For most of the twentieth century, the predominant view of Edgar Allan
Poe held him to be a passionate aesthete with little interest in the political
and social issues of his time. However, in recent years, there have been
numerous scholarly efforts to place Poe back into his cultural milieu and
to illustrate that rather than an apolitical romantic Poe was indeed a man
very much engaged in the major debates of his day. Much of this attempt
to historicize Poe has focused on the issue of slavery and has reconstructed
Poe as a typical antebellum Southerner, possessing aristocratic pretensions,
racist opinions, and an overwhelming – though perhaps
subconscious – fear of slaves and their potential for uprising.For a sampling of recent studies that address Poe, the South, and slavery, see Richard
Gray, ‘ “I am a Virginian’: Edgar Allan Poe and the South,” in Edgar Allan Poe: The
Design of Order, ed. A. Robert Lee (London: Vision, 1987), 182–201; Louis Rubin, The
Edge of the Swamp: A Study of Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1989); John Carlos Rowe, “Poe, Antebellum Slavery,
and Modern Criticism,” in Poe's Pym: Critical Explorations, ed. Richard Kopley
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 117–41; Joan Dayan, “Romance and Race,”
in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1991), 89–109; Dana Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading
‘Race’ in American Literature, 1638–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992);
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Scott
Bradfield, Dreaming Revolution: Transgression in the Development of American Romance
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993) ; James Livingston, “Subjectivity and
Slavery in Poe's Autobiography of Ambitious Love,” Psychohistory Review, 21 (1993):
175–96; Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American
Literature, 66 (1994): 239–73; Sam Worley, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and
the Ideology of Slavery,” ESQ, 40 (1994): 219–50; David Leverenz, “Poe and Gentry
Virginia,” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, eds. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen
Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 210–37; Teresa Goddu,
Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997); Nancy Harrowitz, “Criminality and Poe's Orangutan: The Question of Race in
Detection,” in Agonistics: Arenas of Creative Conflict, eds. Janet Lungstrum and
Elizabeth Sauer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 177–95; Jared
Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Lesley Ginsberg, “Slavery
and the Gothic Horror of Poe's ‘The Black cat,’ ” in American Gothic: New Interventions
in a National Narrative, eds. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 1998), 99–128. Recently, Terence Whalen has challenged many of the
assertions of these critics in Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of
Literature in Antebellum American (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
This body of work has convincingly illustrated the connections between Poe's often
ignored views on slavery and fictional works such as The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black cat,”
and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” One of Poe's
final stories, “Hop-Frog” (1849), a tale of an abused dwarf's violent
revenge upon his cruel master, would certainly lend itself to an
examination of the author's views on slavery but has never been fruitfully
employed in this discussion apart from being briefly mentioned in larger
discussions of Poe and slavery by Harry Levin, Louis Rubin, and, most
recently, Joan Dayan, who has argued that “Hop-Frog,” Poe's “most
horrible tale of retribution,” is his “envisioned revenge for the national
sin of slavery.”Dayan, “Amorous Ladies,” 258. See also Dayan, “Romance and Race,” 103–04;
Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1957),
122; and Rubin, The Edge of the Swamp, 183–89.
