Queer Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart of His Fiction

Queer Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart of His Fiction LELAND S. PERSON “W hen I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment,” C. Auguste Dupin explains in “The Purloined Letter” (1845), “I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression” (Works, 3:984–85).1 This example of mimicry—of a man making himself “correspond” intellectually and emotionally with another man—can offer an interesting point of entry for studying connections between male relationships and the play of desire in Poe’s fiction. The possibility of a physical identification so potent that a telepathic communication of thoughts and feelings occurs between two men invites interpretation from a gay or queer perspective. Poe’s fiction includes a remarkable number of such identificatory moments, raising questions about the range of thoughts or sentiments that can arise in a man’s mind or heart under such intense conditions. To what extent can those thoughts and sentiments be understood according to homoerotic structures of desire and response? Analyzing Poe’s representation of male-male intimacy can also tell us a great deal about the nineteenth-century imaginary—about the forms that intense male relationships could take before “homosexuality” became a set of behaviors and a state of being. Jonathan Ned Katz has catalogued many examples of “sex between men” long before “homosexuality” entered the American lexicon.2 None other than Rufus Griswold, Poe’s notorious literary executor, noted the “horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians” in his review of Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.3 Robert K. Martin has also observed that from the 1840s to the 1880s, a “range of possibilities” for male-to-male relationships existed that “could run from boyhood ‘chums’ to an idealized comradeship of ‘knights-errant’ to an anguished and guilt-ridden projection of the self onto figures of Gothic evil.”4 The “figures of Gothic evil” that occupy one end of Martin’s spectrum resemble the male characters in the tales that concern me here, and their origin as “guilt-ridden projections” seems consonant with the male psychology Poe represents. Keeping in mind Katz’s C
2008 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 41, 2008 7 L E L A N D S . P E R S O N warning against “retrolabeling”5 —against imposing contemporary templates of sexual behavior and identification on older case studies—I intend not so much to label Poe’s characters and plots as queer or homoerotic as to situate them on the historical and cultural “map” that Martin and others describe. Poe’s writing features a play of homoerotic desire and disavowal that may “queer” his characters’ sexuality and subjectivity, in other words, but is not itself “queer.” A reading that labels Poe’s tales queer produces what Valerie Rohy calls an “optical illusion, visible only from one historical vantage point,” though that contemporary perspective can still provide a useful starting point for researching appropriate readings.6 Guarding against the risk of “anachronistic projection,” I want to keep the question of plausible reading always before us at the same time that I want to imagine alternative and deviant possibilities, including those available to nineteenth-century readers. We have not fully examined Poe’s fiction for what it can tell us about the male imaginary and, especially, about possibilities for deeply felt male-to-male relationships. That Poe’s tales typically end in failure—often with violent foreclosure on male-to-male intimacy—may help us understand the inception of a powerful homophobia in the middle of the nineteenth century.7 A few critics have already explored homoeroticism in Poe’s life and fiction. In her psychoanalytic biography, Marie Bonaparte diagnosed Poe’s “latent homosexuality,” which originated, she reasoned, in the death of his mother and his conflicted relationship with John Allan.8 J. A. Leo LeMay argued...