‘I say to you that I am dead!’: Edgar Allan Poe’s Protesting Cadavers

Abstract

In his fantastical tales, Edgar Allan Poe employs scientific and medical experiments as narrative devices to voice anxieties of White male civic fragility. For Poe, the dying and dead body, in the hands of the doctor or scientist, offers an opportunity to both explore and exorcise fears of social exclusion and loss. Written in a context of early US graverobbing, Poe’s medical narratives realise the frightening possibility that White middle-class, educated or propertied man could also be controlled and manipulated in the name of medical progress. In subjecting his protagonists to near-death or fatal experiences, Poe asks what it means for citizens to lose their self-possession and instead become the property of others. Speaking of and protesting their suffering, the conscious voices of the dead and dying undermine the expectation of a rational and self-possessed early US citizenship represented by the professional White male doctor.