clash of the gentry hierarchy with capitalist dynamics. On the margin of gentry culture, Poe played with his culture's greater historical marginality. Once he had read the gentry as a hegemonic yet beleaguered fiction, he mourned for the postcolonial dreams of aristocracy that he resurrected for himself with textuality. Sensing that his master had two masters, Old and New England, the white Sambo-trickster aped and emptied out his pseudomaster's meanings.

Notes

1. On Allan and Galt, see Silverman 1991, 12, 27-28; on Allan as foster father and businessman, 9-28. On Poe's marginality, see Rubin 1989, 148-53; on Poe's Byronic poses, 177-78.

2. Gray atones for the omission with “‘I Am a Virginian,’” arguing that Poe adopts various southern personae as well as expressing “profoundly conservative” southern values (1987, 190).

3. On Poe's dreams of an elite magazine, see Silverman 1991, 101-2, 175-76, 408-11); see also Allen 1969.

4. In American Slavery, American Freedom, Morgan argues that racism “absorbed in Virginia the fear and contempt that men in England, whether Whig or Tory, monarchist or republican, felt for the inarticulate lower classes,” making a rhetoric of liberty and equality possible “by lumping Indians, mulattoes, and Negroes in a single pariah class.” This process “paved the way for a similar lumping of small and large planters in a single master class” (1975, 386).

5. On Allan, see Silverman 1991, 20-22, 27-28; on Byrd, see Lockridge 1987, 46, 51; on Byrd as the embodiment of the ideal gentleman, see Gray 1986, chap. 1.

6. On extreme skepticism, see McKeon 1987, 114-19; on the destabilization of social categories, 162-69. McKeon's most prominent English example of extreme skepticism is the third Earl of Shaftesbury. While others have found Shaftesbury more morally coherent than McKeon's analysis of his “indirect discourse of self-conscious and parodic impersonation” implies (118-19), McKeon's historicizing of indeterminacy applies not only to many elements in Swift but also to Poe. At the end, McKeon polemically asserts that extreme skepticism also characterizes contemporary poststructuralism, perhaps with similarly historicizable dynamics (420-21).

7. Other useful studies on gentry leadership and contradictions in Virginia include Breen 1980, esp. chap. 8, on gentry uses of social rituals such as horse racing and gambling, and chap. 9, emphasizing the gentry's “hustler” or entrepreneurial side. Isaac 1982 usefully highlights the gentry's attentiveness to rank and England, but overstates the case for “transformation” by arguing that evangelism and individualism established a competing value system as early as the 1750s. Siegel 1987 similarly argues for the uneasy coexistence of self-made, bourgeois men with gentry paternalism, an Isaac-like dichotomy that most historians see as part of gentry social construction.

8. Kulikoff 1986 defines gentry and yeomen through the relative numbers of their slaves as well as their property holdings (9-13, 262-63, 421-23). As he notes, “perhaps a twentieth of the region's white men” were gentlemen, though half were yeomen, many owning a slave or two (262).

9. See Stowe 1987 on the planter class's celebration of hierarchy, the close correspondence between self-esteem and social order, the public “showiness” in day-to-day life, and the divided gender worlds (5-49, 251-54).

10. On raucous student behavior, see Faust 1977, 9-10; see also Silverman 1991, 31.

11. On nose pulling, see Greenberg 1990, 71; the nose was a “sacred object,” the most visible symbol of honor that a man could publicly display. To pull it was to accuse him of lying (68).

12. On Washington and Cato, see Meier 1989, 195-97.

13. Silverman also says Poe's sexual relations with Virginia were “uncertain,” perhaps nonexistent (1991, 124), and that his flirtations with other women intimate not sexual desire but his need to be taken care of (282, 289-91, 371, 415). On Poe's student debts, see 32-34.

14. Allen stresses Poe's “desire for British recognition” at least through 1842 (1969, 155), especially in his emulation of John Wilson's critical style. After 1845, Allen suggests, Poe found “a sense of public identity” linked more to his American mass audience than to Wilson (157).

15. On 5 October 1837, Emerson notes how easily “little people … demolish me” while “a snippersnapper eats me whole” (1982, 170). His 8 October entry is probably his rejoinder to that experience. In Mind and the American Civil War, Simpson reads Emerson's 8 October entry as a reflection of New England scorn for the anti-intellectual South, without noting the previous slight (1989, 48-69). Simpson's analysis of New England nationalism complements my emphasis on contrasting ideals of manliness.

