Amy C. Branam
In his preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Poe writes: “I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.”1 By refusing to acknowledge the Gothic as belonging to only one place, he legitimized the use of the Gothic by an American. Poe was adamant that the Gothic was the property of all humankind, and he had no qualms about appropriating this genre and its conventions for his own writing. Moreover, this declaration at once illustrates the Gothic’s duality: as a locale and a universal condition. This duality implies that the genre operates in such a way that it can appear to discuss a specific time and place while it also engages the time and place of its audience. In recent Poe scholarship, Poe’s articulation of universality through the particular is receiving increased attention. For instance, in Poe’s Children: Connections between Tales of Terror and Detection, Tony Magistrale and Sidney Poger assert, “it seems impossible not to read Poe as somehow commenting upon his epoch, even when the writer appears most disengaged from American culture.”2 As this pronouncement suggests, Poe scholars are shifting from viewing Poe’s works apart from their historical contexts to interrogations of how his works reflect content directly related to American historical moments.3 This change in method is significant because it allows for apparently anomalous works, such as Poe’s verse drama Politian, to realize more import than in past critical assessments. For instance, until the 1990s, scholars had focused almost exclusively on the play’s literary merits and its potential literary and historical origins.4 However, in 2002, Jeffrey H. Richards’s article, “Poe, Politian, and the Drama of Critique,” finally engaged the play as a work of its time within the dramatic tradition rather than the literary tradition.5 By discussing this work as a play for early nineteenth-century America, Richards opened the discussion for contextualizing this work in relation to the dramatic sphere. In 2007, in “Politian’s Significance for Early American Drama,” I also argued for the play’s reading within a historical context; however, unlike Richards, I elaborated on how this work demonstrates a sincere engagement with its time as opposed to the burlesque of contemporary theatrical techniques and content posited by Richards.6
Even though American drama began to evolve into a distinctive national form, during the early 1800s, the older, European dramatic forms persisted, such as the sentimental drama, melodrama, and the Gothic drama.7 In terms of the Gothic in particular, it facilitated “the exercise, release, and containment of personal and social anxieties.”8 By looking at Poe’s drama within its theatrical context, as well as in conjunction with his sociohistorical position in American history, this article investigates Poe’s Gothicism via his verse drama, Politian.9 Not only does this play conform to many of the conventions of Gothic drama but it also engages sociopolitical issues common to the genre, including anxieties regarding power and identity.10 Moreover, as the Gothic often displaces contemporary places to a distant locale and previous era, this argument also establishes how Poe’s setting is superficially Renaissance Italy, yet it covertly addresses antebellum Virginia anxieties. Through isolating these concerns, the play can be understood more clearly in relation to Poe’s philosophy of the Gothic, as well as within an American Gothic tradition.
In “‘Gothic’ and the Critical Idiom” Maurice Levy asserts: “The naturalization of [‘gothic’] in a country with no medieval past and whose fiction owes more to Indian folklore than to European legends does not convince me.”11 The “country” to which he refers is America, and he objects to classifying any American writer as a Gothic writer because he believes that the term possesses “many specific connotations” that prohibit its applicability to American literature.12 To apply this term to a nation that did not experience the first Gothic revival or the political turmoil under Georgian rule seems ludicrous to Levy.13 However, he maintains that Poe is a Gothic writer in “Edgar Poe et la tradition ‘gothique.’”14 Levy avoids contradicting his argument in the “Critical Idiom” by asserting that Poe’s Gothic aligns with traditional English and European Gothic conventions rather than the variation known as the American Gothic. He recognizes that Poe utilizes concrete Gothic imagery, such as the castle, underground labyrinths, and even the Inquisition. Although Poe is an American, Levy claims that Poe actually belongs in the European Gothic tradition due to Poe’s decisions to situate most of his Gothic tales in England, Germany, or some other European clime.
In contrast to Levy’s definition, European Gothic and American Gothic appear to be quite similar when the term is evoked to signify an understanding of the fear of living under a tyrant in an enlightened age. Since the Gothic’s anxiety stems from the question of legitimacy, the nascent American government and the haunting by its English past parallel the European Gothic tradition.15 Ultimately, the main ideological difference between European Gothic and American Gothic is negligible. Like English doubts regarding whether the country truly followed a path to realize sociopolitical improvement, American Gothic engaged the same notion. As Teresa Goddu notes, it often presented “a nightmarish vision of the American experiment gone awry.”16 According to David Reynolds, American Gothic “was . . . bent perversely on dismantling the complacencies of ideological investments in human perfectibility through tales of the perverse,” and this approach “was a kind of political engagement rather than escapist storytelling.”17 In a sense, the American Gothic confronted the question of what if: what if the American experiment claimed casualties? In “Nineteenth-Century American Gothic,” Allan Lloyd-Smith traces the evolution of these casualties from the settlers’ decimation of the Native Americans through to the growing reliance on the slave system to support the American economy.18 The apprehension regarding whether these acts could indeed be legitimized became increasingly exacerbated as the nation moved closer to civil war and the American government continued to persecute the Native Americans.
