Poe and the Visual Arts

3. Poe’s Homely Interiors

In a letter to George Eveleth dated October 1, 1878, Helen Whitman reveals that Poe told her he was intent on “writing a pendant to ‘The Domain of Arnheim ’ in which the most charming effects should be attained by artistic combinations of familiar and unvalued materials” (Tales, 2:1326). This chapter explores these ordinary and undervalued objects in the stories, sketches, and essays that Poe did write. Such homely details can be read as vehicles for undercurrent themes, nuanced complications of plot, and/or satirical and critical responses to cultural norms. Scholars such as Nina Baym, David Ketterer, Richard Wilbur, and Joan Dayan, to name just a few, have interpreted the phantasmagoric interiors in Poe’s more popular stories from the late 1830s and 1840s (including “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Masque of the Red Death”). However, the homely decorative objects and interior design in the domestic settings that Poe creates for his characters in the tales and sketches of this period have received little critical attention. Specifically, this chapter examines the visual cues found in the homely details (or the material culture) of “The Devil in the Belfry,” “William Wilson,” “The Philosophy of Furniture,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” and “Landor’s Cottage.” “The Devil in the Belfry” (1839) A year after Poe moved to Philadelphia, “The Devil in the Belfry” was published in the May 1839 issue of the Philadelphia Saturday Chronicle and Mirror of the 3 poe’s homely interiors poe and the visual arts {  } Times. The story includes a detailed description of the interior of a burgher home that, according to the narrator, mirrors all of the other homes in the city of Vondervotteimittiss. This description reinforces the narrator’s satiric overview of the townspeople, who thrive on uniformity, conformity, and punctuality . The ostensible intent of his story is to reveal the terrible chaos that erupted one day after the town clock struck thirteen, in hopes of prompting his auditors to come to the aid of the villagers whose lives were torn asunder. However, this overt purpose is complicated by the implications of the narrator’s focus on the interior decoration of the cottages. When this is taken into consideration, his underlying intent seems altogether less like a call for help in restoring the villagers ’ disrupted routines and more like a scathing critique of their systematic lives. The narrator carefully describes the typical burgher home as follows: The dwellings are as much alike inside as out, and the furniture is all upon one plan. The floors are of square tiles, the chairs and tables of black-looking wood with thin crooked legs and puppy feet. The mantel-pieces are wide and high, and have not only time-pieces and cabbages sculptured over the front, but a real time-piece, which makes a prodigious ticking, on the top in the middle, with a flower-pot containing a cabbage standing on each extremity by way of outrider. Between each cabbage and the time-piece, again, is a little China man having a large stomach with a great round hole in it, through which is seen the dial-plate of a watch. (Tales, 1:367) The Chinese object on the hearth might seem innocuous and could easily be overlooked despite being in plain sight—just like the letter openly displayed on the “trumpery fillagree card-rack of pasteboard . . . just beneath the middle of the mantel-piece” in Minister D——’s apartment in “The Purloined Letter” (1844; Tales, 2:990–91). In addition, the narrator of “The Devil in the Belfry” makes note of the “fierce, crooked-looking fire-dogs” in front of the fireplace (1:367–68)—andirons that call to mind the crooked, fierce-looking lions that guard Chinese tombs. Poe’s attention to detail and his philosophy of overall effect make these objects, which seem out of place in a Pennsylvania Dutch home, stand out and beg interpretation. How a Chinese object, such as the “little China man having a large stomach,” found its way into the homes of ordinary Pennsylvanians—here, in the “Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittiss” poe’s homely interiors {  } (1:365)—is an engaging story of its own. It circles back to the explicit reference to history in the very first paragraph of “The Devil in the Belfry.” Initially, the narrator claims to tell his tale like a historian: “No one who...