Domestic terror and Poe's Arabesque interior

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

Poe certainly inherited the subversive European tradition detailed above, but his own use of the arabesque resists easy categorization. In "The Philosophy of Furniture," Poe promotes the arabesque pattern as a way to ameliorate Americans' "corruption of taste," and thus the design creates not chaos, but refined comfort. This comfort flows from the room's suggestive rather than representative features:

   In brief--distinct grounds, and vivid cycloid figures, of no
   meaning, are here Median laws. The abomination of flowers, or
   representations of well-known objects of any kind, should not
   be allowed within the limits of Christendom. Indeed whether
   on carpets, or curtains, or tapestry, or ottoman coverings, all
   upholstery of this nature should be rigidly Arabesque. (243)

Poe's arabesque design, which has "no meaning," promotes the kind of obscurity that Edmund Burke argues is productive of romantic affect. In A Philosophical Enquiry, a book that erects a system to distinguish and define the Beautiful and the Sublime, Burke states:

   It is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it
   affecting to the imagination. If I make a drawing of a palace,
   or a landscape, I present a very clear idea of those objects; but
   then ... my picture can at most affect only as the palace, temple
   or landscape would have affected in the reality. On the other
   hand, the most lively and spirited verbal description I can
   give, raises a very obscure and imperfect idea of such objects;
   but then it is in my power to raise a stronger emotion by the
   description than I could do by the best painting. (55)

The arabesque, in Poe's philosophical interior, works much like Burke's "verbal description," through association and metonymy. It is a heuristic device for the imagination. However, Poe's socio-spatial borders, "within the limits of Christendom," establish the licence of the arabesque as dependant on its incongruous placement in the Western drawing room. Poe's question of taste as sensation, as affect, becomes a question of taste as subjectivity and engages a different theorist of the sublime, Immanuel Kant. (6) Staring at a geometrical Islamic design which has "no meaning" the viewer faces a manifestation of Kant's "mathematical sublime" that threatens to result in intellectual trauma. Reason must intervene, giving the experience closure and establishing the psychic comfort of man's ability to rationalize the unfathomable. Thus the arabesque may achieve the "art for art's sake" aesthetic Poe presents in "The Poetic Principle," but it also offers a controlled encounter with the sublime that produces not only the material comfort of the bourgeois drawing room but the philosophical comfort which underpins bourgeois subjectivity. By imaginatively incorporating arabesque design into American domestic space, Poe grants controlled access to the exotic and thus a domesticated experience of the sublime. Burke writes of the sublime, "when danger or pain press too nearly they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful" (36). The modification in question here is artistic co-option and circumscribed representation of the exotic.