Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique by Robert T. Tally, Jr. (review)

In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robert T. Tally, Jr., challenges conventional ideas about Poe, especially the notion that he is essentially a Gothic writer. For Tally, Poe, whose oeuvre includes hoaxes, humorous tales, and other writings, has a clear interest in satire, and even stories such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “William Wilson” contain comic elements that seem anomalous if one reads these texts as mere terror tales. Fueling the satire is deep skepticism. As Tally indicates, Poe exhibits little faith in progress, scientific and cultural, and he rejects the idea that the United States is a redeemer nation, an ever-expanding land of happiness and freedom. Such attitudes distinguish Poe from many of his contemporaries. For this reason, some influential critics, notably V. L. Parrington and F. O. Matthiessen, deem Poe a literary outsider in the world of American writing; but whereas these writers suggest that such cultural alienation is a problem, Tally finds this estrangement advantageous, for as an outsider Poe discerns the limits of human endeavor as well as the disparities between American ideals and the realities of national life. Scholars will, no doubt, detect similarities between Tally’s approach and that of G. R. Thompson, a critic who finds Romantic Irony, a particular order of skepticism, throughout Poe’s writings, wherein terrifying and humorous elements are intermingled. Poe and the Subversion of American Literature differs, however, from previous studies such as Thompson’s. In his book, Tally examines not Romantic Irony but “satirical fantasy,” a mode through which Poe ridicules “both humanist and national tendencies” to exaggerate the powers of the mind as well as the moral excellence of the American system (21). Braggadocio of this kind is, as Tally asserts, the fruit of an exceptionalist ideology under the aegis of which American Studies came into being, and Poe’s writings offer a powerful corrective to such bluster.

To establish Poe as an outsider, Tally surveys the writer’s life, during which Poe moved from city to city as his fortunes waxed and waned. This mode of existence set Poe apart from Americans pursuing wealth with the object of settling somewhere as freeholders; furthermore, constant moving made it impossible for Poe to take root in a single place and to assume a regional identity. Life in cities, those centers of continual change, made settling difficult, and Poe, “an indigenous and well adapted city-dweller,” rejected two kinds of settlement, staying in one place as well as closing the mind to new, disturbing truths (113). Poe was thus, in some respects, outside the ideological orders that governed American life during the nineteenth century, and the conditions under which Poe lived gave his thinking a “pervasive nomadism,” a habit of wandering from expectations and embracing uncertainty (41).

This turn of mind encourages skepticism, an attitude Tally detects in Poe’s tales. Consider “Poe’s voyages,” most of which “lead less to knowledge and conquest than to greater mysteries and insecurity” (45). With their inconclusive endings and unreliable narrators, stories such as “MS Found in a Bottle” are satirical versions of “personal narratives of the nineteenth century,” texts that dramatize “the progressive march of knowledge” (49). According to Tally, Poe questions the optimism regarding individual agency on display in such narratives, as his tales of journeys to nowhere reveal. Readers struggle to find meaning in these stories, which are enigmatic, and Tally considers “inscrutability” or what he calls “the terror of unknowability” a keynote in the tales of Poe (70). To give one example, Tally examines Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” a story in which the narrator pursues a suspicious character through a crowded cityscape. For Tally, this tale is not an allegory about a secret sin that only the careful observer can see; rather, “The Man of the Crowd” dramatizes the narrator’s failure to learn whether his perceptions are accurate, and the...