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Gothic Passages Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic By JUSTIN D. EDWARDS University of Iowa Press Copyright © 2003 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-87745-824-1 Chapter One Hybrid Bodies and Gothic Narratives in Poe's Pym
In her insightful analysis of "gothic America," Teresa Goddu calls attention to Poe's comments on the black banditti in one of Monk Lewis's plays (73). After questioning Monk about why he introduced black characters into a region where "black people were quite unknown," Poe is told that "blacks would have more effect" on the audience of the drama (qtd. in Goddu 73). Lewis was, of course, preaching to the converted: Poe had been playing with images of blackness and whiteness since the onset of his literary career. But Poe's invoking blackness in such stories as "The Black Cat" (1843) and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) becomes more than a mere formal device; it forces the reader to confront the gothic color of slavery. Images of blackness and whiteness are thus effective sources of gothic production that are matched only by depictions of an unstable color line whereby the border separating black from white is not policed or strictly enforced. In this chapter, then, I shall argue that behind the gothic veil of Poe's Pym-with its decaying bodies, bloody violence, and anthropophogy-are negotiations of antebellum racial discourses, negotiations that attempt to chart a course between dichotomies in order to call attention to the anxieties of potential bloody conflicts between blacks and whites, slaves and masters. Written at a time when the institution of slavery was vulnerable and being threatened by both white and black Americans, Pym can be read as an investigation of the peculiar attitudes to racial difference and hierarchies within the context of contemporary discourses in the popular field of racial "science."
Racial "Science"
Pym reproduces the typical gothic conflict between defenseless victims and abusive tyrants within a racialized framework, endeavoring to capture American anxieties concerning racial uprisings as it deconstructs racial patterns through the exploration of a space between blackness and whiteness. Representing "hybrid" bodies, for instance, was a way for Poe to both recognize and respond to the ongoing instability of the master-slave dynamic. While racism haunts much of Poe's work, and Pym certainly contains racist discourses and bigoted expressions, the novel also tries to make sense of antebellum racial conflicts, while it repeatedly deconstructs racial essentialism. Such deconstructions sought to overcome the pitting of black against white at a time when David Walker's Appeal (1830) and Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion were foremost in the consciousness of many Virginians. And Poe's Pym, haunted by the bloody images of a symbolic slave uprising in the form of a mutiny, turns to hybridized bodies-both physical and textual-to address the anxieties engendered by the revolutionary principles put forth by slaves such as Walker and Turner.
The fear of slave rebellions-fueled by the Virginia slave uprising in the summer of 1800-inspired arguments for the expulsion of blacks and the establishment of a white man's country (Jordan 542). As early as 1801, Virginia politician George Tucker suggested that the "race question" in Virginia was "an eating sore" that was rapidly infecting the body of the state and impeding the "progress of humanity" (33). He proposed suppressing the specter of slave rebellions by sending blacks to Africa, the West Indies, or even to the unsettled western lands of the United States. Virginia's debate over colonization was furthered by what Tucker called a "spirit we have to fear," a spirit of unrest that could wake the state with violent attacks; the only answer to this unrest was black removal (34). The debate continued during the early nineteenth century; in 1820, for instance, the Virginia proposition for expatriation was put forward by James Madison. He argued that free blacks should be forced to leave the United States, for "the repugnance of the Whites to their continuance among them is founded on ... physical distinctions, which are not likely soon if ever to be eradicated" (76). Likewise, in 1826 Thomas Jefferson reiterated his belief in the colonization of blacks by stating: "I consider expatriation [of blacks] to the governments ... of their own color as entirely practicable, and greatly preferable to the mixture of color here. To this I have a great aversion" (137). And a 1786 Virginia bill drafted by Jefferson actually proclaimed that "a marriage between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a mulatto, shall be null" (557). Such comments seem odd in light of the recent DNA evidence supporting Jefferson's intimate relationship with Sally Hemings, his slave and mistress, but his aversion to intermarriage and intermixture was shared by many of his contemporaries. The fear of miscegenation became a strong argument in favor of black removal; it was thought that racial mixing would mean a corruption of American "whiteness" and the loss of an "original" American identity. For instance, William L. Smith, a South Carolina politician, asserted that "a mixture of the races would degenerate the whites, without improving the blacks.... If they would intermarry with the whites, then the white race would be extinct, and the American people would be a mulatto breed" (qtd. in Jordan 544). Smith was claiming that white America would lose its "true" identity and disappear.
