SOURCE: Erkkila, Betsy. “The Poetics of Whiteness: Poe and the Racial Imaginary.” In Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg, pp. 60-7. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Erkkila explores the racial overtones of Poe's use of black and white, dark and light, in “The Raven.”]

THE CROAK OF THE RAVEN AND THE POETIC PRINCIPLE

“The croak of the raven is conveniently supposed to be purely lyric,” wrote Hervey Allen in 1927 of the contemporary lack of concern with “what Mr. Poe had to say of democracy, science, and unimaginative literature” (xi). While recent critics have turned with renewed attention to the historical and specifically Southern contexts of Poe's writing, there is still a tendency to pass over Poe's poems as sources of “purely lyric” expression. And yet, as I have been trying to suggest, whether they are read as forms of aesthetic resistance or as perverse symbolic enactments that ooze darkness and death over the American dream of progress, freedom, and light, Poe's poems are deeply embedded in the sociohistorical traumas of his time. This is particularly true of his most popular poem, “The Raven,” one that, in the words of Arthur Hobson Quinn, “made an impression probably not surpassed by any single piece of American poetry” (439). What does it mean, I want to ask, in the context of the heightening social, sexual, and racial struggles of the United States in the 1840s, for a dead white woman to come back as an “ominous” and ambiguously sexed black bird? While critics have tended to follow Poe in “The Philosophy of Composition” in interpreting the raven as an emblem “of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance” (Works, 14:208), I want to suggest that the “ghastly” figure of the black bird “perched” upon “the pallid bust of Pallas” also evokes the fear of racial mixture and the sexual violation of the white woman by the black man that was at the center of antebellum debates about the future of the darker races in white America.¹

In the July-August 1845 issue of the Democratic Review, which had published Poe's essay “The Power of Words” only a month before, John O'Sullivan declared that it was the “manifest destiny” of Anglo-Saxon America “to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” (5). Critical of those who opposed the annexation of Texas because it would lead to the increase and perpetuation of the institution of slavery in America, O'Sullivan argued that, on the contrary, the “Spanish-Indian-American populations of Mexico, Central America and South America” would provide a kind of national sewage system to “slough off” emancipated Negroes in order to leave the United States free and pure to realize its white Anglo-Saxon destiny: “Themselves already of mixed and confused blood,” writes O'Sullivan,

and free from the “prejudices” which among us so insuperably forbid the social amalgamation which can alone elevate the Negro race out of a virtually servile degradation even though legally free, the regions occupied by those populations must strongly attract the black race in that direction; and as soon as the destined hour of emancipation shall arrive, will relieve the question of one of its worst difficulties, if not absolutely the greatest.

(7; emphasis added)

In O'Sullivan's formulation, the United States will, in effect, expel the degraded and “servile” bodies of “the black race” in order to “relieve” the country of the prospect of “social amalgamation.”

Although “The Raven” was published before O'Sullivan's article, I want to suggest that the figure of Poe's “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous” black bird registers symbolically and more pessimistically some of the same national anxiety about “mixed and confused blood” that O'Sullivan expresses in his famous declaration of America's white Manifest Destiny. Moreover, I want to argue that in “The Raven,” as elsewhere in Poe's writings, the dead white woman and the ominous black presence are foundational to Poe's poetics, his attempt to achieve “that intense and pure elevation of the soul” that he associates with “Beauty” as “the sole legitimate province of the poem” (Works, 14:197). In fact, the poem's dramatic contrasts of black and white are productive of its scene of terror and the melancholy tone of sadness, which is Beauty's “highest manifestation” (Works, 14:198).

While “The Raven” is not explicitly about race, like Poe's use of the orangutan in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to commit “excessively outré” acts of violence against two white women, his idea of using “a non-reasoning [black] creature capable of speech” in writing “a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste” (Works, 14:200, 196) evokes popular notions of blacks as parrots incapable of reason: its story of a dead white woman coming back in the form of an “ominous” black bird of prey who penetrates the heart and overtakes the mind and soul of the white speaker registers the simultaneous fear of and fascination with penetration, mixture, inversion, and reversal that emerges alongside of (and as part of) an increasingly aggressive nationalist insistence on sexual, social, and racial difference, white superiority, and Anglo-Saxon destiny. Perhaps better than other antebellum American writers, Poe reveals the linked processes of demonization, mixture, and reversal in the national imaginary.² In “The Raven,” as in other Poe poems and tales, the expelled other of American national destiny—the dark, the corporeal, the sexual, the female, the animal, the mortal—returns as an obsessive set of fantasies about subversion, amalgamation, and dark apocalypse.³