These oppressive tactics on the path to nation building align the American Gothic with the European in that both address issues of power and identity. However, America may claim an additional layer of anxiety: the additional urgency to avoid reinventing Old World tyranny highlighted in its nation-building rhetoric. The burgeoning country confronted many challenges to its utopia, including concerns regarding miscegenation, class relations, and the realization of democratic ideals (particularly for slaves and women), which contributed to a generalized fear that this new society would degenerate. These proofs against America’s idealized conceptions constitute uniquely American anxieties. America’s self-conscious identity formation as a nation in which all men “are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” was at stake.19
By the time Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) appeared in England, the controversy over the monarchy had already emerged.20 As E. J. Clery and Robert Miles note, “from the seventeenth century onwards, British historians, legal commentators and political philosophers showed a deep interest in the historical role of Germanic tribes.”21 This scholarship resulted in the association of the Gothic with England’s Saxon past. These historians believed that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was not merely an uprising of the people but also a sanctioned event under the dictates of a pre-Norman Conquest constitution. Rather than claim that the ruler has a right to the throne through inheritance, the Saxon constitution bases the selection of a leader on the choice of the people.22 This concept of government especially appealed to the populace under the reign of George III. “Before his illness,” Backscheider asserts, “George III had first been in opposition to his own ministers, including the popular Pitt-Newcastle ‘broad-bottom’ coalition, and had then been the object of resolutions passed in Parliament condemning the increase in his exercise of power.”23 Eventually, the tyranny of George III’s rule led to the American Revolution. The affinity of the American cause with this Gothic tenant was instrumental in the justification for the war against the crown. Because the British subjects in colonial America remained part of the political party system of Britain, they were just as involved in these debates as the subjects who remained in England. The Whigs tended to rely on the premise that the common man had inalienable rights that the monarch had no right upon which to infringe. In the wake of the American Revolution, the Whig party laid the foundation for American politics. In Demophilius’s The Genuine Principles of the Ancient Saxons, or English Constitution (1776), an American colonist outlines the fundamental principles for the American constitution. He also distinguishes between pre-Norman versus post-Norman rule. The writer alleges: “The [pre-Norman is] founded upon the principles of liberty, and the [post-Norman] upon the principles of slavery.”24 As this treatise indicates, the Gothic’s preoccupation with power relations is not only exclusive to an English cultural memory but also to colonial and postcolonial American memories.
Set in sixteenth-century Rome, Politian begins with the appearance of two servants discussing the “untimely revels” of their master’s son, Castiglione Di Broglio (249).25 In addition to his inebriation, the audience learns that he has seduced his father’s orphan ward, Lalage. In the first scene, three servants discuss the unhappy fate of Lalage. Then, the second scene cuts to Castiglione and his friend San Ozzo finishing a night of festivities; however, the focus remains on the plight of Lalage. Feeling guilty about his treatment of Lalage, Castiglione begins to regret how he seduced and abandoned her. Through his antics, San Ozzo convinces Castiglione to think no more of the affair—at least for the moment. Also, during this scene, the audience discovers that Castiglione’s father, the Duke, has confined Lalage to a room in the castle. As the play progresses, an English Earl by the name of Politian arrives at the Duke’s palazzo with his companion, Baldazzar. These men learn that Castiglione is preparing for his nuptials with his cousin, Alessandra. That very same evening Politian hears a woman singing a sorrowful, English song and discovers the forlorn Lalage at her window. He falls in love with her immediately and commits himself to her wholeheartedly in spite of her liaison with Castiglione. Lalage accepts Politian’s pledge on the apparent condition that he kills Castiglione. Politian accepts these terms because of Castiglione’s egregious injury against her. When the drama concludes, Lalage finds Politian in the Coliseum and relays to him that Castiglione is marrying Alessandra at that moment. The last action of the play is Lalage’s farewell to Politian as he departs to confront Castiglione at the altar.26
Poe’s Politian presents the quasi-medieval world of late fifteenth- to early sixteenth-century Rome, but, in actuality, it alludes to issues confronting the American South. These issues include the vilification of the Southern plantation owner who did not engage in the proper treatment of slaves, orphans, and women. Slavery and plantation life were linked inextricably. Imprisonment, chains, and torture—all elements of the Gothic—mirrored the ideas many persons held about how the slaves were abused in the American South. As Teresa Goddu notes in Gothic America, these abuses often were appropriated by American Gothic writers to be utilized as writing conventions.27 Poe consciously exploited the tensions between the North and the South, knowing that his readers were often Northerners who hungered for stories that presented imagined horrors of plantation life. Even today, his exact position on slavery remains elusive. Though Poe did own a slave for a brief time, David Reynolds asserts that Poe “retained deep, if rather oblique and ambivalent connections to the most urgent and vexed question of his day.”28 Fiedler attributes this apathy to Poe’s “aristocratic pretensions.”29 He believes that Poe lacked “the equivocations and soul-searching demanded of such liberal gothicists as the young Brockden Brown.”30 Goddu believes that he not only equivocates on the question but that he also uses “the conventions deployed by pro- and anti-slavery proponents alike to sell his own tales.”31 Poe’s primary interest did not appear to be to sympathize with marginalized peoples, such as American Indians, slaves, and women. On the contrary, his lack of sympathy allowed for his use of these sensationalized scenes of oppression to further his literary career. This indifference further explains how Poe could treat such issues as feminism and racism with irreverent, albeit dark, humor in such tales as “Hop Frog” and “How to Write a Blackwood Article.”32
The character of Lalage exhibits the affinity between the titillation of the Gothic and the sensationalism of slave depictions. The plight of the persecuted heroine parallels the experience of the slave. Because the plantation owner tried to paint himself as the caretaker of these allegedly childlike beings, the idea that a father would treat his “children” with such violence affected readers in much the same way as a guardian in the Gothic transgressing his duties. A slave master could beat his male slaves and rape the females, often producing mulattos, that is, the literal slave-child paradigm. From a Northern perspective, one imagined that, if the slave master could perpetrate these atrocities, very little could prohibitone of these men from pursuing his ward if he so desired. Poe adds an additional complication in the play in that Lalage is a fallen woman. The American South viewed infidelity as a grave matter. The preservation of the family line could not be risked by the female’s proclivity to cuckold her husband. This outlook is promoted by the drama of this period. Traditionally, the heroine was to “embody sensibility, often in its purest, most idealistic form.”33 When she does signify these traits, she has a much greater chance of “bring[ing] out the latent benevolence of the protagonist.”34 Lalage has fulfilled this role before the play opens; however, her purity has suffered an irrecoverable blow at the play’s commencement. Castiglione equates her beauty with her character when he initially defends her against San Ozzo’s imprecations. Castiglione confesses: “If ever a woman fell / With an excuse for falling it was she! / If ever plighted vows most sacredly / Solemnly sworn perfidiously broken / Will damn a man, that damned villain am I! / Young, ardent, beautiful, and loving well / And pure as beautiful” (254, emphasis mine).
