Much recent historically-focused scholarship has revealed the ways in which the deviant criminality in the work of Edgar Allan Poe can be read as ideologically conservative. This criticism is understandably concerned with whether the violence Poe renders against marginalized American bodies reinforces a social order dependent upon subjugation. But Poes tales can also be read as attacks upon the norms of civil and social life in the nineteenth century. The veneer of conservativism on the surface of his prose reveals, upon scrutiny, characters who are deeply disturbed by the social order. Poes textual corpus is insistently concerned about orders, spaces, and structures, and the movements a subject must enact within them to avoid their taxonomic identifications. Through the reading of the critically-neglected tale The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, this paper joins a body of criticism that argues for Poes work as providing a challenge to normativity. The inmates of Tarr and Fether do not dismantle the system; they change their (spatial) relationship to it, forcing the disciplinary gaze to chase them in its effort to fix and identify. Inside the confining space of the asylum, Poes inmates confuse the discrete conferral of criminality, and everyone must deviate in order to dissolve the paradigms that structure social subjects. Poes stories argue for the total reorganization of the social structure through deviant criminality.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-07272010-132612 |
| Date | 16 August 2010 |
| Creators | August, Emily |
| Contributors | Professor Colin Dayan |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-07272010-132612/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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