Poe and Sentimental Mourning

Poe’s famous statement that “the death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” has sparked a variety of responses [ER, 19]. For some, the statement confirms Poe’s alignment with gothic sensibilities; for others it encapsulates his troubling gender politics. Rarely have scholars understood it as locating Poe within the sentimental culture of mourning and memorialization that flourished in the nineteenth century. Instead, for the most part, they have positioned Poe against this culture, viewing his dark Gothicism as the antithesis of sentimentality. In Communities of Death, Adam Bradford challenges the generally held perception that Poe either stood apart from or was openly hostile toward the sentimental tradition of mourning, and instead makes the case that he was deeply engaged with the aesthetics, rituals, objects, and affective states that define this tradition. Bradford’s reconsideration of Poe within the context of mourning culture sheds new light on the author’s aesthetic philosophies and on his reception by readers, including one of his most famous readers: Walt Whitman.

In recent years, the work of Russ Castronovo, Mary Kete, Dana Luciano, Peter Balaam, and others has intervened in the pejorative characterization of nineteenth-century mourning culture as mawkish, feminine, and historically insignificant. These recuperative readings are a subset of the larger reconsideration of sentimentality, which, thanks to such influential critics as Jane Tompkins and Joanne Dobson, now occupies a place of significance in the study of American literary history alongside Gothicism, romanticism, and transcendentalism. Yet, a gendered division between sentimental writers (Sigourney, Stowe, Warner) and romantic or transcendental ones (Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman) continues to exercise enormous influence over scholarly approaches to the period and its literature. Poe, as the preeminent figure of American Gothicism, has been viewed in opposition to sentimental conventions: the image of the beautiful death, the promise of reunion in the afterlife, and the exquisite pleasure and communitarian bonds that arise from the shared experience of suffering. Poe’s rotting corpses, gloomy landscapes, and bleak existentialism appear to present a contrasting view of death that offers no such promises—and that, indeed, strikes out against the feminized emotions and domestic settings featured in female-authored sentimental texts. Bradford, however, contends that Poe’s poetry and prose are inextricable from the popular context of memorial culture, situating his writing alongside a host of objects such as mourning quilts, hair jewelry, commonplace poetry, and postmortem portraits. He argues that Poe “provid[ed] readers with thoughts and images so horrifying that they would be driven to ‘recoil,’” opening up a space in which “something more inspiring” could emerge [14]. Poe’s emphasis on the horror and trauma of loss was, in Bradford’s words, meant to “inspire a reader to assert, imagine, and embrace transcendent notions of death and the afterlife” [72].

Bradford locates evidence of this sentimental effect in the responses of Poe’s contemporaneous readers. While readers today often find it impossible to reconcile Poe’s writing with the sentimental tradition, nineteenth-century readers, according to Bradford, clearly and consistently perceived them as parts of a whole. Bradford employs these contemporaneous responses as models for his own alternative interpretation of Poe. Reader-response criticism of the kind he undertakes often runs the risk of overstatement, given that evidence of individual responses is arguably non-representative. And at times, Bradford falls into this trap, as when he characterizes a handful of reactions as “copious testimony” proving that a sympathetic response “was the norm for readers of the time” [82]. He also tends to collapse various kinds of “response” (personal accounts, published reviews, and even parodies and rewritings) without addressing the differences between these genres, their distinct audiences and goals. In particular, poetic compositions that rewrite or respond to Poe’s poetry would appear to comprise a distinct species of writing that does not entirely fit under the heading of reader response. At other times, however, Bradford’s account of the reception of Poe’s writing by nineteenth...