A “Wild” and “Homely Narrative”: Resisting Argument in “The Black Cat”

By focusing attention on color relations (emphasizing black, white, and red), on settings within the domestic sphere (involving ill-fated marriages), and on the centrality of narrators whose deviations situate them in relation to reform ideology, historicist readings of Poe have in recent years sought to place his gothic fiction in the world of antebellum contestation. To what extent was Poe racist or sexist? What did he have to say about the effects of alcohol or narcotics? About death and corpses? About the nature of madness and the need for prison or asylum reform? For all the excitement such questions raise about the possibilities of contextualizing Poe, who can seem the least American of our early authors, there is a danger that the focus on antebellum Poe will obscure his originality. The task for historicist critics, as defined by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman in their introduction to The American Face ofEdgurAZZun Poe, is to “restore his writings to [their] cultural milieu” while taking full account of “the process by which Poe’s fictions simultaneously attempt to abstract themselves from and allude to the particulars of their cultural moment.”l