Chasing Edgar: The Tourist Rhetoric of the Poe Bicentennial

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe’s 200 th birthday meant big business for the retail and tourism industries. The popular clothing merchant Urban Outfitters marketed exclusive ladies’ T-shirts featuring quotations from “Alone” and “The Raven,” as well as a men’s “Edgar Allen Poe” [sic] tee emblazoned with a screen print of the author, framed by a reclining skeleton. All styles were, naturally, available in just one color—black. The U.S. Postal Service released a commemorative forty-two-cent portrait stamp, accompanied by a “limited edition commemorative copy” of “The Raven,” advertised with the less-than-catchy slogan “The Edgar Allan Poe Stamp: for Now, Not Nevermore.”1 And six American locales (Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Richmond, and Sullivan’s Island) attracted literary pilgrims wishing to celebrate Poe’s bicentennial in style. From a historical standpoint, it is not surprising that such a large number of locales would try to lay claim to the author’s legacy. Though it is difficult to accurately track every move that Poe made throughout his lifetime, he, his wife Virginia, and her mother Maria Clemm occupied numerous homes in several cities. Their home life included moves from Baltimore to Richmond, from Richmond to New York City, from there to Philadelphia, and back to New York City, with several intra-city relocations.2 Through these moves, Poe unwittingly studded the East Coast with homes, commemorative plaques, statues, and other monuments to his legacy. Unlike Mark Twain, whose boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri, appears in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, or Henry David Thoreau, who penned Walden at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, Poe’s life and work elude obvious associations with a particular point-of-origin or “home.” That is to say, they foil the “pursuit of the writer by the reader,” resisting the literary pilgrim’s longing for “the communication between readers and writers, mediated through the house and the objects it contains.”3 Poe’s tales and poems often take place in fantastical, ambiguous locales, unconnected to any identifiable originals. The houses he once occupied, now museums, feature few, if any, objects that belonged to Poe or his family—most of his personal effects were lost or sold during his many moves.