Irish Mouths and English Tea-pots: Orality and Unreason in “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” has generally been read as a comedy or commentary on issues of mental illness in antebellum America. Recent scholarly appraisals have further noted the story’s rebellious contexts and connections to antebellum slavery debates. This essay pushes beyond those boundaries and offers a transatlantic reading in which cunning “lunatics” and a clueless narrator formulate a critique of Anglo-American colonial responses to the Irish. Published in 1845 and coincident with the beginnings of Ireland’s Great Famine, “The System” engages with antebellum America’s response to mass Irish migration: mass institutionalization. The famished Irish entering America during this period swiftly became the single largest population in a rapidly expanding mental asylum system. Justifying this institutionalization were Anglo-American cultural and colonial assumptions premised on reason as a dividing line between fit Anglo-Saxons and incurably “insane” Irish. In this essay I use theoretical conceptions of Irish oral identity or orality to recast Poe’s oral tropes—singing, eating, drinking, and speaking—and read his lunatics as Irish subjects. Irish orality is posited within the first-person narrator’s clueless and unreasoned narrative, which testifies both to colonial agency and the fallacious limits of colonizing reason.