The Arabian Romance of America in Poe’s “Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”

The Arabian Romance of America in Poe’s “Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” MATTHEW PANGBORN F ebruary 1845 proving a dull month for fashion, Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book decided to forego its usual illustrations of the latest designs. It did offer, however, the account of a woman strangled to death by her husband after an argument over a bustle. As the wife’s name was Scheherazade and the author’s Edgar Allan Poe, it is unlikely any of the magazine’s fashionable female readers feared their own worst nightmares had been realized. Yet if “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” treats a topic less sensationalistic than an actual murder, it does explore public anxieties just as powerful, ones arising in the phenomenon of orientalism reaching its peak in the United States in the 1840s. Recent readings, especially of Poe’s “Ligeia” and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” have examined the author’s engagement with an oriental discourse that has proven more complicated than the mere escapism or expression of everyday wisdom it was often taken to be during the period.1 According to such studies, orientalism allowed its participants to partake of “a powerful, colonial, national identity, one which linked the country with the ethnocentrism of post-Enlightenment Euroamerican culture.”2 No study of Poe’s “Scheherazade,” however, has commented on the author’s use of the discourse to mount an elaborate double parody of that national identity’s central myth, and none has studied the author’s decision to address a largely female readership through a woman narrator who is violently garroted.3 But if Poe’s story tracks the enlistment of the oriental tale in discursive attempts to construct a safe domestic space for European Americans, it also calculates the cost of that construction for both European Americans and their others. Poe’s narrator asserts from the start that there is more truth than pleasure to his tale—a truth about European Americans, not “orientals”—but it is a truth he also expects his audience will find too painful to believe.4 Poe’s story takes the form of an epilogue to the Near Eastern and Indian folktales of The Thousand and One Nights, which was introduced to the West through Antoine Galland’s French translation (1704–17) but quickly brought out in English by Grub Street hacks. Scheherazade, the original folktales’ C  2010 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 43, 2010 35 M A T T H E W P A N G B O R N heroine, weds a sultan bent on avenging his first wife’s infidelity by marrying one of his female subjects every evening only to murder her at dawn. By skillfully weaving together the tales she tells the sultan, and by interrupting each at a cliff-hanger ending, Scheherazade puts off her fate, and after the designated number of nights, she convinces her husband to abandon his murderous designs. The Nights had an immense impact on French and British literature, sparking a mania within each nation for the fanciful imaginings and philosophical ruminations of the oriental tale.5 These resulting tales, however, only reinforced for Westerners an image of an inferior Eastern other, one critiqued by studies of orientalism after Edward Said as enabling imperialist European policies. More recently, attention to the role in American literature of an orientalist discourse or presence has expanded from a national focus to a transnational and even global perspective.6 European Americans’ literary invocations of a supposed contrast between a Western Enlightenment and an Eastern decline allied the United States with a stable European course of civilization that in the tumultuous first decades of the nation’s founding may have seemed more than an ocean away. But such a construction also permitted writers to investigate problems with U.S. bids to join that FrancoBritish world-system, whose main characteristics included “sensibility” and the “sentimental cultural artifacts” of novels, but also the more problematic features of “sensational consumption” and “Atlantic slavery.”7 Mark Kamrath thus traces the presence, in early American periodicals, of oriental tales that formed a vital transition between “the politics...