Maggie Tonkin

The “Poe-etics” of Decomposition: Angela Carter's “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe” and the Reading-Effect

Few authors are as undead as Edgar Allan Poe. Despite having been interred over one hundred and fifty years ago, Poe continues to generate effects. Like all the “dear ones” buried in his fictions, prematurely or otherwise, he perversely refuses to lie down. Of course, in “The Philosophy of Composition” he claimed to meticulously calculate his effects, to write, so to speak, from the effect backwards. If we take Poe at his word, his notorious statement that “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” ought to be read as a calculated, attempt at achieving a certain preconceived effect (Philosophy 18–19). As we shall see, however, whether we take Poe at his word— whether we privilege effect over cause; surface over latent content—is in itself an effect of our ideological approach to the literary text. For even a writer as calculating as Poe claims to have been could not have foreseen the discursive effects his work would generate. He remains one of the most controversial figures in American literature, a writer whose status is always in dispute. Poe is a special case not only in literature, but also in psychoanalysis, where, Shoshana Felman argues, he generates singular effects:

Albertine/a the Ambiguous: Angela Carter’s Reconfiguration of Marcel Proust’s Modernist Muse

Feminism has killed the Muse. According to Arlene Croce, the feminist argument against the Muse runs something like this: Like Nekrasov, who said, ‘I’d rather be a citizen than a poet,’ today’s woman says, ‘I’d rather be a citizen than a Muse.’ We know the arguments: Muses are passive, therefore passe. Muses are a fantasy rooted in wrongheaded notions of biological ‘essentialism’ (i.e., femininity). Most degradingly, Muses do not choose to be Muses; they are chosen. Since the nineteen-seventies, modern feminism has based its appeal to women on the premise that all barriers to the dream of self-realization are political. Whatever can’t be acquired for oneself, invoking one’s civil rights, isn’t worth having, and who wants to be a symbol anyway? The Muse is only a man speaking through a woman, not the woman herself. What male artists call Woman is a construct designed to keep real women in their place. (164)

Musing on Baudelaire: Angela Carter's “Black Venus” and the Poet as Dead Beloved

At the far right of Gustave Courbet’s massive allegorical painting L’Atelier du Peintre, Charles Baudelaire sits assiduously reading a book. The figure of Baudelaire, who was a long-standing friend of the artist, is unmistakable, but the identity of several of the other figures in the painting is much disputed. Several interpretations of the painting have hinged upon the identity of the well-dressed couple immediately to Baudelaire’s right, but more contentious still is a murky patch on the blank wall between this couple and the poet. Even in reproduction, the hazy outline of a rather distorted female figure next to Baudelaire’s shoulder is discernible, but the figure is just that: an outline, without detail or color. Is this figure, as some art historians have claimed, an image of Baudelaire’s mistress, Jeanne Duval? In a letter to his friend Champfleury, Courbet merely identified the original image as that of ‘‘a Negress looking at herself coquettishly in a mirror’’ (Lindsay 128). Nevertheless, Anthea Callen adduces that ‘‘a portrait of Baudelaire’s ‘Black Venus,’ the mulatto Jeanne Duval, at the writer’s side was painted over by Courbet at his special request but can now be dimly seen on the blank wall between Baudelaire and the bourgeois couple’’ (81). Callen does not cite the source of this information. Neither does Jack Lindsay, who makes the identical claim that ‘‘the Negress (Baudelaire’s mistress, Jeanne Duval) was painted out, no doubt at Baudelaire’s request, though her phantom outlines can still be detected’’ (128– 29). The mysterious outline on the wall has even inspired a novel, the Haitian novelist Fabienne Pasquet’s L’Ombre de Baudelaire, which fictionalizes the erasure of Jeanne Duval from the painting.