Poe, Animals, Animality

Two recent contributions to animal studies scholarship include sustained examinations of Poe’s writing. Colleen Glenney Boggs’s Animalia Americana offers a deftly nuanced, impeccably researched study of animal figures that inform thinking about power, embodiment, and subjectivity in American literature from the seventeenth-through the twenty-first century. Christopher Peterson’s Bestial Traces brings together poststructuralist thought and intriguing close readings of texts by Poe, Richard Wright, Joel Chandler Harris, Philip Roth, and J. M. Coetzee to consider how disavowals and avowals of human animality bear on concepts of race and sexuality.

As is well known, Poe’s raven, Ourang-Outang, and black cat have preoccupied generations of critics. But over the past fifteen years—notably, since the publication of Jacques Derrida’s “L’animal que donc je suis (à suivre)” [in L’animal autobiographique, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 1999), 251–301], and David Wills’s translation, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” [Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 369–418]—scholars have asked, with increasing frequency, how Poe’s animals raise and respond to questions about species difference and human-animal relations. Boggs’s and Peterson’s offerings differ considerably from one another—for instance, Boggs emphasizes interspecies relationships while Peterson focuses almost exclusively on human animality—but both studies are deeply consonant with Derrida’s searching meditations on philosophical, religious, and literary animals (this is more obvious in Peterson’s book, but no less the case in Boggs’s).

Although I am inclined to agree with Boggs’s claim that “animals are in fact present in and central to virtually all of Poe’s works,” centrality across the corpus remains to be established [115]. Prior animal studies–oriented work on Poe has focused on just a few texts, most often “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” [Akira Lippit, 2000; Jochen Achilles, 2004; Michael Ziser, 2007; Thangam Ravindranathan, 2014] and “The Black Cat” [Niles Tomlinson, 2010; Kari Weil, 2012]. Ziser also takes up “The Raven” and “The Purloined Letter,” and I offer a reading of Pym [2013]. Boggs’s account is the broadest to date, encompassing the more popular works as well as “The Gold-Bug,” “The Philosophy of Composition,” “The Poetic Principle,” and Poe’s writings on phrenology.

A very ambitious and smart book, Animalia Americana ranges from Plymouth Plantation to Abu Ghraib (in a single chapter), interweaving carefully historicized close readings of Poe, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Katharine Lee Bates, and other American literary figures with the insights of a panoply of twentieth-and twenty-first-century theorists (Foucault, Agamben, Esposito, Haraway, Lacan, Berlant, Terada, Trilling, and Levinas, to name only a few). Boggs’s reading of Poe brings together phrenology, mesmerism, bestiality, Lockean and early national pedagogy, genre theory, thing theory, and poststructuralist theories of embodiment and alterity. In Boggs’s view, Poe “locate[s] us . . . at the crux of animal studies,” between the “two divergent and seemingly incompatible strands” of animal rights and poststructuralist approaches [109, 3]. Centrally, she claims that Poe “uses animals to link ratiocination, the abstract reasoning that undergirds symbolic discourse, with an alternative register of embodied meaning-making that founds and undercuts it” [109]. So reading, for instance, is for Poe “not only a symbolic act, but also a corporeal process” that suggests new concepts of relational subjectivity irreducible to the liberal subject [114].

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is the Poe text that Boggs and Peterson have in common. They join Lippit, and Poe himself, in asking whether the Ourang-Outang commits murder. The two agree that Poe leaves the question unresolved, and in doing so places the human-animal distinction at the heart of his conceptions of law and morality. Moreover, Boggs and Peterson demonstrate that Poe’s treatment of Dupin rules out a firm distinction between Dupin’s human rationality...