'These Days of Double Dealing': The Reception and Remaking of Poe's Fiction in the Antebellum U.S.

James L. Machor

Although most readers today think of Poe's fiction as dominated by gothic tales of mystery and horror, Poe's contemporaries viewed him before 1840 as a writer of satirical stories and whimsical burlesques. But within seven years of "Metzengerstein," his first published story in 1832, Poe was being read as a writer of serious, troubling, and what were sometimes seen as dangerous tales of "Germanic mysticism"--what we today call the "gothic." What caused this change in the antebellum response to Poe's fiction?

It would be tempting, and all too easy, to say simply that Poe began writing different kinds of tales in the late 1830s, so that the comic "Decided Loss," "The Visionary," and "Lionizing" gave way to the somber and eerie "Ligeia," "Fall of the House of Usher," and "William Wilson." But the problem with such a formalist explanation is that it will not hold in light of both antebellum and twentieth-century commentary on Poe's tales. By 1840, and particularly with in response to Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, antebellum American reviewers were reading as Germanic the very tales that they had treated as comedic before 1838. Numerous twentieth-century Poe critics have designated such early works as "Metzengerstein," "Berenice," and "Morella" as straight gothic tales, while others have argued that many, if not all, of Poe's stories are comic pieces. The status of Poe's fictions, that is, does not exist apart from the ways they are read--or more accurately, apart from the ways they have been read in a changing history that includes the reconceptualization of his tales from 1838 to 1842.

This historically specific shift in Poe's antebellum reception needs to be considered in relation to developments that go beyond the stories themselves. One factor involved a growing audience perception, after his stint of the Southern Literary Messenger, of Poe as a critic whose fictions should be interpreted as characteristic products of a caustic, devastatingly serious, and even at times brooding writer. Important as well were economic and political developments that caused public reading practices in the U.S. to be marked by attention to and even suspicion of anything in fiction smacking of "foreign" and "corrupting" influences--a shift that caused elements previously seen as comic to be read as tokens of an overpowering Germanic darkness.

Poe reacted to this change in the reception of his short stories with strong ambivalence. On the one hand, given his emphasis on audience effect and on the writer's need to control the very soul of the reader, such responses seemed a verification of his desire for artistic power over the reading experience. On the other hand, this shift in responses signaled the recalcitrance of an audience that refused to give Poe final authority over the status and meanings of his texts.