However, this beauty proves not to be pure but vulnerable. For this reason, Poe’s play shows that his heroine cannot escape punishment entirely for her failure to protect her chastity. Depicting a mad character eventually will become one of Poe’s hallmarks, although Lalage’s madness is distinct from the many mad male narrators to follow. Many male Gothic writers created mad female characters. According to Backscheider this occurs “at points of action when heroines might have asserted themselves and attempted to assume control or might have submitted to some dishonorable action: the device, thus, serves to remove responsibility for immoral, ‘unfeminine,’ or effective action.”35 This maneuver allows the female character to fluctuate between a desire to repent and to seek revenge on the villain who reduced her to this abominable state. Because Lalage engages in premarital sex, she must die. Or does she? She references the “early grave untimely yawning” because this is how society expects a fallen woman to repent (263). Simultaneously, though, Poe depicts a woman who, on some level, cannot accept that she is solely accountable for her fall. These conflicting responses result in her competing desires for repentance, a gradual death by debilitating remorse, and the death of Castiglione. This internal strife leads to her descent into madness. Poe conveys the process of degeneration, which leads Lalage to conspire in the commission of unlawful actions. Moreover, he accomplishes a pseudo-pardon through the introduction of a hero who sympathizes with her. By taking this measure, he prevents his audience from distancing themselves from his main female character. In effect, through the paternalistic championship of her cause, Politian exculpates Lalage from any guilt because his status as a nobleman signals that her indignation is righteous. Politian’s support and Lalage’s madness eschew a demand from the audience to hold her accountable for her revenge impulse. Rather, these two conditions provide Lalage with a double absolution.
At the very beginning Lalage appears sane, although understandably distressed. She takes solace from reading about other women who have been betrayed by lovers and were “happy” enough to die. Upset from the recent death of her parents, the betrayal of her lover, and the impertinence of her servant, Lalage quickly deteriorates. Throughout the play, she is depicted as unstable. In the fourth scene, her fractured self is forecasted by the Monk, who deems her “words are madness” (264). According to Poe’s stage direction for his final scene, Lalage has entered “wildly” (287). In his characterization of Lalage, Poe exploited shifting views of insanity. Sally Shuttleworth explains that, as the nineteenth century progressed, “madness is envisaged less as an inescapable physiological destiny, than as a partial state, to which anyone under stress is liable, and which endures only so long as passion overturns reason.”36 Since the public of the 1830s believed that any person could succumb to insanity, the audiences were less likely to distance themselves from Lalage just because she became frenzied after her seduction. Her reaction, when viewed within the context of the early nineteenth-century mentality that a fallen woman had destroyed her future prospects, would receive more audience sympathy than if the same situation would have occurred even ten years prior due to these new attitudes toward madness.
In addition to changing views on insanity, Poe’s drama tapped into two significant cultural views regarding seduction: the emergence of reform movements and the Southern sense of chivalry. In New York in particular, the mission of a women’s group called the Female Moral Reform Society was to ostracize “the most guilty of the two—the deliberate destroyer of female innocence.”37 Because many seduced women became prostitutes, these reform societies not only wanted to aid prostitutes but also deter the seductions. One of their most successful tactics was the public disclosure of the names of men who were known to have committed such egregious offenses. A couple of months before Poe began to compose his play this group began to circulate The Advocate, which printed these lists. Although these reform societies were composed predominantly of women, Rosenberg describes an incident in which an all-male group of female reformists suggested that, now that they had taken up the cause, the women could disband. In response, however, the women asserted that this “was decidedly a woman’s not a man’s issue.”38 Rather than kowtow to this paternalistic attitude, these women decided to insist on the opposite extreme: foregoing male assistance altogether. However, Poe’s play retains this paternalism. Poe’s Politian protects Lalage. Men, especially Southern gentlemen, often felt that they needed to stand up for women; many engaged in dueling to effect just this.39 Rather than allow women to protect themselves or seek their own recompense through the courts, men continued to fight for women’s honor. Like a deus ex machina, Politian appears at just the right moment to avenge Lalage.