16. On Longfellow's solicitude, see Silverman 1991, 438, 444; on Poe's attacks, 145-46, 234-37. Poe did praise Longfellow in a late public reading (385). Hovey argues, in a fine analysis, that Poe's attempt to free the South from northern thought was at the root of his attempt to free poetry from truth (1987, 349). Hovey also notes that Longfellow may well have retaliated in his novel, Kavanagh (1849), by parodying Poe in the character of a poet who poses as “a pyramid of mind on the dark desert of despair” (342).

17. Stowe (1987, 253) notes “the almost complete absence of black people in white accounts of ritual and daily routine.” Faust (1977, 116) discusses five southern intellectuals, including Simms and James Hammond, who eventually turned to proslavery arguments to win recognition and respect after failing in other efforts to raise the status of intellectual work.

18. Some years ago a Williamsburg tour guide mentioned that the book most frequently found on Virginia shelves during the late eighteenth century was Fielding's Tom Jones. That makes a striking regional contrast to the equivalent secular primacy of Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost on New England shelves.

19. Culture as “game” recurs throughout Distinction; on “the games of culture” as part of the “aesthetic disposition,” which “can only be constituted within an experience of the world freed from urgency,” see Bourdieu 1984, 54. The value of culture, Bourdieu argues, is generated through the struggle between highbrow and middlebrow, each dependent on the other (ibid., 250-54).

20. Linck Johnson suggests that “without” may seem more archaic now, since Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary gives “on the outside of” as one of its standard meanings, along with “unless,” among others (personal communication). At the least, however, the word seems to call attention to Roderick's literary posing. See Cox 1968 for a thoughtful account of Poe's emphasis on excessive impersonations and literary posings.

21. This passage emphasizes the implied yet denied aristocracy in the social game of taste: “the principle of the pleasure derived from those refined games for refined players lies, in the last analysis, in the denied experience of a social relationship of membership and exclusion. … The philosophical sense of distinction is another form of the visceral disgust at vulgarity which defines pure taste as an internalized social relationship” (Bourdieu 1984, 499-500).

22. Jordan notes that the narrator cannot remember Ligeia's paternal name, yet accepts her patrimony. She argues that the story is a fight for narrative authority, which the narrator wins only by silencing Ligeia's story with murderous patriarchal language. Leland Person, in Aesthetic Headaches, reads “Ligeia” similarly as the struggle of a man “to define and control a woman” through language (1988, 30), but comes to an opposite conclusion: the woman wins the “battle of wills,” rendering the narrator's words impotent as “Ligeia resists objectification, death, and denial” (ibid., 32).

23. Auerbach historicizes Poe primarily as a writer hostile to modernity and Jacksonian democracy (1989, 55-56, 125-26), as does Pease in Visionary Compacts (1987, 168-75); see also 199-202 on Poe's taking self-reliance to an extreme of sensational immediacy without personhood. See also Elbert (1991), who argues that Poe's personae alternate between Whig and Democrat modes. Rubin (1989, 138-39), citing Tate, also reads “The Man of the Crowd” in relation to the deracinating modern city, as do many others.

24. Olmsted writes: “It is this habit of considering themselves of a privileged class, and of disdaining something which they think beneath them, that is deemed to be the chief blessing of slavery. It is termed ‘high tone,’ ‘high spirit,’ and is supposed to give great military advantages” (1984, 19). For Byrd's letter to the Earl of Egmont, see Simpson 1989, 20.

25. Irwin also calls Poe a “fallen Virginia gentleman” (1992, 205), overstating Poe's childhood status. In “Horrid Laws,” Whalen teases out Dupin's progress in the three stories from an aristocrat to a professional who works for money (1992, 400).

26. On the double reversal of romance idealism and naive empiricism in extreme skepticism, see McKeon 1987, 63-64. In Fables of Mind, Dayan calls Poe “a philosophical Calvinist” against the American grain, and links his skepticism to that of David Hume (1987, 6-7). She emphasizes Poe's conversion of identity from a philosophic to a linguistic difficulty (201), and writes of Poe's “despair with truth or fiction” (210). For Cavell, see his essay in this collection.

27. To my knowledge, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is alone among recent southern historians in arguing that “patriarchy” as a term should be restricted to the Roman model, in which a husband could kill his wife, children, and slaves (1988, 63-64). She suggests “paternalism” instead; for an opposite argument that the role of gentleman “derived much of its content” as well as prestige “from the encompassing metaphor of patriarchy,” see Isaac 1982, 354-55.

28. For this formulation I am indebted to T. Walter Herbert. For helpful readings of earlier drafts, I am indebted to Frederick Crews, Anne Goodwyn Jones, Linck Johnson, John Seelye, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and the editors of this volume.