Thinking with Love: Poe’s Queer Mimicries

ABSTRACT: In this article, I read Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” through Eliza Richards’s emphasis on Poe’s replications of feminine poetic voice as well as through some of the dominant templates for queer readings of Poe, including homoerotic mimicry and a resistance to reproductive futurism. In reading the story through both gender and sexuality, I consider Poe’s cross-gendered imitation as not just heterosexually erotic, as many of Poe’s imitations of poetess voice clearly were, but also erotically queer, questioning the line between genders and Poe’s self-proclaimed role as aesthetic producer of feminine death. This cross-gendered Poe opens up a new way of reading the author’s imitations, including his textual imitations of visual artworks, his aesthetic imitations of other writers, and the internal imitations between a story’s characters. I propose reading these forms of mimicry through ekphrastic imitation, which theorists have framed as always necessarily about gender (and gender anxiety or instability). Through Richards, I argue, we might imagine a Poe who is not just an author of gay panic but a conscious performer of a femme persona.