Poe Mo: Modernism and the Politics of Gothic Adaptation

POE MO: MODERNISM AND THE POLITICS OF GOTHIC ADAPTATION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY LAUREN CURTRIGHT IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PAULA RABINOWITZ JUNE 2010 © Lauren Curtright, June 2010 i Acknowledgements It is my great pleasure to thank all of the people who have made it possible for me to write this dissertation. First and foremost, I am grateful to my adviser, Paula Rabinowitz. I am incredibly lucky that my idol has become my champion. Paula’s confidence in me and her unwavering commitment to my success at a difficult time in our field have driven this project from its inception to completion. I am also grateful to the rest of my dream committee, who, in all ways, have been there for me, from my qualifying exams to my defense. With grace and conscientiousness, Lois Cucullu has modeled professionalism for me and treated me with the utmost compassion and respect since I began the doctoral program at the University of Minnesota. Siobhan Craig’s brilliance, warmth, encouragement, generosity, and honesty have inspired and aided my teaching and scholarship alike. By expressing both enthusiasm and needed skepticism about my avenues of inquiry and teaching me to attend to historical contexts, John S. Wright has made me into a more serious and responsible scholar. This dissertation has benefited from my opportunities to study nineteenth- century American literature under Patricia Crain and Donald Ross, non-fiction writing under Patricia Hampl, cinema of the Weimar Republic under Richard McCormick, and cultural theory under Jani Scandura. I am particularly indebted to Jani, who, by securing a position for me at the 2008 Nagoya American Studies Summer Seminars (NASSS), enabled me to visit Japan, to conduct research for chapter 3 and the coda. Many thanks are due to the organizers of the NASSS for their hospitality and generous support of my participation in their invaluable program and to Rey Chow for her example and guidance in the NASSS sections on literature and culture. For making it possible for me to present my works-in-progress to international audiences, including top scholars in my field, I am grateful to the organizers of the International Gothic Association’s Eighth and Ninth Biennial Conferences and to the organizers of the Poe Studies Association’s Third International Conference commemorating Edgar Allan Poe’s bicentennial. I thank the librarians at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia for their assistance while I researched the John Henry Ingram Poe Collection and Pratt Family Papers and Laura Christiansen, Dickson Librarian at the Jean Outland Chrysler Library of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, for compiling and mailing me materials on William Abbott Pratt. I also thank the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts and Graduate School for a travel grant and summer research fellowship, respectively, and to the Department of English for granting me two semester-long fellowships, including the Ruth Drake Dissertation Fellowship, for including me in the English Now! series, and for nominating me for a number of University of Minnesota fellowships. On a personal note, I have the deepest gratitude for Sarah Murphy for her unconditional love and trust and for conversations that have kept me sane, made me wiser, and been as much a part of my education as any of the many courses I have taken over the years. I would not be who or where I am today without Sarah’s friendship, nor would I be without the friendship of Michael Taylor Brown, Chad Luck, Jessica Lewis Luck, Katie Macnamara, Yasmina Madden, Margaret Ronda, and Michelle Ross. They ii and all of my other friends and mentors at Indiana University, Bloomington will always have a special place in my heart and mind: Jessica Baldanzi, Tim Campbell, Sara Biggs Chaney, Eva Cherniavsky, David Daniels, JoEllen DeLucia, Jeffrey Galbraith, Ann- Marie Larson Dunbar, Jonathan Elmer, Victoria Elmwood, Susan Gubar, Katie Levin, Manuel Luis Martinez, Tobias Menely, Andrew Mulvania, Craig Owens, Celia Barnes Rasmussen, Bryan Rasmussen, Kyle Schlabach, and Julie Wise. I am especially grateful to Katie Levin, who, by my good fortune, was my peer at Indiana and supervisor at the Center for Writing at the University of Minnesota—and who will always be my friend. Katie’s help on drafts and her enthusiasm for my dissertation in formal sessions and informal meetings have been unmatched. Without the support and feedback characterized by great humor and wisdom given me by Katie and my other dearest friends at the University of Minnesota—Madhurima Chakraborty, Molly Kelley Gage, Chris Kamerbeek, and Jessica Knight—this dissertation would not have