Like O'Sullivan's essay on Manifest Destiny, “The Raven” is all about boundaries—and the horror of their dissolution. Associated with the name Helen and its derivatives Ellen, Elenore, Lenore—which mean, in Poe's terms, “light” and “bright” (Mabbott, 331)—Lenore is another of those “rare and radiant” maidens whose death enables both poetry and beauty. As Poe famously wrote in his scientific analysis of “The Raven” in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846): “[T]he death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (Works, 14:201). In the poem, however, the “lost Lenore,” like Ligeia and Madeline Usher, refuses to stay dead. Although her radiant whiteness is at first set against the darkness of time, history, and the colors of the body, in the course of the poem she is confused with, and indeed replaced by, the darkly foreboding and sexually ambiguous black bird of prey. Expecting to find Lenore at his bedroom window, the protagonist opens the shutter to find, “with many a flirt and flutter,” an uppity black bird in human drag, which collapses the boundaries between animal and human, black and white, female and male, body and spirit, real and supernatural, dead and undead:

In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door—
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—
          Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

(Mabbott, 1:366)

While the raven's hypnotic croak—“Nevermore,” “Nevermore,” “Nevermore”—appears to have a “purely lyric” reference to the death of the “sainted maiden” and the futility of joining her in another world, the “ebony” bird's physical location on “a bust of Pallas” suggests a broader reference to the negation of whiteness: not only the death of white beauty and white art but also the death of white mind and an entire regime of classical and Enlightenment order, reason, and knowledge associated with Pallas Athena. Although Poe does not say so in “The Philosophy of Composition,” the black bird's physical presence in the bedroom “perched” on the “bust of Pallas,” a locale that is marked by the bereaved lover's obsessive repetition—“upon the sculptured bust,” “on the placid bust,” “on the pallid bust of Pallas”—also evokes the specter of sexual violation, racial mixture, and a reversal of the master-slave relation.⁴

At issue is not only the prospect of black domination but also, as in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and “Instinct vs Reason—A Black Cat,” the question of black intelligence. “Startled” by the apparent prescience and wisdom of the bird's “aptly spoken” reply, the speaker assumes that it is merely parroting the words of “some unhappy master”:

“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore—”

(Mabbott, 1:367)

The speaker's words link the “croak” of the raven with the master-slave relation and an entire Western philosophical defense of white mastery. “There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white,” wrote David Hume in 1748 in a defense of the superiority of white, and especially English, civilization. “In Jamaica, indeed,” he writes, “they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but 'tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly” (Hume, 86; emphasis added). Edgar Allan Poe, or at least the sorrowful white scholar of “The Raven,” would “doubtless” agree.

If “The Raven” aspires toward “that pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure” through “the contemplation of the beautiful” (Works, 14:197), it is, paradoxically, a pleasure and a beauty that are achieved through the death of the female body and the cultural terror of the black body. This bodily terror is perhaps most startlingly figured in the fluid interpenetration of light and dark in the concluding passage of the poem:

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
          Shall be lifted—nevermore!

(Mabbott, 1:369)

More than a “purely lyric” expression of “Mournful and Never-ending remembrance,” the demonic and shadowy figure of the black bird sitting “[o]n the pallid bust of Pallas” also projects some of the culture's deepest fears about the sexual violation of the white woman (or man) by the dark other, a possible reversal of the master-slave (or male-female) relation, and the apocalyptic specter of the end of Western wisdom and civilization in unreason, madness, and the bodily domination of black over white.

In “The Poetic Principle,” which was delivered as a lecture on several occasions in 1848 and 1849, Poe gives more explicit critical formulation to the racially inflected poetics of whiteness that frames his poems.⁵ Against “the heresy of The Didactic,” the notion that the object of poetry is truth or the inculcation of a moral, Poe asserts the absolute value of the “poem per se—this poem which is a poem and nothing more—this poem written solely for the poem's sake” (Works, 14:272). Recapitulating in slightly revised form many of the same notions of poetic purity that Poe had originally set forth in his 1842 review of Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems, this foundational text in the history of modern aestheticism represents, at least in part, a historical response to the moral imperative and abolitionist politics of New England poetry.⁶