Politian’s intervention ensures the violent return of the repressed. Although society generally sanctioned repentance and death for fallen women, the American Gothic opened a space to expose the ferocity with which society clung to this “nostalgia.” As Eric Savoy explains, this nostalgia is “a will to sustained cultural coherence.”40 In this case, that coherence relates to the idea that women should repent their falls. However, as Lalage’s actions portend in the wake of her jilting, an alternative story contends with society’s expectations. Whereas most fallen women might quietly disappear for propriety’s sake, Lalage, like most Poe women, refuses to stay entombed. Her active empowerment may mark her as “wild,” yet her aggressive return is both a hallmark of Poe’s women and American Gothic. As one of Poe’s tropes, this “return of what is unsuccessfully repressed” is the secret of aristocratic debauchery.41
If England possessed the medieval remnants of castles and Italy its palazzos, the American South paralleled these magnificent structures with its plantation houses. Indeed, many of these homes were fashioned after the Gothic and Palladian styles. In addition to architecture, the cultures’ patriarchal value systems also coincided. The Southern gentleman, like the English and Italian aristocrat, was expected to live according to certain moral codes. One of these codes directed citizens on how to dispense with a dead relation’s child. In these instances, the Southern gentleman did not hesitate to offer his home and raise this child with (and as) his own.42 Priding themselves on self-education in the classics, Latin, and Greek, many Southern men looked to these civilizations as models for what to instill in their children. This included teaching females how to be respectable. For instance, in a letter to his niece, a Southern patriarch instructs: “Propriety is to a woman what the great Roman critic says action is to an Orator: it is the first, the second and the third requisite. A woman may be knowing, active, witty and amusing; but without propriety she cannot be amiable. Propriety is the center in which all the lines of duty and of agreeableness meet.”43 The word “propriety” included chastity, and the Southern culture placed the onus on women to protect this quality. However, there is one important exception. When guardians seduced their female wards, the seducer was held accountable for the woman’s fall. According to Catherine Clinton, “Only if a man seduced a female ‘under his protection’ did the southern moral code shift the burden of guilt onto the male transgressor.”44 Part of the reason for this exception was the community’s desire to ensure that all persons conformed to certain expectations. If a guardian who committed such an act was left unchecked, he was perceived to have degenerated into a tyrannical, terrorizing individual, which was quite similar to the earlier “feudal lords [who] saw themselves as the law.”45 In America, this tyrant was reincarnated as the evil plantation master. In “Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’” Lesley Ginsberg argues for Poe’s deliberate use of the Gothic to depict “the peculiar psychopolitics of the master/slave relationship.”46 Due to their similar legal statuses, Ginsberg asserts that the distinctions between slaves and women were negligible. In effect, both groups thrived or suffered according to the disposition and dispensations of the master. In essence, this totalitarian mentality denied the existence of natural rights of dependents. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, the South responded quite deftly to the apparently conflicting notions of authority and how this doctrine related to the issues of women’s rights and slavery.
In Politian, Castiglione and his father embody American fears surrounding the sensationalistic image of the corrupted Southern plantation owner. Castiglione’s trespass against Lalage marks him as a prime candidate for a Gothic villain. Although he contemplates his vile behavior, he ultimately chooses to stay the course. He stresses his treachery through declarations such as, “‘tis but the headach - / The consequence of yestereve’s debauch - / Give me these qualms of conscience” (255). Castiglione defines manliness as that which does not fall into bouts of reflective melancholy. Whenever he begins to consider remorse, his friend, San Ozzo, mocks Castiglione’s worry over Lalage. He ridicules Castiglione’s potential repentance, deriding him as a “cardinal” in the making (255). In the scene that parodies the donning of ashes for atonement, Castiglione conclusively decides to forsake Lalage altogether and to continue his debaucheries of “crack[ing] a bottle” and fraternizing with the buffo-singer, which are sanctioned by the aristocracy as young, masculine activities (257). The aristocratic characters consistently promote appearances above all else. For instance, his betrothed, Alessandra, instructs Castiglione on the importance of appearances for young, aristocratic men. She critiques him, noting that his “dress and equipage” are “over plain / For thy lofty rank and fashion” (258). Castiglione also mentions the importance of honor, clearly intending the word to mean avoiding an appearance of the debasement of his line rather than being virtuous or noble in his treatment of “lowly born” women, such as Lalage (255).
Although Castiglione commits the physical transgression, Castiglione’s father, the Duke Di Broglio, possesses the power to suppress Lalage’s story through her incarceration. Through this action, he supports his son’s treacherous behavior. The audience learns in the very first scene that the Duke has not treated his ward properly. His servant, Benito, reports that the Duke “pardons his son, but is most wroth with her [Lalage] / And treats her with such marked severity / As humbles her to the dust” (249). The father originally had orchestrated an alliance between his son and Lalage, but now Lalage is a “plighted wife” (249). Her former “bosom friend,” Alessandra, is to be married to Castiglione (250). We also learn that this transfer has taken nearly a year to accomplish. During this eleven-month period, the Duke has kept Lalage confined to her apartment, or, as Benito witnesses, behind “the lattice-work / Of her chamber-window” (250) and, as San Ozzo later expresses, “secluded from society” (254). The primary motive for the Duke’s breach of promise is his perception that Lalage is destitute of wealth and titles. Moreover, she also lacks propriety in the word’s sense of conforming to society’s polite expectations regarding chastity and in the sense of without ownership, which by extension often implies protection. In contrast to Lalage, Alessandra, Castiglione’s cousin, assures an honorable marriage, which will produce a legitimate heir for the house of Di Broglio.
In addition to the Gothic images of the tyrannical master and guardian, preservation of a familial hierarchy, as well as suspicions of the Other (i.e., the North), are operative in this play. Unlike the North, the American South insisted on confining women to the domestic sphere. Whereas many Northern women began to enter the workforce as the North industrialized, Southern women instead became managers of “a complex household.”47 In addition to resisting progress in terms of women’s roles, the South also experienced a decline in its prestige. According to Ann Douglas, “The South was on the defensive, was slowly but certainly being pushed from her position of pre-eminence. Now, Charleston could admit without qualms the superiority of London, and even more readily that of ancient Athens or Rome; but the superiority of New York was a dangerous supremacy, a condition in the making rather than an accomplished—or, possibly, an admitted—fact, and a condition to be fought.”48
In the view of many Northerners, the plantation system was reminiscent of the maligned feudal pasts of England and Italy. The confrontation of the North’s and South’s respective ways of life could not be ignored, and many Southerners felt the impending loss of the region’s prestige. For example, in a review of Lucian Minor’s address advocating education in Virginia, Poe praised Minor for his forthright attempt to improve the waning lustre of Virginia. In the December 1835 issue of The Southern Literary Messenger, Poe writes:
Virginia is indebted to Mr. Minor—indebted for the seasonable application of his remarks, and doubly indebted for the brilliant eloquence, and impressive energy with which he has enforced them. We sincerely wish—nay, we even confidently hope, that words so full of warning, and at the same time so pregnant with truth, may succeed in stirring up something akin to action in the legislative halls of the land. Indeed there is no time to squander in speculation. The most lukewarm friend of the State must perceive—if he perceives any thing—that the glory of the Ancient Dominion is in a fainting—is in a dying condition. Her once great name is becoming, in the North, a bye-word for imbecility—all over the South, a type for “the things that have been.” And tamely to ponder upon times gone by is not to meet the exigencies of times present or to come. Memory will not help us. The recollection of our former high estate will not benefit us. Let us act.49
This notice appeared the same year, 1835, in which Poe wrote Politian.
