Domestic terror and Poe's Arabesque interior

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

[The uncanny's] favorite motif was precisely the contrast between a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien presence; on a psychological level, its play was one of doubling, where the other is, strangely enough, experienced as a replica of the self, all the more fearsome because apparently the same. (3)

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In each of the three tales of domestic terror which will be discussed below, Poe uses the arabesque design to enact an infiltration of the domestic sphere by "an alien presence." The "contrast" between security and alienation which Vidler marks as the motif of Poe's uncanny is achieved precisely through the mutable arabesque design, a design which itself has a mirroring function. The comfort of the domestic space in "The Philosophy of Furniture" becomes the horror of the decadent and deadly interiors of Poe's tales of domestic terror through an inversion of the arabesque design pattern's affect. But this inversion, this self-mirroring, is inherent in the arabesque design already, since the pattern mirrors itself in its convolutions, mimicking and inverting its own form within its formulaic geometrical production and re-production. The "alien presence" that infiltrates the home space in Poe's tales of terror is born out of the decorator's own decorative impulse-out of the subject's own effort to create the screen necessary for subjectivity. Thus Poe's arabesque literary style, which is marked by themes of doubling and inversion, emanates from the material arabesque design pattern which can be found adorning the interior spaces of these tales of "verdant decay."

To demonstrate, the morbid party crasher in "The Masque of the Red Death" embodies the abbey's arabesque interior decor and forces reconciliation between the pleasure of viewing difference, in the form of decadent art, and the horror of contact with real difference. Early in the story, Poe describes the interior design of the abbey that the Prince Prospero has decorated and chosen to seal off from the plague-ravaged town outside:

   There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and
   appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman
   fashions. There was much of the beautiful, much of the
   wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and
   not a little of that which might have excited disgust. (Complete
   Tales 271)

The arabesque is figured as the grotesque, a perversely anthropomorphized image which combines "unsuited limbs and appointments," but it also indexes Schlegel's theory of the literary arabesque as the organizing principle of "an artistically ordered chaos of enticing symmetries and contradictions" (Jeness 63). Ultimately the outside cannot be kept from infiltrating the inside as the Red Death appears at the masquerade ball dressed as himself, causing a thematic collapse of exterior and interior world: "the mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have difficulty detecting the cheat" (Complete Tales 272). The theme of Poe's arabesque tales is the transformation of taste into affect, such that the art in these stories comes alive and touches its patron. This theme allegorizes the slippage of the domestic sublime into an unmediated encounter with the sublime as the distance required for "delightful horror" collapses and the experience becomes unadulterated horror. But the reader maintains the "required distance" through the act of reading, and thus the horror experienced through the medium of Poe's tale in fact reinforces the reader's control over that horror. Poe's unique contribution to the American Renaissance is to locate the reader's desire and fear in precisely this moment of collapse between representation and experience. This is a collapse that promises fulfillment of the subject's ambivalent yearning for the other approached through representation but that ultimately defers actual material contact with otherness by substituting the fiction of contact for actual contact.