Resisting Reproduction in Edgar Allan Poe's Family Fictions

Abstract

Resisting Reproduction in Edgar Allan Poe's Family Fictions Paul Christian Jones (bio) In the growing body of queer scholarship on Edgar Allan Poe, critics—including Gustavus Stadler, Leland Person, and David Greven—have understandably been focused primarily on dynamics of same-sex desire in Poe's fiction, including "William Wilson," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Man of the Crowd," and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.1 For the most part, these studies have paid less attention to the construction of queerness by recent queer theorists, like Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, José Muñoz, and Elizabeth Freeman, who "detach queerness from sexual identity," according to Halberstam, viewing it more broadly as an "opposition to the institutions of family . . . and reproduction," a position grounded in temporal "logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death."2 This ideology of "reproductive futurism," scrutinized most famously in Edelman's manifesto No Future, enlists all individuals as participants in the production, biologically and imaginatively, of the future "in the privileged form of the Child" and marks as "queer" those individuals who do not participate in this shared vision of the future, deeming them dangerous threats to society, the future, and life. Edelman writes, "queerness names the side of those not 'fighting for the children,' the side outside the consensus . . . confirm[ing] the absolute value of reproductive futurism." The consequences of this position are severe: "The sacralization of the Child . . . necessitates the sacrifice of the queer."3 In this essay, I argue that this understanding of queerness as a resistance to the conventional notion of futurity as figured in the form of heterosexual reproduction can be valuably applied to Poe characters that have not yet garnered any significant attention in the queer criticism of his work focused primarily on desire. Specifically, I examine the [End Page 165] male figures in "Morella," "Ligeia," and "The Fall of the House of Usher," a trio of stories addressing the subjects of family, marriage, and reproduction. Each story offers readers at least one male character who finds himself tempted or attempting to stray from the prescriptive expectation of heterosexual procreation in a way that twenty-first-century readers might recognize as queer.4 In these stories, Poe demonstrates both interest in the imagined liberation of queerness and at the same time deep anxiety about the possible consequences of such liberation, especially the potential for monstrosity that might emerge from the rejection of heterosexual norms. Criticism on these tales has widely condemned these male figures as mad, immoral, murderous, or broken. It is often precisely the characters' queerness—their perceived opposition to futurity in the form of children—that provokes these negative and even hostile responses, as critics anticipate Edelman's construction of the queer as a disturbing figure of "the death drive," opposed to "the cult of the Child and the political order it enforces."5 Challenging the near consensus of scholars who judge these characters to be dangerous threats and murderers of their family and their future, this essay asserts that it is instead reproductive futurism and the pressure, both external and internalized, to conform to it through heterosexual procreation that loom as the essential source of horror in these tales for the queer characters and for Poe himself. In the readings of these stories to follow, we see Poe navigating between various conceptions of queerness, its potentialities, and its implications. While Poe would likely have been similarly motivated by a sense of queerness, in Edelman's description, as "the act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life," his fiction reveals discomfort with what has been called the "anti-social thesis" of No Future, which presents queerness as "not intend[ing] a new politics, a better society, [or] a brighter tomorrow" but as exclusively "insisting on the negativity that pierces the fantasy screen of futurity" and as "shattering narrative temporality . . . with explosive force."6 The readings presented in this essay indicate that Poe, like many of Edelman's critics of the last decade or so, a number of whom have been called queer optimists or utopians, did not imagine queerness as merely a...