Accounting for value in "The Business Man"

Studies in American Fiction, Spring, 2007 by Elizabeth Duquette

Elizabeth Duquette

Gettysburg College

Notes

I would like to thank Jonathan Elmer, Robert Levine, Stacey Margolis, and the members of the Princeton Americanist Colloquium, especially Erin Forbes, for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.

(1) Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of EdgarAllan Poe (New York: Vintage, 1975), 673. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

(2) Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of EdgarAllan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols. (New York: Cromwell, 1902), 16:280.

(3) Poe, The Complete Works, 16:281.

(4) For a related discussion, see Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 218.

(5) First published in Button's Gentleman's Magazine in February 1840, the story was significantly revised at some time before it appeared in the August 2, 1845 edition of the Broadway Journal. Thomas Mabbott surmises that in the intervening period, the tale likely was published in one of the papers for which the archive is not complete--the Philadelphia Saturday Museum or the New York Sunday Times--as the revisions are too extensive to be consistent with Poe's standard practices during the period. Changes between the extant versions include the title, the character's name, and the inclusion of materials that could have been inspired by events of November 1842. See Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas O. Mabbott, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1969), 2:48. In my reading of the tale, I will rely primarily on the later, revised, version. For information on Poe's practice of reprinting while at the Broadway Journal, see Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-53 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 189.

(6) While the differences between the detective tales and this seemingly insubstantial satire would suggest that they have little in common, David Halliburton's argument about Poe's compositional practice suggests that such differences have too often distracted readers from noticing basic consistencies between Poe's works. "Poe was in the habit," Halliburton claims, "of playing one work off against its polar complement ... parodying in one work matters that are treated seriously in another." Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), 232. Halliburton argues that "The Business Man" reprises the sober opening of "MS. Found in a Bottle" from seven years earlier (233) while its narrator recalls the narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher" (281).

(7) Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 126-27.

(8) Cavell, 126-27.

(9) Candace Vogler sees a related operation in "Ligeia," where the narrator is "ill fitted to productive engagements with [the] world, adapted not to family or established institutions of law and property, not even to the work of self-subsistence, but to the need for repetitive insistence that things have been lost, that there is always human cost in the operation of ordinariness." "'Much of Madness and More of Sin': Compassion, for Ligeia," Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (New York: Routledge, 2004), 51.