A “Wild” and “Homely Narrative”: Resisting Argument in “The Black Cat”

Paul Lewis A “Wild”and “HomelyNarrative”: ResistingArgument in “TheBlack Cat” How out of error shallwe fabricatetruth? -Poe, Mapnalia, December 1844 TowhatextentarePoe’sexpressedviewsproperlyhisown? What, if anything,can be deducedfrom Poe’ssilences? -Terence Whalen,EdgarAllan Poe and the Masses By focusing attention on color relations (emphasizing black, white, and red), on settings within the domestic sphere (involvingill-fatedmarriages),and on the centrality of narrators whose deviationssituate them in relation to reform ideology, historicist readings of Poe have in recent years sought to place his gothic fiction in the world of antebellum contestation . To what extent was Poe racist or sexist?What did he have to say about the effects of alcohol or narcotics?About death and corpses?About the nature of madness and the need for prison or asylum reform?For all the excitement such questionsraise about the possibilities of contextualizing Poe, who can seem the least American of our early authors, there is a danger that the focus on antebellum Poe will obscure his originality. The task for historicist critics,asdefined by ShawnRosenheimand Stephen Rachman in their introduction to TheAmericanFace ofEdgurAZZunPoe, is to “restorehiswritingsto [their] culturalmilieu”while takingfullaccountof “theprocess by which Poe’s fictions simultaneouslyattempt to abstract themselves from and allude to the particulars of their cultural moment.”l Fiftyyears of formalistreadingsculminating,perhaps , in the work of G. R.Thompson in the 1970s arrivedat a Poewhose gothictaleswere seenasedgy, speculative, multilayered, ambiguous, and ironic. “Flatstatements. ..in Poe,”Thompsoninsisted,“are only seeming. Almost everything that Poe wrote is qualified by, indeed controlled by, a prevailing duplicity or irony.”2Guided by New Critical sensitivity to narrative subjectivity,this approach found an unreliable teller at the center of the first-person tales and delighted in describing Poe’s experiments with sustaining mystery. The narrators of such stories as “Ligeia”(1838), “The Fall of the House of Usher“ (1839),and “The Black Cat” (1843) werejudged to be variouslyunreliable:hallucinatory,lackingin selfknowledge , confused about how the world operates, unable to comprehend the motivations of other people, and quite possibly duplicitous. Within the formalistidealof theselfcontainedwork,readerswere left to wonderabout the statusof such “events”asthe return of Madeline Usher and Ligeia from the dead, the electrical storm at the end of “Usher,”and-in the tale under particular consideration here-the formation of a gallowson the head of a cat.The tricks formalists reveled in uncovering concerned Poe’s deployment of overwrought, intoxicated, and perverse narrators whose unreliabilitywas seen as creating endless circles of mystery. Even critics who wrote essays claiming to have discovered what really hap pens in one of these stories often noted Poe’s artful avoidance of resolution and, in effect, thought of themselves asjoining Poe and his charactersin their high-stakesinterpretive games. The present reading of “TheBlack Cat”as both a conventionalandyet provocativelyunusualtale of the 1840s seeks to preserve this sense of Poe as a gothic innovatorin the contextof new historicalrevelations. Poe’sfirstreaders-who were familiarwith forthright treatments of slaveryand poverty,with reform stories about abusive masters, cruel husbands, intemperate drinkers, or impoverished criminals in which details of plot, characterization,mood, and setting inevitably supported political,social, or moral theses-may well have found “TheBlack Cat”unsettling in its unwillingnessto engagein argumentnot onlyabout race and gender but also about poverty and class. The nonappearance of such arguments, the sense that confusion and error preside where coherence and direction are expected, creates a palpable void, a si1 lence that defines Poe’s gothic sensibility. The danger is that historicist readings of the gothic tales may sacrifice this narrative indeterminacy to the eureka impulse toward discoveringtheses that Poe labored, often in defiance of his moralistic contemporaries, to subvert. Since gothic stories depend on the violation of culturallydefined taboos, the critical balance required is particularly challenging. Historicistreadings of these moments of violation need to recover contexts (theculturallyspecificnorms, rules, or practices that the works take up) without implying that stories depicting deviation from “proper”behavior necessarily participate in a serious discussion of underlying moral or political issues. Coming from different perspectives, Terence Whalen and David S. Reynolds have sought to draw the line between historicizing and distorting Poe. The Poe Whalen describes was above all a professional writer and editor trying to advance by adhering to a principle of...