Poe’s Genre Crossing: From Domesticity to Detection

Abstract

Scholarship of the past forty years has repeatedly demonstrated that domesticity emerged as a pervasive cultural ideology in nineteenthcentury America, promoting the feminized household as a spiritual retreat from the instrumental relations of the marketplace. “Domesticity constitutes an alternative to, and escape from, the masculine economic order,” Gillian Brown contended in 1990, recapitulating the groundbreaking studies published in the 1970s and 1980s.1 But despite all its manifest resistance to capitalism, domestic ideology and the popular fiction associated with it have also been prominently linked to consumerism. In her classic 1977 book, The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas leveled a notoriously harsh indictment against domestic ideology as the origin of mass culture. More recently, in Sentimental Materialism, Lori Merish has reexamined Douglas’s argument, offering a more even-handed consideration of the conflicted orientations and complex intellectual history by which domesticity contested the market while nevertheless supplying a crucial logic for consumerism.2 Such internal contradictions have caused a number of critics to conclude that domestic ideology was too aligned with the public sphere to maintain its credibility as a moral counterpoint to industrial society. “A persistent and fundamental paradox of American domesticity,” in Kathleen McHugh’s words, is that “[while] it was constructed ideologically from the beginning as a resistant discourse to market capitalism its resistance functioned conservatively, as an accommodation with or amelioration of threatening market forces rather than a direct contestation of them.” Yet, according to Mary P. Ryan, domesticity’s concessions to commercial culture were not static but progressive. In her account, the domestic fiction and household guidebooks of the 1820s and 1830s firmly emphasized republican frugality and practical household skills. It was only toward the 1840s and 1850s that such influential magazines as Godey’s Lady’s Book and a number of novelists shifted to a comparatively consumerist version of domestic womanhood, stressing tasteful selection over heroic self-sufficiency.3 Ryan could be seen here to suggest the beginnings of a dialectical progression of literary genre by which the heroine of “woman’s fiction” initially