Based on these rivalries between the North and South, the stage is set for Poe to transpose these competing cultures discretely yet not too obscurely onto men of differing nationalities. Poe’s substitution of an English Earl for an American hero results in a distinction of Southerners as different from Northerners, particularly in terms of class. From some vantage points, such as the Italian, this transfer is difficult to comprehend. Early nineteenth-century Italians envisioned an “American” as an aboriginal, or Native American; therefore, when Americans traveled to Italy, they were commonly assumed to be English.50 However, Americans, especially those in the North, distinguished themselves from the English due to the wars and the English’s emphasis on rank. For this reason, Poe’s use of an English nobleman as a substitute for a Southern gentleman is quite appropriate for this displacement because it emulates the genteel tradition prized by the South’s aristocracy and underscores even more the disparities between the two cultures.
The persistence of the South’s hierarchical system assumed that the higher classes possessed a higher capacity for intelligence and sensibility. In the play, Poe uses the English to achieve a two-fold purpose: (1) to align his allegiance as a Southerner with the aristocratic class symbolized by his title character and (2) to create a hierarchy that ultimately privileges the English over the Italian aristocracy, thereby also intimating that the American South is above both Italian culture and the American North as well as its prejudices. The latter result appears to be contrary to Ann Douglas’s aforementioned observation that the South already admitted inferiority to Rome, but the South’s concession in terms of an inferiority complex was not based on the system of economy. The South did not seem to equate the Southern plantation structure with Italian feudalism; therefore, the South did not view itself as inferior to Rome for this reason. In order to understand why Poe and other Southerners apparently did not recognize this parallel, the prevalence of Jefferson’s theory of agrarianism and the direct influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on this theory must be reviewed. Considering the sympathies between Lord Kames’s theory of society and Jeffersonian agrarianism, an understanding of how the South could persist in its notions of superiority becomes apparent. Agrarianism emphasized the supremacy of tillers. Not only did this theory posit farming as the best way to live but it also represented the farmer as an inherently virtuous man. The link between farming and Godliness promoted a consensus that slavery may somehow be in tune with God’s plan due to the perceived need for slaves in the tilling of the American South. This philosophy of “mutual benefits” (as Kames refers to it) through agriculture is encompassed by the American South’s economic system. Poe’s drama also emphasizes this blind spot. For example, in Lalage’s description of the New World, she describes America as a place where breathing the air is “Happiness now, and . . . Freedom hereafter” (274). Although this freedom is denied to most of the population in the South, many Southerners refused to view slavery as anything but an unequivocal good.51 Rather than view slavery as exploitative, Southerners could manipulate Kames’s and Jefferson’s ideas to rationalize this institution as peculiar, or different, and, therefore, better than the feudal system through its aggrandizement of all involved.
Italy also may have appealed to Poe because of its potential to symbolize an Other not altogether dissimilar from the American culture juxtaposed against it. Leonardo Buonomo argues that Italy attracted foreign visitors because it “functioned as a relatively accessible and not too disquieting Orient.”52 The dark-skinned people, the Catholic religion, the political system, the pastoral country, and the ruins of ancient Roman civilization provided points of contrast to America. As America industrialized, thereby gaining a reputation of wealth through capitalism, Italy, conversely, represented a land of an idyllic, rural past.53 Also, the Catholic religion fascinated Americans, who were mostly Protestant, because of Catholicism’s apparent affinity with paganism. Nowhere was this parallel more evident than Rome, a city where the statues and temples of Roman gods and goddesses commingled with religious statuary and churches. This juxtaposition gave rise to and supported notions that “at the bases of the Roman Catholic Church there is a simple disguise or adaptation of heathen customs.”54 Similar to the Orient, Italy represented a fascinating alternative to politics, religion, and life in general; however, it also functioned as a revenant civilization. Nineteenth-century Italy merely underscored the lack of greatness inherent in its present society as compared to the civilization of ancient Rome. In many periodicals of the early nineteenth century, articles argued that the fall of Rome could be attributed to the barbaric institution of feudalism, which neglected the rights of the individual. In order to avoid the same fall that Rome experienced, many Americans believed that America had to champion the dignity of the individual above all else. Americans could project their own fears concerning the limitations of American society on this former great society. This strategy was useful as a means to warn that, if America did not purge itself of the American South’s same flaws as those of the Roman civilization, it too would crumble.
