Abstract
ABSTRACT: I focus on the deployment of scientific discourses in Poe's "Hans Phaall—A Tale" (1835) and Richard Adams Locke's "Moon Hoax" (1835) in a shared racial project. I draw on Charles W. Mills's theory of the "Racial Contract," which posits that the historical invention of the "state of nature"—outside and opposed to the social contract of the civil state—created new categories of space and persons to be colonized. I argue that in Poe's and Locke's texts, the moon functions as such a space: conquered visually and epistemologically by science, it is also the home of unmistakably racialized lunar bodies. Figured as monstrous hybrids, the lunarians embody the texts' fears about racial mixing. Yet the tales offer different responses to these anxieties. Locke's fictionalized Sir John Herschel acts as an agent of the imperializing state, overseeing a lunar Eden of racial harmony, while Poe's Hans Phaall is a settler-outlaw whose identity threatens to merge with the native, hybridized lunarian. Contextualizing "Hans Phaall" within contemporaneous debates in racial science, I show that Hans and his lunarian conjure the specter of racial "degeneracy," casting doubt in the text on the social contract and its promise of human freedom.
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