Perverse Feelings: Poe and American Masculinity

Queer theory offers an array of reading strategies especially useful for critics trying to explain how Edgar Allan Poe, in his creative works, disrupts complacencies about gender and sexuality characteristic of antebellum society at its patriarchal worst. Illustrative of this critical boon is the recent publication of Poe, Queerness, and the End of Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), in which Paul Christian Jones examines Poe's resistance to conventional domesticity and its reproductive imperatives. Perverse Feelings: Poe and American Masculinity (hereafter Perverse Feelings) also attests to the illuminating power of queer reading. However, Suzanne Ashworth emphasizes here not heteronormative assumptions about family life but the emotional pain experienced by white antebellum men in thrall to falsehoods about self-reliance and honor, men invested in a fragile masculinity that cannot satisfy their needs for acceptance and love—men who, thwarted and confused, are prone to violence. Careful not to equate this inner turmoil with the suffering endured by women, people of color, and the sexually marginalized in a world dominated by heterosexual white men, Ashworth nevertheless insists that attention be paid to the affective dysfunctions associated with "white nineteenth-century manhood" (4), dysfunctions terribly destructive in their consequences, and to investigate such emotional maladjustment, she turns to writings by Poe in which fictional characters—and, in some cases, Poe himself—"materialize the disfiguring impacts of patriarchal, capitalist, and imperial violence" (10).Two particularly dangerous feelings, hate and melancholia, are the subjects for chapters 1 and 2, respectively. In the first of these, Ashworth focuses on "William Wilson," a tale narrated by a tormented man who lived a life of dissipation and murdered his double. To explain his motivation, Ashworth links the narrator's self-destructive behavior to antebellum anxieties regarding masturbation, taking an interpretive cue from Leland Person. Consumed by forbidden desires, the narrator cannot accept those longings as legitimate, so through projection, he transforms his self-loathing into hatred. Murdering the hated other provides, however, little affective relief because "irreconcilable conflicts" persist; in particular, the narrator "embodies a manhood acculturated to transgression and revered for its raucous autonomy" (39)—a rugged individualism, to be sure—but experiences an intolerable bondage to impulse that undermines his dream of absolute, manly freedom. Ashworth turns to another destructive affect in chapter 2, addressing melancholic obsessions in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains." According to Ashworth, Augustus Bedloe, with his "chronic depression and neuralgic attacks" (54), shows symptoms of what nineteenth-century medical authorities called melancholia, and Poe's tale draws attention to the curious bond between the patient and his mesmerist healer Dr. Templeton. Under the physician's influence, Bedloe envisions the death of Templeton's friend Oldeb during a colonial uprising in India, an experience that binds Bedloe to his caretaker. Charged with homoerotic power, Bedloe's relationship with Templeton is, however, fraught, as Templeton's application of a poisonous leech to Bedloe's temple indicates, and Ashworth suggests that the guilt and desire experienced by both men are the affective consequences of imperial conquest, the subject of Bedloe's dream. In their attachment to a colonial past more violent than glorious, Bedloe and Templeton's "melancholia may be as nostalgic for lost sovereignties as it is for queer intimacies" (80). For Bedloe, the obsession proves fatal.The book's next two sections target other emotional states. Ashworth devotes chapter 3 to disgust in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," a tale notable for its graphic images of bodily decay. In this story, the narrator, a mesmerist identified by the initial "P.," recalls hypnotizing the elderly Valdemar, a terminal consumptive, on the point of death; prolonging his existence in a liminal state during which the old man slowly rots; and watching in horror after the trance breaks and Valdemar's body liquefies. Putting the story in its antebellum context, Ashworth almost loses the thematic thread of masculinity while discussing general nineteenth-century responses to corpses, but she returns to the obsessions of white men while examining the erotic dimension of P.'s hypnotic test. She concludes that the combination of fascination and revulsion he feels throughout this experience signals not only curiosity about other modes of being, especially "liminal ontologies" that represent alternatives to binary-defined identity (89), but also intense fear of transgressive desire and its effects. Poe's tale thus exposes the fragility of masculinity built on untenable exclusions and denials, an instability revealed through the "psychological tell" of "P.'s disgust" (95). Vulnerable manhood is also on display in chapter 4, but this section moves away from fictional matters as Ashworth scrutinizes Poe's own letters to his foster father John Allan, which "document the affective intricacies of grievance and resentment" (118). Of particular concern to Ashworth is the resentment—steeped in "memories of powerlessness and loss" (118)—Poe expresses throughout that correspondence. Socialized in the South to believe white men were entitled to self-rule and racial deference, Poe, in his letters, upbraids Allan for refusing the support he thought his honor required, his rage at rejection tempered by a longing for paternal acceptance. Ashworth may overstate the sincerity of Poe's appeals to Allan, but her demonstration that those demands employ a language of masculine injury