However, Poe’s Italy did not function entirely as a substitute for the American South. It was also a point of contrast between the North’s view of the South and the South’s distinctions from Italy. Indeed, many of the American impressions of Italy were similar to the impressions Northerners held concerning the American South. Southerners, including Poe, could not have helped but notice the sympathies that their region shared with Rome. Both these regions experienced an awareness of their fading glory. Although the Italian High Renaissance of the late fifteenth century may have promised a great future for Italy, instead the works of Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Castiglione proved to be merely “the ‘swan song’ of late medieval Italian civilization.”55 This was even more apparent when travelers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries went to Rome in order to view its landscapes and its ruins rather than to appreciate the country’s modernity.56 Migration of the people from the rural to the urban areas of America also indicates the tendency to marginalize the non-industrialized South. Unlike its response to Italy, the North did not subscribe to nostalgic portrayals of the South as a land to be prized for its abilities to stave off “the irresistible march of technology.”57 Instead, the South’s economic system was the bane of a country that hoped to throw off the plantation system and its association with slavery. The romantic potential of the Southern plantation was largely ignored by the North until it was clearly a remnant of a past that could not resurge, that is, after its destruction via the Civil War.
To underscore differences between Italy and the South, Poe evokes one of the High Renaissance figures, Castiglione, through the name of the main character in the play. As the author of The Book of the Courtier, Castiglione’s ungentlemanly portrayal in Politian is ironic. Poe demonstrates how this great champion of courtly behavior does not necessarily privilege virtuous behavior. Castiglione lived in a nonindustrialized nation. However, an important contrast with the South is that Italy was steeped in Catholicism, which often stood for a debauched society.58 In contrast to Poe’s portrayal of the Italian Castiglione, the Southern gentleman resembled the impulses of Politian: the desire to impose moral standards, to ensure justice for those who have been wronged, and to abide by the chivalric code as a means to effect the first two impulses. The idea was that, if society conformed to these codes, it could reclaim a prelapsarian state of being. Since Italy held onto its old institutions of government, religion, and economy, its Edenic state appeared to be lost irrecoverably.
In Poe’s play, the reference to Eden provides a foil to the corrupted state of Italy. In Gothic drama, the landscapes and their rendering in set design are part of the genre’s popularity. The landscape paintings of Salvator Rosa were so popular, for example, that set designers endeavored to replicate these scenes onstage. Even Poe, who coined quite a few words, is credited with the word “Salvatorish.” He employs the term in “Landor’s Cottage” to describe the trees, implying that, like Salvator’s, they are “lofty” and sublime.59 Just as Radcliffe’s heroines find solace in the contemplation of sublime nature, Poe’s Lalage paints a vision of the New World as an Eden, as “the divine world,” which reassures the persecuted heroine that there is a “spiritual power counteracting the forces of evil.”60 In contrast, “the Gothic world” is depicted “as a postlapsarian one that presents us with a powerful echo of the lost Eden, a physical and psychological wilderness that threatens virtually everyone and in which no one can be trusted to be what one appears or claims to be.”61 In Poe’s play, Italy’s postlapsarian status is underscored by the presence of “a spectral figure” in the garden of the palace (274). Similarly, Lalage’s description of the New World leads the reader to draw the parallels between the promise of America as a paradise and its current, corrupted state. She waxes:
A fairy land of flowers, and fruit, and sunshine,
And crystal lakes, and over-arching forest,
And mountains, around whose towering summits the winds
Of Heaven untrammeled flow. (274)
Obviously, in the mid-1830s, the American North and its industrialized cities resembled this paradise much less than the expansive, natural beauty of the American South and its agrarian economy.
These doublings and redoublings in Poe’s play are significant in that the use of Italy appears to obfuscate Poe’s allegory. He at once tackles the issues of what it means to be a gentleman and who best embodies such qualities. In the process, a pressure arises for his audience to connect the metonymical Castiglione and Politian to the peoples each figure symbolizes. These correspondences are not simply to Italians and English, respectively. Rather, Politian, who appears as an Englishman, incarnates Southern ideals of the gentleman, including a defender of a lady’s reputation. The English hero represents the South’s idyllic view of its social codes, including its paternalistic, deferential culture. In contrast, the use of Italy as a stand-in for the North’s perceptions of the South allows Poe to exploit tropes concerning tyranny. This approach also scratches at the South’s anxieties regarding just how legitimate those Northern perceptions may be. In effect, the hero attempts to redeem the South’s image through his noble-minded actions. However, he is haunted by “an imp” that he cannot shake (267). What is this imp that threatens to extinguish his life? Politian only identifies it as “that nature / Which from my forefathers I did inherit, / Which with my mother’s milk I did imbibe” (268). Politian seeks an act of substance. As he confides to Baldazaar, “I am sick, sick, sick, even unto death, / Of the hollow and high-sounding vanities / Of the populous Earth!” (268). This hero may be a melancholic, yet his “imp” signifies a repression that he will not articulate to himself or others. The zeal with which he fights against the tyranny of the di Broglios may result in his expatiation as well as Castiglione’s. However, Poe’s play never directly reveals this oppressive secret.
In Politian, the repression is not merely the local situation between a libertine male and a seduced woman. Rather the repression is a generalized anxiety that the corrupted nature of the aristocracy might be revealed. The use of Gothic conventions displaces the Southern secret of the potential tyrannical effects of unlimited power of patriarchs over women, children, and slaves.62 In addition to the sensationalism that the Gothic elicits from its readers, the Gothic also allows Poe to work through his own anxieties in terms of his marginalized status in relation to the Southern aristocracy. Poe’s strained relationship with his foster father, John Allan, as well as his existence in the shadow of his grandfather, distinguished Revolutionary War Assistant Deputy Quartermaster “General” David Poe, simultaneously brought him close to the aristocratic circles of Southern gentlemen while also holding him at bay.63 This frustration, as Ginsberg notes, continued to be exacerbated by Poe’s continued close proximity to these aristocrats in his work as an editor for T. W. White at the Southern Literary Messenger and how they directed the views, particularly on slavery, while he worked for them.64 Indeed, “Scenes from an Unpublished Drama” first appeared as a serial for this periodical in December 1835 and January 1836.65 Interestingly, the scenes that condemn Castiglione through his crass epithets against Lalage are not included in the serial version of the text. On the contrary, the five scenes selected for the magazine appearance depict Castiglione’s response to Lalage’s condition as a genuine concern about the pivotal role he has played in her present distress. This decision indicates Poe’s savvy regarding just how transparent the displacement of the setting could be and how it might potentially inflame his Southern audience’s sensibilities. Rather than present a corrupted, mainly unrepentant, aristocratic rake, Poe tempers Castiglione’s portrayal in the serial version for the Messenger’s primarily Southern audience.
