Chasing Edgar: The Tourist Rhetoric of the Poe Bicentennial

Chasing Edgar: The Tourist Rhetoric of the Poe Bicentennial J. BOWERS E dgar Allan Poe’s 200th birthday meant big business for the retail and tourism industries. The popular clothing merchant Urban Outfitters marketed exclusive ladies’ T-shirts featuring quotations from “Alone” and “The Raven,” as well as a men’s “Edgar Allen Poe” [sic] tee emblazoned with a screen print of the author, framed by a reclining skeleton. All styles were, naturally, available in just one color—black. The U.S. Postal Service released a commemorative forty-two-cent portrait stamp, accompanied by a “limited edition commemorative copy” of “The Raven,” advertised with the less-than-catchy slogan “The Edgar Allan Poe Stamp: for Now, Not Nevermore .”1 And six American locales (Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Richmond, and Sullivan’s Island) attracted literary pilgrims wishing to celebrate Poe’s bicentennial in style. From a historical standpoint, it is not surprising that such a large number of locales would try to lay claim to the author’s legacy. Though it is difficult to accurately track every move that Poe made throughout his lifetime, he, his wife Virginia, and her mother Maria Clemm occupied numerous homes in several cities. Their home life included moves from Baltimore to Richmond, from Richmond to New York City, from there to Philadelphia, and back to New York City, with several intra-city relocations.2 Through these moves, Poe unwittingly studded the East Coast with homes, commemorative plaques, statues , and other monuments to his legacy. Unlike Mark Twain, whose boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri, appears in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, or Henry David Thoreau, who penned Walden at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, Poe’s life and work elude obvious associations with a particular point-of-origin or “home.” That is to say, they foil the “pursuit of the writer by the reader,” resisting the literary pilgrim’s longing for “the communication between readers and writers, mediated through the house and the objects it contains.”3 Poe’s tales and poems often take place in fantastical, ambiguous locales , unconnected to any identifiable originals. The houses he once occupied , now museums, feature few, if any, objects that belonged to Poe or his family—most of his personal effects were lost or sold during his many moves. C  2010 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 43, 2010 59 J . B O W E R S Many nineteenth-century biographies—including Rufus Griswold’s infamous work—erroneously claimed Baltimore, not Boston, as the author’s birthplace.4 And Poe’s own accounts of his origin add to the spatial confusion. He calls himself “a Bostonian” on the cover page of his first book, Tamerlane, and Other Poems (1827), but in an 1841 letter he writes, “I am a Virginian—at least I call myself one.”5 The New York Times was still debating this point as late as 13 January 1900, in an article that humorously notes, “Poe claimed to have stepped twice over the threshold into this stage of existence.”6 An end result of this personal ambiguity is the absence of a focal point for tourists wishing to honor the author’s memory. In short, when we visit one of “Poe’s houses,” the locations that critic Mike Robinson refers to as “the physical embodiment of those we cannot usually see, or speak to, and whose works we worship,”7 our connection to Poe is rendered unavailable by the multiplicity of “homes” the author inhabited during his lifetime. Because of the rootlessness evident in Poe’s work and life, it is impossible to settle on which attraction—the Poe House in Baltimore, the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia, Poe’s birthplace in Boston, the Poe Museum in Richmond, the Poe Cottage in the Bronx, or Poe’s Tavern on Sullivan’s Island—is the “right,” “singular,” or “most authentic” site of veneration. Harald Hendrix has argued that the success of writers’ houses as tourist attractions can be ascribed to “the romantic interest in personality, especially in genius, and the desire to identify with such extraordinary persons, the need to get in touch with history...