But while “The Poetic Principle” is shaped by national and race-centered debates about “true Beauty” and true Americanism, it also participates in and makes a distinctive contribution to broader philosophical and political contests about the meaning of the aesthetic. Against the Emersonian definition of the poem as “a meter-making argument” (Emerson, “The Poet,” 450) and the abolitionist emphasis on literature as a form of moral action, Poe follows Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) in seeking to distinguish between the good, the true, and the beautiful.⁷ Focusing on the aesthetic subject rather than the aesthetic object, Poe argues that “a work of art” is to be judged “by the impression it makes, by the effect it produces” in creating “that pleasurable elevation or excitement, of the soul, which we recognize as the Poetic Sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement of the heart” (Works, 14:268, 275). He reiterates the notion of a tripartite division of the mind that he had originally set forth in his 1842 review of Longfellow:

Dividing the world of mind into its three most immediately obvious distinctions, we have the Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense. I place Taste in the middle, because it is just this position, which, in the mind, it occupies. … Just as the Intellect concerns itself with Truth, so Taste informs us of the Beautiful while the Moral Sense is regardful of Duty.

(Works, 14:272-73)

Drawing on eighteenth-century constructions of the individual mind and subject and the effort to discover what Burke had called “the logic of Taste” (11), Poe's attempt to carve out a separate space of pure pleasure and pure beauty might be read as a radical affirmation of human being and spirit in the face of the theoretical abstractions of Enlightenment rationalism, the dehumanizing technologies of modern science, and the increasingly mechanistic and self-alienating effects of the industrial marketplace. “An immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful,” Poe writes. “It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us—but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above” (Works, 14:273). Whereas in the work of Alexander Baumgarten and other early philosophers of the aesthetic, the aesthetic was meant to designate perception through the body and the senses in opposition to abstract reason and immaterial thought, in Poe, as in Kant, the aesthetic represents an effort to climb out of the body to attain what Poe calls “but brief and indeterminate glimpses” of the beauty beyond.⁸

And yet, for all Poe's effort to lay claim to a separate space of pure beauty, pure art, and pure pleasure beyond empirical knowledge and the passions of the body, the subject he seeks to affirm and the pure space of beauty toward which he aspires continue to be shaped by the racial codes, hierarchies, and values of Western, and specifically Anglo-American, culture. Poe's emphasis on what he calls “radical and chasmal differences between the truthful and the poetical modes of inculcation” (Works, 14:272), his desire to distinguish and differentiate the aesthetic as a separate realm of activity, participates in, even as it seeks to surmount, an emergent scientific discourse of racial difference, purity, and distinction that grounds both modern “white” subjectivity and Western aestheticism. Thus, for example, in Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), his attempt to distinguish Beauty as a purely subjective and disinterested realm of aesthetic activity is grounded in his assertion of fundamental national and racial difference. In a section of Observations entitled “Of National Characteristics, so far as They Depend upon the Distinct Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime,” Kant writes that there is a “fundamental difference” between the black and white “races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color” (111). The aesthetic is, in effect, color-coded in Kant's cultural taxonomy: blacks are not only different from and inferior to whites; they are also incapable of experiencing or producing beauty. “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling,” Kant writes in support of Hume's observation that “not a single [Negro] was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praise-worthy quality” (Kant, 110-11).

Poe's “Poetic Principle” is similarly grounded in the bodily presumption of white over black. In the passages he cites from Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Moore, Thomas Hood, Lord Byron, Alfred Tennyson, and Edward Coote Pinckney to exemplify his aesthetic theory, beauty and poetry are associated with whiteness, purity, love, and fair womanhood; blackness is associated with “muddy impurity,” corporeality, pain, horror, and the “stain” of mortality. And yet, as in Poe's “The Raven,” in which the whiteness of the marble bust of Pallas necessitates the blackness of the raven, and the desire for beauty and the beauty-effect are intensified by the physical presence and social horror of blackness, in Poe's aesthetic theory, as in Kant's, beauty paradoxically incorporates blackness as part of its own self-definition and its subjective “effect.”

In its most utopian form, Poe's theory of “Supernal Beauty” represents an attempt to unite a fractured nation and an increasingly atomized world on the common ground of culture. But while Poe seeks in “The Poetic Principle” to establish a kind of science of aesthetic value as a means of bridging the apparent division between the poet-critic, the popular press, and what he calls “the mass of mankind” (Works, 14:278), his desire to locate pure beauty “Anywhere, anywhere / Out of the world!” (Works, 14:286) is also linked with his lifelong ambition to establish an aristocracy of taste and intellect that will decide—against the debased judgment of the masses and the moral pieties of the New England literary establishment—what counts as true art. This is particularly evident in Poe's ongoing dream of founding his own magazine. In 1848 Poe wrote to Helen Whitman requesting her aid in financing the Stylus: “Would it not be ‘glorious,’” he asked, “to establish, in America, the sole unquestionable aristocracy—that of intellect—to secure its supremacy—to lead & to control it?” (Letters, 2:410). Here, as elsewhere in Poe's writing, culture becomes the ground at once of “unquestionable aristocracy” and social control. For Poe, no less than for Jefferson, this cultural aristocracy and its ideals of pure beauty cannot finally be separated from the question of race and the ongoing historical struggle over the color of American skin. Emerging out of the broader taxonomies of the Western Enlightenment, the aesthetic is itself a historically marked signifier that would continue to play a key role in national and international efforts to fix the boundary not only between races and nations but also between civilized and uncivilized, culture and its others.