common in the antebellum South is airtight. What is more, her assertion that Poe turned his disappointment with Allan to creative use by dramatizing male angst over and over in his fictional works is persuasive.Drawing Perverse Feelings to a close are a study of revenge in "The Cask of Amontillado" (chapter 5) and a brief epilogue. Of the tale, Ashworth reiterates a critical assumption, often expressed, that Montresor's murder of Fortunato is a personal fantasy through which Poe got even with members of the New York literati who slandered him. Taking that conventional reading in a new direction, she insists that the Montresor/Fortunato bond mirrors Poe's complicated relationship with Thomas Dunn English, a friend and colleague who became an enemy. According to Ashworth, vengeful desires belie an affection that the will to harm can easily obscure, and this longing is, she argues, evident not only in Montresor's remarks about Fortunato but also in Poe's grief about a lost friendship with English. In both cases, destructive imperatives of male honor thwart craved intimacies, revealing the isolating effects of self-reliant manhood. Following this mediation on male revenge, Ashworth reflects, in the epilogue, on the rise of patriarchal revanchism in early twenty-first-century America. No references to Poe appear here, and Ashworth makes little effort, in this short piece, to distinguish antebellum masculinity from its present iterations. Nevertheless, her inquiries into the emotional anguish experienced by Poe and some of his narrators provide ample evidence that clinging to constructed identities can reinforce social divisions, breed self-loathing, exacerbate isolation, intensify rage, undermine communal peace, and prevent self-realization.Intriguing as Ashworth's insights into individual texts are, her book does not cohere as well as it could. In the first place, the chapter sequencing seems odd. Ashworth opens with a discussion of an 1839 tale by Poe, shifts to an 1844 work before taking up a story published the following year, curiously jumps back to letters Poe wrote long before 1839, and ends with commentary on a tale published in 1846. Anticipating criticism of this approach, Ashworth claims that "uncritical devotion to linear time is especially incompatible with her project" (13), but most of her chapters are arranged in chronological order by publication date of text analyzed. Her decision to insert a chapter on Poe's early correspondence between analyses of stories published in the 1840s bewilders, though. The problem is that Ashworth's argument relies, at least in part, on the progressive notion of time she claims to reject, for she suggests that Poe's experiences with Allan were psychologically formative and creatively generative. She indicates, in short, that Poe's stories of beset manhood, to borrow a phrase from Nina Baym, originated in psychic struggles of his adolescence. Yet the arrangement of chapters in Ashworth's book occludes that insight. This sequencing problem might result from a focal indeterminacy that characterizes Perverse Feelings, some of which shows how Poe worked through personal trauma in his writings while the rest of the book emphasizes the ways in which Poe depicts, with some irony, men caught up in their own emotional turmoil. More puzzling are, however, gaps in coverage, omissions from the book that suggest incompletion. Only four stories by Poe receive extended analysis, and considering the specific affects Ashworth identified as central to Poe's creative imagination, readers familiar with the Poe oeuvre must wonder why she left unexamined male melancholia in the so-called marriage tales as well as in poetical works, including "The Sleeper," "The Raven," "Ulalume—A Ballad," and "Annabel Lee"; the commingling of disgust and desire in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; the homicidal rage of the narrator in "The Black Cat"; and the terrifying revenge depicted in "Hop-Frog"—to mention just some of the interpretive roads not taken in Perverse Feelings. Reinforcing the notion that this book is not quite finished are some peculiarities of diction, especially in attributive tags (e.g., "Gleig enumerates" on p. 57 and "As Macaulay punctuates" on p. 58), and errors indicative of hasty editing (e.g., "to possess it more completely it in memorialization" on p. 43; "Each of these . . . are" on p. 64; "In other words, Bedloe's lives a depression" on p. 67; "As a perpetual foster child, Poe losses were multiplied" on p. 134; "Henri Le Renner" on p. 139; and "Maria 'Muddy' Clem" on p. 160).Whatever its perceived defects as a monograph, Perverse Feelings remains a valuable aid to understanding how Poe, in his writings, exposed the madness of his antebellum world, a place where white men often pursued mastery at the expense of self-knowledge, intimacy, and justice. Dedicated to a vision of self-reliance that proved destructive to self and society, these men were actually in ideological bondage, and as Ashworth indicates, Poe had a remarkable talent for making legible the emotional realities of that thralldom. Citing biographies of Poe, scholarship about gender and sexuality in Poe's time, antebellum medical writings, psychoanalytic texts, research in affect studies, and queer criticism, Ashworth enriches her argument, showing not only Poe's familiarity with nineteenth-century notions about manliness but also his uncanny ability to intuit ideas about mental life and identity formation articulated long after his death. In addition, emphasizing affective experience in works by Poe, as Ashworth does, is entirely appropriate in light of Poe's well-documented interest in emotional response, especially in designing texts to produce predetermined effects. Additional research into Poe's fascination with emotions and their revelatory power should, it seems, prove fruitful.