Such fears were partly fueled by stories of "black erasure," such as the one recounted in 1798 in the Weekly Magazine of Harry Moss's transformation from black to white (qtd. in Gardner 461). The anonymous author pieced together the "facts" about Moss's miraculous transformation from articles published a decade earlier. Jared Gardner notes that Moss's case was well known during the early nineteenth century: born a slave in the 1760s, Moss "began to develop white spots on his body and by 1795 he was entirely 'white'" (Gardner 460). Early American racial theorists used Moss's conversion to argue against racial mixture, fearing that the case of racial ambiguity arose out of an "unnatural" mix of white, Native American, and black blood. But the Weekly Magazine article uses Moss's transformation to argue against the evils of slavery. "The lines dividing the black from the white are not regularly defined," the author states, "and the change from white to black must be as equally possible with the reverse above stated, it may be well for the white slave dealers ... to consider ... [that] they may ultimately be doomed to the wretchedness, to which they are now devoting millions" (110-11). Here, Moss's story generates abolitionist sentiment by relying on the fear of whites' losing their racial identity and being plunged into the horrors of slavery. Charles Brockden Brown realized the gothic potential of this case when his Monthly Magazine (1800) published a similar article titled "Another Instance of a Negro Turning White." The anonymous author of this piece states that "the change of color which Harry Moss has, within a few years, undergone, from black to white" has happened to another African American "in the town of North Hempstead" where he has transformed "not to the dead white of the Albinos, but is a good wholesome carnation hue.... How additionally singular it would be, if instances of the spontaneous disappearance of this stable mark of distinction between slaves and their masters were to become frequent!" (qtd. in Gardner 460). Gothic discourses are put forth here asserting that this slave did not transform into the "unnatural" albino, but he assumed a so-called healthy color. The whiteness of the albino, that is, would have repeated a visual marker of difference that was lost in the fading of his "blackness." But when a slave becomes indistinguishable from his master, a gothic fear is generated through the image of trespassers who can move freely over the borders separating blackness from whiteness.
The retention of physiognomic identity and the fears of losing "true Americanness" were central to the early and mid nineteenth-century American discourses of miscegenation and hybridity. So-called evidence that the races should be kept separate, coupled with antebellum views on interracial sexuality, are outlined in Samuel George Morton's Crania Americana (1839). Here, Morton presented his scientific view of polygenesis, claiming that blacks and whites, because of the relative size of their brains, belonged not to different races but to different species; he therefore called the products of interbreeding between races "hybrids" (260). For Morton, hybrids were inferior in that they lacked fertility and suffered from more sickness and disease than a product of pure racial stock, an absurd theory that exposes his anxiety concerning interbreeding as well as his profound desire to protect white purity (261). Morton, like Poe, thus borrowed from early nineteenth-century travel literature by Browne, Hawkins, Caillet, and others to argue that the two species were naturally repelled by each other. Africans, he claimed, had a "natural repugnance" for non-Africans similar to that of whites for Africans (115). Morton's text had a profound impact on Josiah Nott's 1843 essay, "The Mulatto a Hybrid-Probable Extermination of the Two Races if Whites and Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry," a pseudoscientific attempt at laying the groundwork for "the designation of species and the laws of hybridity" (252). This work was furthered by John Campbell, who published Negro-Mania: Being an Examination of the Falsely Assumed Equality of the Various Races of Men in 1851. Here, Campbell derides theories of monogenesis and exposes a defensiveness about slavery by turning to cultural and biological arguments in support of polygenesis. Campbell's cultural argument denied the historical existence of a black civilization. Because one had never existed, he claimed, the black race was decidedly inferior to that of the white (58-65). Moreover, Campbell turned to a biological question by asking whether the hybrid offspring of unions between whites and blacks would be fertile. If not, Campbell claimed, this would be proof that blacks and whites were of different species and thus should never marry (146-50).
The debates about hybridity during the 1830s-debates that continued to rage into the postbellum period-all maintained the uncomplicated racial divisions of blacks from whites by arguing that racial mixture was "unnatural." This marked separation, placing blacks and whites in mutually exclusive categories, became the dominant theoretical model not only in the United States, but throughout much of the Western world (Robert Young 124). In America, then, degrees of difference between the races became discrete, constructing a racial schema that placed all nonwhite races in a general category, setting them apart from white Americans. Morton, Nott, and Campbell thus used these discrete racial categories to suggest that nonwhites constituted a different species. This model of absolute difference, with whites providing the norm from which all others could be regarded as deviations, served as proof that interracial sexual activity was a "crime against nature" (Campbell 149). People of mixed races, as a result, crossed a boundary that marked them as deviants; in turn, this boundary had to be policed with exceptional care. Nineteenth-century racial theories were significant in that they justified slavery within a nation that proclaimed the equality of all men. By marking the constitutive difference of the races, these "scientists" could claim that nonwhites were of a lower species and not "properly human," thus precluding them from constitutional equality (Nott 255).
