Domestic terror and Poe's Arabesque interior

English Studies in Canada, March, 2005 by Jacob Rama Berman

THUMBING THROUGH THE PAGES of a May 1840 Burton's Gentleman's Magazine the reader alights on a curious essay about the "philosophy" of interior design written by the editor, Edgar Allan Poe. Beginning with a quote from Hegel that affirms philosophy as "utterly useless" and therefore the "sublimest of all pursuits," Poe proceeds to argue for a philosophical approach to internal decoration that implicitly establishes furniture as a potential source of the sublime ("Furniture" 243). Poe's subsequent claim, though, is that this philosophy of furniture is "nevertheless more imperfectly understood by Americans than by any civilized nation on earth," to which he adds that in terms of internal decoration "the English are supreme" and "the Yankees alone are preposterous" (243). Considering the "Yankee" composition of Poe's own audience, it is not surprising that the critical response to "The Philosophy of Furniture" stresses its "intentionally humorous tone" (The Edgar Allen Poe Society of Baltimore). What this dominant approach ignores, though, is Poe's serious investment in modeling cultivated taste for an American audience whose own "primitive" taste precludes domestic access to the sublime. (1) To this end, Poe, posturing as cultural critic, concludes the article with an invitation to his readers to watch as he sketches a "small and not ostentatious chamber with whose decorations no fault can be found" (244). Prominent among these faultless decorations is the arabesque. An analysis of Poe's arabesque reveals the link between his "humorous" theory of interior design and his serious theory of literary affect, ultimately providing the scholar with a pattern that elaborates the hitherto under-appreciated influence of Orientalism on Poe's aesthetics. (2)

Ensconced in voluminous drapes, thick carpet pile, and diffuse light, the proprietor of the chamber "with whose decorations no fault can be found" dozes peacefully as Poe ushers his readers through a diorama of eclectic furnishings which include a Saxony rug, Sevres vases, and an Argand lamp. The atmosphere is one in which Poe insists "repose speaks in all." This sphere of repose is not only achieved through obscure lighting and plush materials, it is conducted by the meditative arabesque designs which adorn the wallpaper, carpet, and "all upholstery of this nature." However, when these very same arabesque images appear in Poe's fiction, they effect not pleasant dreaming but nightmarish terror. Indeed, only a few months prior to the appearance of the Burton's article, Poe had published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, a document in which he credits his "peculiar taste" for the arabesque with establishing the "tenor of terror" that defines his "serious tales." (3) The arabesque, which operates as a "rigid" representation of leisure in "The Philosophy of Furniture," becomes animate in these "serious tales"--a metamorphosis which allows terror to infiltrate the domestic sphere. What then is the relationship between Poe's use of the static arabesque as a signifier of invigorated American taste and his use of the animate arabesque as a signified American terror?

Answering why Poe perverts taste into terror necessitates unraveling the arabesque convolutions of his Romantic aesthetics. In his major essays on style, "The Poetic Principle" (1848) and "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), Poe mimics the voice of a traditional Continental Enlightenment aesthete when he extols "supernal beauty," rational methods of composition, and the equivalencies between morality and taste. In these "public" treatments of aesthetics, Poe ostensibly conforms to what Michael Davitt Bell has theorized as the conservative theory of American Romance, an approach which emphasizes balance and integration and is best exemplified by Nathaniel Hawthorne's definition of romance as "controlled, serious, moral, and conservative" (Bell, 36). However, if the progressive project of the Enlightenment was, as Horkheimer and Adorno put it, "liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty," (3) Poe's tales of domestic terror, in particular, consciously undermine the fearless, sovereign self and exhibit a predilection for an aesthetic reification not of the Beautiful or moral, but of the monstrous, grotesque and inhuman. These tales effectively split the reader's gaze between subjective identification with the terror experienced within the tale and the objective sovereignty inherent in the mediated act of reading itself, raising the question as to where Poe locates the libidinal investment of his audience. The arabesque appealed to Poe, then, both because of the pattern's geometrical formalism (its balance and integration) and because of the style's associations. An analysis of Poe's different arabesques fleshes out the writer's engagement with different, and often fraught, strains of Romantic aesthetics. In Poe's tales, these European aesthetic concerns are vivified by an American fascination with Arabs, Arab culture and Arab space. In his figure of the arabesque Poe exploits imagery that had been circulating in American popular culture since the United States' engagement in the Barbary Wars at the beginning of the century. Therefore, it is not only that the arabesque style gives Poe the salient means through which to channel German metaphysics and Continental philosophy into the "peculiar" literary aesthetic that sets him apart from his American Renaissance contemporaries; "The Philosophy of Furniture" also provides the key to understanding how the material image of the arabesque instantiates this "peculiar" aesthetic through the medium of interior design.