come to fruition. I also thank Tim Armato, Amy Barker-Armato, Matt Beehr, Dieter Bohn, Maija Brown, Linda Clemens, Sara Cohen, Michael Coleman, Ryan Cordell, Christelle Curilli, Vlad Dima, Dara Downey, Katie Egging, Pat Eliason, Tom Friedrich, Alicia Gibson, David Graber, Amy Griffiths, Rachel Guberman, Kit Hansen, Debra Hartley, John Havard, Steve Healey, Nick Hengen, Kimiko Hiranuma, Chris Holmes, Liz Hutter, Kirsten Jamsen, Lisa Borys Jensen, Carla Elaine Johnson, Tiffany Schneider Joseph, Jayashree Kamble, Peter Krinke, Juliane Langenbach, Andrew Lewis, Sara Lindey, Elizabeth McCarthy, Ali McGhee, Jennifer Miller, Yoko Mizuguchi, Rachel Mordecai, Lydia Morken, Bernice Murphy, Kristin Orlowski, Kati Pederson, Becky Peterson, Kevin Riordan, Nick Robinette, Brian Rowe, Cynthia Rowe, Russell Sbriglia, Adam Schrag, Sharin’ Schroeder, Angela Sprunger, Kim Strain, Liz Swedo, Jasmine Kar Tang, Lisa Trochman, Rebecca Weaver, Becky Weinberg, Chris Wiley, Siwei Xu, Mishio Yamanaka, Maria Zavialova, and Laura Zebuhr for their good advice and good company at home and abroad. I am grateful to my parents, sisters, brother-in-law, grandparents, and aunts and uncles for their incredible support and encouragement on the long haul to earning my doctorate. Finally and most of all, I thank my greatest love, Daniel Coplen, for sharing a life with me and for helping me to believe it was not only possible but also important to finish this dissertation. iii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my grandmothers, Ann Curtright (Anna Matilda Peters) and Doris Tanzey (Anna Doris Vanlandingham). iv Table of Contents List of Figures ………………………………………………………………………. v Introduction …………….…………………………………………………….……… 1 Chapter 1. Moving Daguerreotypes and Myths of Reproduction: Poe’s Body ….….. 22 Chapter 2. An Ideal Instrument for Equivocation: Poe’s Camera ….………….……. 84 Chapter 3. Shocking Intermediaries: Poe’s Mutations .…………….……………….. 142 Coda. Horrifying Instants …………………………………………………………… 202 Works Cited …………………………………………………………………………. 223 v List of Figures Figure 1. Ultima Thule ……………………………………………………………… 26 Figure 2. Thompson …………………………………………………………………. 30 Figure 3. Illustration of the Virginia Sky Light Daguerrean Gallery ……………….. 31 Figure 4. First page of “Poe in New York,” Century Magazine ……………………. 45 Figure 5. Players Club ………………………………………………………………. 51 Figure 6. Photograph of Pratt’s Castle …………………………………………….... 77 Figure 7. Photograph of Pratt’s Castle ……………………………………………… 77 Figure 8. Photograph of Chateau Front and Back, the Gatekeeper’s Lodge ……….. 80 1 Introduction Distinguishing his narrator from both “Hollywood-movie ectoplasms” and “a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe,” in the Prologue to his modernist opus, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison implies that monsters in horror films and gothic literature are too immaterial to be relevant to racism or anti-racist critique (3). In contrast to Poe’s “spook[s]” and Hollywood’s “ectoplasms,” Ellison’s narrator is “a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and [he] might even be said to possess a mind” (3). Ellison seems, thereby, to draw a line between popular and modernist forms and to downplay the former as politically and historically inconsequential. However, reading the narrator of Invisible Man as a trickster figure, I interpret his opening comments as an ironic invitation to reconsider the politics of the gothic and the significance of this transhistorical, transnational genre to modernism. This dissertation is about the ways in which Poe’s writings, reproductions of images of Poe, and adaptations of Poe’s works are implicated in the use of filmic technologies to dehumanize particular subjects and to privilege others. As Ellison’s narrator explains, others’ “inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality,” position him as a social outcast (3; emphasis in original). Represented as a form of invisibility, the narrator’s race is not a fixed, inherent property but rather “occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes” (3). My analysis of relations between ideology and image technologies extends this point. Despite their overt dismissal by the narrator of Invisible Man, Poe’s “spook[s]” and their progeny embody the conflation, which has persisted since the late-eighteenth century, of mechanical extensions of human vision and perceived human differences. Because 2 discourses on filmic technologies have purported them, paradoxically, to at once distort and illuminate reality, still and moving photographic images have acquired special purchase in efforts to support or counter constructs that rely on visible evidence of race. Responding to Ellison’s dissociation of Poe’s

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