Edgar Allan Poe and the Horrid Laws of Political Economy

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Quarterly.The brilliancies on any one page of Lalla Rookh would have sufficed to establish that very reputation which has been in a great measure self-dimmed by the galaxied lustre of the entire book. It seems that the horrid laws of political economy cannot be evaded even by the inspired, and that a perfect versification, a vigorous style, and a never-tiring fancy, may, like the water we drink and die without, yet despise, be so plentifully set forth as to be absolutely of no value at all. -Edgar Allan Poe, 1841 review of Dickens THOUGH HE CULTIVATED A REPUTATION AS AN EXPERT IN ARCANEand mysterious lore, Poe also liked to shock his readers by celebrating the truth of surfaces, that vast realm of superficial knowledge which is visible out of the corner of one's eye. Those who gaze intently into the nighttime sky see only the star, but someone who "surveys it less inquisitively is conscious of all for which the star is useful to us below its brilliancy and beauty" (PT, 14).' This method is useful for surveying Poe's own work, because by focusing less intently on a single text, the oblique perspective makes it possible to explore the relation between literary production and what has been thought of as production in general. Previous efforts to examine this relation have been hampered by the assumption that "literature" and "capitalism" designate All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 382 AMERICAN QUARTERLY practices which are somehow discrete or even autonomous. But if Poe is correct in claiming that "the horrid laws of political economy cannot be evaded even by the inspired," then any study of his "context" must consider the specific material or economic pressures affecting those writers who signify in the course of social labor. In what follows, I refer to this context as a signifying environment, primarily because other terms tend to downplay (1) the similarity between writing and other forms of work; and (2) the antagonistic relation between commercial writers and the various embodiments of capital in the publishing industry and the expanding U.S. economy.2 These embodiments of capital include printing machinery, transportation networks, commercial information, technical data, and even that grist for intellectual labor which Poe calls "thinking material." In order to understand the rich interplay between antebellum history and the creations of an ostensibly separate imagination, it is therefore necessary to begin with a crude and scandalous conjecture, namely that from the standpoint of the commercial writer, nothing is more intimate than production.Such an...

Poe’s Myth of Self: A Structural Barthesian Reading on “The Black Cat” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

“…Therefore, it is not surprising that Poe, an economically dominated subject, would criticize the dominating subjects (especially the Jacksonian politicians). On this issue, many researchers such as Whalen (1992), Harris (2000), Beuka (2002), andFaherty (2005) have concluded so. Each of them analyzes different Poe's texts to come up with varied characteristics of his stance towards the 1840s United States political economy; but almost all suggest that Poe conceived himself as a fallen white aristocratin other words, Poe had, so did the majority of Southerners of the period, a conflicting stance towards slavery and Orientalism (see also Haspell, 2012: Lee, 2003Schueller, 1995).…”