Poor Poe: On the Literature of Revulsion

Edgar Allan Poe’s surname was strangely revealing. To southern ears, it sounded the economic condition that would always be with him: he was poor, or po’. An icon of financial vulnerability in unstable times, Poe’s very identity became entwined with his indigence to the extent that daguerreotypes of the writer can seem like visual battles between lowly financial circumstances, revealed in his worn and mended clothes, and moral qualities that—according to his friends at least—maintained his self-respect.¹ Poe’s appearance staged “the silent but continuous sap of necessity,” as the novelist Thomas Mayne Reid described it (qtd. in Poe Log 410), and made an implicit plea for alms within a culture of benevolence. Yet Poe’s spectacular performance of gentlemanliness reduced to starvation had more troubling implications for those around him. Take the reaction of Thomas Willis White, publisher of the Southern Literary Messenger where Poe worked as editor and first published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). White claimed that the publication of Pym cost him $20 per page, and wrote to a friend with the hope that he would soon be clear of Poe. “I am, my friend, considerably inclined to melancholy—too much so, for my comfort or happiness—but I cannot help it,” wrote White: “Poe pesters me no little . . . He is continually after me for money. I am as sick of his writing, as I am of him” (qtd. in Poe Log 241–42). If the picture of Poe implied the disturbing possibility of social decline, then White’s response registered Poe’s powerful effect in shaping an emotional and economic reaction in which anxiety and insecurity combined.

Poe’s work has long been viewed as a barometer of the troubled financial times in which he wrote. Both Terence Whalen and Meredith McGill have explored Poe’s literary adaptations to the rise of information commerce and to a decentered print market dominated by reprinting and piracy.² Jill Lepore has argued recently that Poe was forced to crank out tales of gothic horror to win prizes and sell magazines in a desperate effort to keep the wolf (or the raven) from his door.³ We have become familiar with a version of Poe as an ambivalent writer who sought to appeal to mass tastes while constructing his intellectual distinction against readers and writers alike. Poe’s evidence of intellectual worth was observed by contemporary critics to collapse easily into imaginative wildness and emotional excess which seemed offensive to good taste.⁴ I want to return to this inconsistency in our view of Poe, though not to explore the writer’s faltering grip on success, but to understand more clearly his peculiar performances of failure. By looking at Poe in this inverted light, we can understand one part in a larger story of the relationship between literature and economic crisis, one in which a particular kind of aesthetic “fall” becomes the compelling embodiment of the concept of failure that gets hidden in the culture at large (Sandage 265). To recognize the literary forms of failure and collapse is, in a sense, simply to place literature more truly in the context of the nineteenth century, when market society was inherently unstable and the experience of class identity was ideologically unsure (Livingston 41–42). It is also to appreciate how the aesthetic power of literature can emerge not by confirming hegemonic class relations but by giving shape to the insecurity and slipperiness structured integrally into US economic relations.

No doubt some antebellum literary texts did seek to save the ethic of capitalism from the ruins of economic turmoil. Popular “panic texts,” particularly those that responded to the devastating Panic of 1837, sought to resolve the contradictions of capitalism and to assuage the ideological fears of the middle class, as numerous critics have argued.⁵ Nobody, but the literary historian, reads today Hannah Lee’s Three Experiments of Living (1837) or Elinor Fulton (1837), however, perhaps because of the historically localized and moralistic way that such texts attempt to teach readers to survive a specific financial panic...