Notes

1. If slaves were emancipated, wrote Dew in 1832, “The whites would either gradually withdraw, and leave whole districts or settlements in their possession, in which case they would sink rapidly in the scale of civilization; or the blacks, by closer intercourse, would bring the whites down to their level” (“Abolition of Negro Slavery,” 57; emphasis added).

2. Stallybrass and White's discussion of “the contradictory and unstable representation of low-Others” is relevant here. “A recurrent pattern emerges,” they observe as,

   the “top” attempts to reject and eliminate the “bottom” for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other (in the classic way that Hegel describes in the master-slave section of the Phenomenology), but also that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life. The result is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear and desire in the construction of subjectivity: a psychological dependence upon precisely those Others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level. It is for this reason that what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central.

   (5)

3. Poe makes recurrent use of animals in racially inflected contexts in his writings: the orangutan that is provoked to acts of “frightful mutilation” by its master's “use of a whip” in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Mabbott, 2:547, 565); the “perverse” relation between black cat and master in “The Black Cat”; the ape that is worshiped and the “wild beasts” that periodically rise up against their masters in “Four Beasts in One—The Homo-Cameleopard”; the black cat capable of reason in “Instinct vs Reason—A Black Cat”; and the figure of the condor as ominous black bird of prey in the poems “Sonnet—To Science” and “The Conqueror Worm.” In these and other poems and tales, such as “The Haunted Palace,” Pym, “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Feather,” and “Hop-Frog,” Poe returns over and over to fantasies of revenge and reversal of the master-slave (or male-female) relation. See also Poe's 1836 review of Robert Bird's Sheppard Lee, in which he praises a sequence in which the ghost of the white man, Sheppard Lee, assumes the body of a black man, Nigger Tom: “In his character of Nigger Tom, Mr. Lee gives us some very excellent chapters upon abolition and the exciting effects of incendiary pamphlets and pictures, among our slaves in the South. This part of the narrative closes with a spirited picture of a negro insurrection, and with the hanging of Nigger Tom” (CW, 5:285).

4. See also John F. Adams, who observes: “Classical mythology has Pallas, the embodiment of wisdom, as the raven's original master, a tradition Poe evidently drew upon in perching his raven on her white bust” (53).

5. Poe delivered his lecture “The Poetic Principle” in Providence, Rhode Island, on 20 December 1848; in Richmond, Virginia, on 17 August and 24 September 1849; and in Norfolk, Virginia, on 14 and 17 September 1849 (Thomas and Jackson). The lecture was published posthumously in 1850.

6. In response to Poe's lecture in Richmond on 17 August 1849, John M. Daniels in the Semi-Weekly Examiner praises Poe for exploding “the poetic ‘heresy of modern times’” by insisting that poetry should have no “end to accomplish beyond that of ministering to our sense of the beautiful.—We have in these days poets of humanity and poets of universal suffrage, poets whose mission is to break down the corn laws and poets to build up workhouses” (Thomas and Jackson, 827).

7. Whereas earlier critics, including Woodberry, Campbell (The Mind of Poe), Stovall, and Laser, have emphasized the determining influence of Coleridge on Poe's aesthetic ideas, Omans argues convincingly that Poe's tripartite division of the mind derives not from Coleridge but from Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790): “Not only are Poe's three faculties, pure intellect, taste, and the moral sense, translations of Kant's German terms, Verstand, das Geschmacksurteil, and Vernunft, but also Poe, like Kant, places the faculty of taste between those of the intellect and moral sense and emphasizes its function as a ‘connecting link in the triple chain’” (128). For a discussion of Poe in relation to eighteenth-century moral sense philosophers, see Jacobs, Poe: Journalist and Critic, especially 3-34.

8. Baumgarten's two-volume Aesthetica was published in Germany in 1750 and 1758. For a discussion of the historical emergence of the term aesthetic in Germany and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Raymond Williams, 31-32. In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton argues: “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body” (13).