In “Average Racism,” Terence Whalen argues that Poe’s position on slavery was neither “racism-positive” nor “racism-negative.”66 Instead, he constructs a meticulous case for Poe’s occupation of a more moderate position. Similarly, Politian demonstrates that Poe’s view on women’s rights also appears to be average: neither feminist nor archaic. Whereas some Poe scholars have discovered a progressive, deconstructionist representation of women in his works, Poe’s depictions reveal his greater interest in literary rather than socio-political ends.67 Poe’s potential interest in presenting a coherent, reliable message on either slavery or women’s rights is elided in favor of titillating his audience in order to sell his works. His vacillation from the traditional European Gothic’s focus on a woman transgressed and oppressed by a tyrant to the use of the transgressed and oppressed slave back to women again through parallels between slaves and women as dependents exemplifies Poe’s genius as a Gothic writer. He reinvents the same sensationalist effect of the demented patriarch wielding his absolute tyranny over those in his care. Politian is just one of the many examples in Poe’s oeuvre of this phenomenon to reveal the secrets that the characters work diligently to keep concealed in a closet, or for Poe, a tomb and locked chamber. Does this repetition indicate a proslavery and/or pro-feminist sympathy? This is indeterminate. However, what Poe does demonstrate without equivocation is that he is certainly Gothic-positive.
Politian’s veiled references to the American South show Poe’s use of a genre known for obscuring contemporary fears and issues of marginalized groups in England through displacing the concerns to a medieval past. Just like European Gothic, Poe’s Gothic displaced his society’s marginalized peoples and national anxieties in this same manner. Poe’s sophisticated, multivalent removals of the American South to a foreign locale in the medieval era caused his own misplacement by his American public and many scholars, such as Levy, who did not trace these displacements fully but mistakenly categorized Poe as a European writer. On the contrary, as Politian’s displacements show, Poe’s works prove that his allegiance exists more so with his craft than with presenting an unequivocally, pro-Southern idealization. However, even though Poe’s personal stance may appear convoluted in his works, the fact that he utilizes contemporary controversies in this play establishes a strong connection between Poe and his American consciousness as well as reaffirms the theory that Poe’s works should be read in conjunction with his historical moment.
1. Edgar Allan Poe, Preface, vol. 1 of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1840), www.eapoe.org/works/misc/tgap.htm.
2. Tony Magistrale and Sidney Poger, Poe’s Children: Connections between Tales of Terror and Detection (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 98.
3. For example, Magistrale and Poger cite examples of this shift as that from F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance to David Leverenz’s “Poe and Gentry Virginia” and Joan Dayan’s “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves” (98). Other recent examples of this trend in Poe scholarship include J. Gerald Kennedy, ed., A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg, ed., Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 141–217; Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
4. For literary merit, see contemporary reviews: Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, comps., The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849 (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1987), 186, 188, 189; Beverly Tucker, “To Poe,” in vol. 17 of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: Sproul, 1902), 22–23; David K. Jackson, “Prose Run Mad: An Early Criticism of Poe’s Politian,” in Poe and His Time: The Artist in His Milieu, ed. Benjamin Fisher (Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990), 88–93. See also later scholars, such as N. Bryllion Fagin, The Histrionic Mr. Poe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1949), 84; John Phelps Fruit, Poe’s Poetry (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 49; Daniel Hoffman, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1998), 37. For literary sources, see Karl Arndt, “Poe’s Politian and Goethe’s Mignon,” Modern Language Notes 49 (1934): 101–4; William Bryan Gates, “Poe’s Politian Again,” Modern Language Notes 49 (1934): 561; Thomas O. Mabbott, “Another Source of Poe’s Play, ‘Politian,’” Notes and Queries 194 (1949): 279; Palmer Holt, “Poe and H. N. Coleridge’s Greek Classic Poets ‘Pinakidia,’ ‘Politian,’ and ‘Morella’ Source,” American Literature 34 (1962): 8–30. For articles that link the play to the historical incident referred to as the Kentucky Beauchamp-Sharp tragedy, see William Goldhurst, “The New Revenge Tragedy: Comparative Treatments of the Beauchamp Case,” Southern Literary Journal 22 (1989): 117–27; William Kimball, “Poe‘s Politian and the Beauchamp-Sharp Tragedy,” Poe Studies 4 (1971): 24–27.
5. Jeffrey H. Richards, “Poe, Politian, and the Drama of Critique,” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 3, no. 2 (2002): 3–27.
6. Amy C. Branam, “Politian’s Significance for Early American Drama,” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 8, no. 1 (2007): 32–46.
7. In early American drama, American innovations included the integration of Native American characters, such as in John Augustus Stone’s Metamora; or the last of the Wampanoags, and also patriotic productions, such as William Dunlap’s The Glory of Columbia; her Yeomanry.
8. Paula Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 168.
9. In terms of viewing the play as Gothic, many scholars have discussed the work’s Gothicism in relation to Byron’s influence on Poe. See Fagin, The Histrionic Mr. Poe, 85–86; Katrina Bachinger, The Multi-Man Genre (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1987); Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 93; Roy P. Basler, “Byronism in Poe’s ‘To One in Paradise,’” American Literature 9 (1937): 236.
