“The Whole Numerous Race of the Melancholy among Men”: Mourning, Hypocrisy, and Same-Sex Desire in Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

“The Whole Numerous Race of the Melancholy among Men”: Mourning, Hypocrisy, and Same-Sex Desire in Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym DAVID GREVEN E dgar Allan Poe’s construction of gender—one of the most provocative and complex aspects of his work—has proven richly suggestive for our critical forays into nineteenth-century theories and embodiments of gendered identity. Joan Dayan, in a powerful reading, locates Poe’s potential radicalism in his satirical representation of Southern codes that governed female sexual appraisal, while David Leverenz and Leland Person have seen social subversion in his portraits of the antebellum “gentleman.”1 Extending these points, I argue that Poe is most culturally valuable in his representation of American manhood as fundamentally, intrinsically disorganized.2 Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is important to studying representations of gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century literature because its most compelling scenes show masculine identities cut off from normative gendered standards. Pym presents us with numerous episodes in which masculine identity undergoes disturbing challenges or assaults, in which men behave oddly, disquietingly, or perversely, often with little or no emotional contextualization or explanation. Some of Poe’s depictions have homoerotic overtones, and an exploration of their significance is the chief focus of this essay.3 Given the extremely problematic nature of “proving” that homosexuality is being represented in an antebellum literary text, I propose that we investigate queer themes, not in scenes of sexual activity, but in depictions of failed gendered performance. It is in these fissures in prescribed codes of gendered conduct—precisely the moments in which normative gendered identity fails or, pushed to the breaking point, threatens to explode—that a queer potentiality lies.4 Patrick E. Horrigan argues that fictive disaster narratives open up new avenues of possibility: “catastrophe,” he writes, “makes people free to discover capacities within themselves that were, until then, unimaginable.”5 Pym exploits its staging of various nautical disasters—principally shipwrecks and mutinies— as opportunities for the disorganization of normative manhood. C
2008 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 41, 2008 31 D A V I D G R E V E N Poe’s evocations of sailing figure alternative forms of male identities cut off from what Michael Warner would call “regimes of the normal.”6 When Pym fantasizes about sea life, he does not envision progress, conquest, material gain, or grand adventure. Instead, he envisions shipwreck, famine, captivity, or “a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown” (Writings, 1:65). This sense of male sorrow is suggestive. By transforming the sailing voyage from a masculinist venture for economic gain to a series of grueling opportunities for lonely, outcast men to share in a common grief, Poe denatures the expectations of both sea life and male identity.7 Bert Bender, writing of the “prominent theme of brotherhood in American sea fiction,” notes that it tells “typically American stories that bespeak our democratic heritage and a ‘common faith,’” as we watch “men working together to survive” the hardships of “storm, shipwreck, and sometimes brutal authority,” forming “a powerful cohesive force, a natural bonding in actual experience.”8 But in Poe there are only deepening states of debility. Infusing the homoeroticized atmosphere of the seaman’s life with a heightened awareness of loneliness and despair, which eventually pours out in the uncontrollable flow of men’s tears, Poe explodes the concept of sea life as an orderly, mutually affirming brotherhood, making it instead a site of excessiveness and erratic, fluctuating performances of masculine identity. As I will demonstrate, Pym is primarily a novel about male mourning. Understanding why men mourn, what they mourn, and for whom they mourn will help us to understand the novel’s allegorical value for queer theory. And as I will also show, Poe’s recurring theme of male debility echoes the language used by nineteenth-century health reformers who made the problem of male sexuality their chief focus; the correspondences between their rhetoric and Poe’s novel are deeply suggestive for inquiries into the “nature ” of gendered...