Longing for Annabel: Queer Love and the Melancholic Critic

Abstract

Abstract: This essay advances a queer reading of Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" through reframing his relationship with the editor Rufus Griswold, who posthumously printed the poem to accompany his infamous obituary of the poet. I argue that the complicated personal and sexual lives of Griswold offer queer resonances to understand his attachments to the action and feeling of "Annabel Lee." Indeed, the history of Griswold's marriages provides insight into how desire and disavowal create screens for refused melancholic attachments. Narrating his ill-fated second marriage to Charlotte Myers, I show how Griswold's desire to present himself as a normative and proper subject belie an anxiety over what he ends up considering wrong object choice, arguing in his divorce affidavit that she "had been bound, in honor and law, not to receive any man's offer of marriage." What this saga of Griswold's fraught attachments illuminates is how a critic's own entanglements with their objects of study can become rich contexts to understand both their own disavowed attachments and the objects that call forth their interest. As such, I consider how the literary critic's orientation toward objects of critique may be compellingly plumbed and analyzed for ways to engage more directly with the concerns of affect studies, queer studies, and author studies.