10. For further discussion on the Gothic conventions in the play, see Branam, 35–39.
11. Maurice Levy, “Gothic’ and the Critical Idiom,” in Gothick Origins and Innovation, ed. Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994), 1–15.
12. Levy, 14.
13. Levy, 4.
14. Maurice Levy,“Edgar Poe et la tradition ‘gothique,’” Caliban 5 (1968): 35–51.
15. Robert Miles, “The Gothic and Ideology,” in Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Tamara Heller (New York: MLA, 2003), 62.
16. Teresa Goddu, “Historicizing the American Gothic: Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland,” in Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction (see note 15), 186.
17. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 175.
18. Allan Lloyd-Smith, “Nineteenth-Century American Gothic,” in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000): 110.
19. Thomas Jefferson, “A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, shorter 6th ed., ed. Nina Baym (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2003), 337.
20. For a discussion of Walpole’s political affiliations, see Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 37–43.
21. E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, ed., Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 48.
22. Clery and Miles, 48.
23. Backscheider, 160.
24. Demophilius, The Genuine Principles of the Ancient Saxons, or English Constitution, 1776, in Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820 (see note 21), 225.
25. Edgar Allan Poe, Politian, in vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. T. O. Mabbot (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1969), 247–98. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and are given in parentheses in the text.
26. Many scholars presume that the play would have ended with the death of Castiglione at the hand of Politian. For example, see John H. Ingram, ‘Poe’s “Politian,”‘ The Southern Magazine, 17 (1875): 588–94.
27. Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York, Columbia University Press, 1997), 93.
28. Reynolds, 181.
29. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 2nd ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), 397.
30. Fiedler, 397.
31. Goddu, 93.
32. For further discussion, see Lloyd-Smith, 113–14.
33. Backscheider, 195.
34. Backscheider, 198.
35. Backscheider, 204.
36. Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 35.
37. Carroll Smith Rosenberg, “Beauty, the Beast and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America,” American Quarterly 23 (1971): 572.
38. Rosenberg, 579.
39. The prevalence of duels led to aggressive legislation against the practice in the early nineteenth century. See Andrew J. King, “Constructing Gender: Sexual Slander in Nineteenth-Century America,” Law and History Review 13 (1995): 63–110.
40. Eric Savoy, “A Theory of American Gothic,” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 3–19.
41. Savoy, 4. In this article, Savoy defines one of American Gothic’s characteristics as “the imperative to repetition, the return of what is unsuccessfully repressed, and, moreover, that this return is realized in a syntax, a grammar, a tropic field.”
42. Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 39.
43. Campbell qtd. in Clinton, 102.
44. Clinton, 112.
45. Backscheider, 164.
46. Lesley Ginsberg, “Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (see note 40), 99–128.
47. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 49.
48. Douglas, 151.
49. Edgar Allan Poe, “Critical Notices,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (1835): 41–68.
50. Leonardo Buonomo, Backward Glances (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 18–19.
51. For instance, in Terence Whalen, “Average Racism: Poe, Slavery, and the Wages of Literary Nationalism,” in Romancing the Shadow, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 9, he discusses Beverly Tucker’s stance on slavery as a strong belief in its moral benefit to all parties involved.
52. Buonomo, 15.
53. Buonomo, 21.
54. Buonomo, 23.
55. Theodore J. Cachey, “Italy and the Invention of America,” The New Centennial Review 2(2002): 17–31.
56. Cachey, 19.
57. Buonomo, 16.
58. Poe once commented that he did not respect any religion, although he did not mind the Jesuits because they “smoked, drank, and played cards like gentlemen, and never said a word about religion.” See Silverman, 341.
59. Edgar Allan Poe, “Landor’s Cottage,” in vol. 3 of The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. T. O. Mabbot (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1969), 1332.
60. Marshall Brown, “Philosophy and the Gothic Novel,” in Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction (see note 15), 46-57.
61. Stephen C. Behrendt, “Teaching the Gothic through the Visual Arts,” in Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction (see note 15), 66–72.
62. Ginsberg also notes that one of the South’s most common depictions in the face of abolition “was the domestic fiction of the happy slaveholding family” (105). Unfortunately, this façade is undercut not only by the instances of abuses against slaves but also by Thomas E. Buckley’s report which uncovered that the highest number of divorces filed in antebellum Virginia cited domestic violence as the impetus (107).
63. See Leland S. Person, “Poe and Nineteenth-Century Gender Constructions,” in A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 130; David Levernz, “Poe and Gentry Virginia,” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 210–36. Poe’s grandfather actually only held the rank of major, but was given the courtesy title “General” because he donated much money in support of the Revolutionary cause.
64. Ginsberg, 120–22.
65. There are three different published versions of this play: the 1835–1836 serialization in the Southern Literary Messenger; T. O. Mabbott’s 1923 authoritative edition of Poe’s manuscript version included in his The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, and the 1845 version printed in The Raven and Other Poems.
66. Whalen, 35.
67. See Cynthia S. Jordan, “Poe’s Re-Vision: The Recovery of the Second Story,” American Literature 59 (1987): 1–19; Joan Dayan, “Poe’s Women: A Feminist Poe?” Poe Studies: Dark Romanticism 26 (1993): 1–12; Marita Nadal, “‘The Death of a Beautiful Woman Is, Unquestionably, the Most Poetical Topic in the World’: Poetic and Parodic Treatment of Women in Poe’s Tales,” in Gender, I-Deology: Essays on Theory, Fiction and Film, ed. Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy, García Landa, and José Angel (Netherlands: Rodopi, 1996), 151–63.