Accounting for value in "The Business Man"

Studies in American Fiction, Spring, 2007 by Elizabeth Duquette

One might go even further and juxtapose the revised ending of "The Business Man" to the debates resulting from the Creole rebellion of November 1841, which ended in the liberation of a cargo of slaves by British authorities. Certainly there are no international incidents in "The Business Man," but the introduction of the Senate in registering communal priorities suggests the potential impact of the Creole debate to Poe's revisions to the tale. That a cargo can consist of slaves in one harbor and persons in another reveals the contingency of what counts as normal, as well as the moral horrors that can result. Poe points to this dynamic by stressing that the difference between an ordinary practice (slavery) and an extraordinary one (the cat-tail business) is arbitrary; what seems to be chance is stripped of its aleatory aspects and, endorsed by the good citizens of the community, naturalized by the regularizing function of the market, which effectively effaces its brutality. The tale's more ambitious aspect, hidden under the satire, is the claim that when method is indistinguishable from numerical accounting--when philosophy and mathematics are interchangeable--then the only kind of thing that one can make is a Proffit; in such a world, thought itself is up for sale and method becomes a means of discrimination in the fullest sense of the word. (33)

In concluding that Poe uses this tale to reflect on the business of slavery without offering either justification or condemnation, I part company with many distinguished scholars who have sought Poe's explicit endorsement or repudiation of the institution. (34) It seems to me more likely that Poe's manipulation of the rhetorical conventions associated with the increasingly national debate about slavery reflects his own ability to mine (and mock) the cant of the day, in this case the language used to talk about slavery. "The Business Man" will not tell us if Poe found slavery repugnant, but it does suggest that he believed the explanation, and responsibility, for its continued practice could be found by looking at the nation's political and economic methods. Thus, Proffit's proposed home is on the Hudson River in New York and the tale is explicit that the legislation is the result of communal will. Divorcing slavery from its association with the South, Poe in stead points to the bottom line--the entire nation enjoys the profits of this "peculiar institution."

What's the Use?

Nineteenth-century Americans were far from certain about how to achieve the lofty ideals promised by the nation's founding documents and, as numerous scholars have demonstrated, regularly expressed concern about their national profile. One remedy for this plight was the conscious crafting of national narratives and models, including the figure of the self-made man as expressive of the values peculiar to the United States. A "popular hero," indeed a "central symbol of American society," the self-made man, John Cawelti explains, allowed "Americans ... to synthesize, under his aegis, many conflicting strands of belief and aspiration." (35) A wide range of authors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, conflated the self-made man and the business man, a phrase that entered common parlance in the early nineteenth century, and maintained that this figure "stood as the ideal" of the middleclass. (36) With its pithy sayings and proclamations about how best to manage one's affairs, "The Business Man" draws upon these assumptions and narrative traditions as it dictates the way to wealth; in this, the tale is not only an attack on American commercialism, it is also a savage parody of the exemplar of the virtuous business man--Benjamin Franklin, patron saint of the socially useful self-made man.