The policing of miscegenation arose from a terror of hybridity. Nott's intense anxiety is signaled, for instance, when he claims that the mixing of races would result in the merger of two distinct species and cause the United States to degenerate not only culturally but also physically (253). This imagined decay of the national body inspired antebellum legislators to pass state laws outlawing sex between races (Beth Day 12). Such laws were developed by the American body politic in response to the general anxiety that degeneration of Caucasian stock in the United States through miscegenation would eventually result in the death of the white race. Furthermore, the gothic discourses of death, impurity, and genetic contamination were complicated by anxieties about racial passing. Racist theories, then, depended on a binarized racial division, implying that whites could read the racial difference inscribed on black bodies. Because hybrid bodies resisted binary categorization, the theory of visually separating whites from nonwhites faced collapse, as did the discrete racial categories theorized by Nott and Campbell. The ambiguous nature of the hybrid body thus engendered legal and cultural ruptures in the context of racial passing, threatening to disrupt the slave's socially constructed status. Therefore, it was feared that miscegenation might result in racially ambiguous slaves who could pass for white in order to flee from bondage. It did not matter that the passing slaves' physical appearance made it obvious that their legally invisible white ancestors likely outnumbered them and that other whites would regard them as white, presumably free, people. The law and the social custom that defined the passing slaves privileged their African heritage-invisible on the surface of the body-over the obviously dominant and visible ancestry that would cause strangers to view them as white and free.
Poe turns to the subject of identities inscribed on body surfaces in the opening section of "The Man of the Crowd." Here, Poe's narrator sits in a café scrutinizing an urban mob and classifying its members according to occupation, class, and ethnicity. His gaze thus taxonomizes the urbanites based on their physical appearance: "The gamblers," he says, "are easily recognizable" due to their "swarthiness of complexion" and their "filmy dimness of eye" (110). Likewise, the "Jew peddlers" can be identified by their "hawk eyes" and "expressions of abject humility" (110). The narrator, then, identifies men of various ranks by their physical appearance, concluding that he can discern an essential physical difference between categories of people. Such physical demarcations echo the essentialism of the racial theories of Morton, Nott, and Campbell, who attempted to rank different races in terms of intelligence and to offer scientific proof of the relationship between physical appearance and essential character (O'Malley 369).
Poe's knowledge of this strain of polygenesism is signaled in his 1845 story, "Some Words with a Mummy," in which the famous Egyptologist, George Gliddon (who collaborated with Nott on Types of Mankind), is present during the resuscitation of, and conversation with, an Egyptian mummy. During the conversation, Gliddon and the others are shocked to hear that nineteenth-century America has degenerated from earlier ages. The mummy, then, contradicts the learned men's social, cultural, and racial theories by suggesting that Egypt and other ancient civilizations were far more advanced than the United States, thus throwing the scientists' theories of teleology, evolution, and modernity into question. More interesting, though, is that this tale raises intriguing questions about attitudes on race, for it challenges separate race origins. Although the text does not resolve the issue of polygenesis, it leaves open the possibility that "civilization" arose from dark rather than light-skinned Egyptians, a possibility that Gliddon had worked hard to contradict (Nelson, "Haunting" 516).
Black or White?
Similar questions are addressed when Poe turns to the depiction of racial hierarchies during Pym's adventures. When Pym arrives on the island of Tsalal, for instance, he discovers that racial distinctions are used to structure the landscape and its inhabitants. Reminiscent of Poe's Virginia, Tsalal is presented through narrative devices that frame black and white images as contrasts that never merge. In fact, on the island there are "no light-colored substances of any kind," and on seeing the white crew of the Jane Guy, the natives "recoil" in disgust, fear, and horror (185, 189). As a result, "natural" racial divisions are normalized as mutually exclusive categories which, in turn, work to justify racial politics based on segregation.
The narrator's initial (incorrect) assumption of absolute racial separation on Tsalal might be read as a utopian vision of antebellum America, a place free from the threats posed by hybridity. Within this bipolarized system, there is no terror of bloody slave revolts, no trepidation regarding racial passing, and no fears of miscegenation; the "natural" black and white divisions cannot be transgressed. Such an imagined space where racial difference is accepted and cannot be misread calms the threats to and the anxieties of American slave owners at a time when bloody slave revolts are foremost in their minds.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gothic Passages by JUSTIN D. EDWARDS Copyright © 2003 by University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission.
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