Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 105The making of Southern myth
However much they differ, though, writers like Cooper and Sedgwick do have common
interests and ideas, derived from the basic currency of Western myth: a belief in
mobility, a concern with the future, a conviction that, whatever problems it may have,
America is still a land of possibility. The counter-myth to this is the myth of the South:
preoccupied with place and confinement rather than space and movement, obsessed
with the guilt and burden of the past, riddled with doubt, unease, and the sense that,
at their best, human beings are radically limited and, at their worst, tortured, grotesque,
or evil. And if Cooper was the founding father of the Western myth in literature, even
though he never actually saw the prairie, then, even more queerly, Edgar Allan Poe
(1809–1849) was the founding father of Southern myth, although he was actually
born in Boston and hardly ever used Southern settings in his fiction or his poetry.
What makes Poe a founder of Southern myth, typically of him, is not so much a
matter of the literal as of the imaginative. “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) is
set in an anonymous landscape, or rather dreamscape, but it has all the elements that
were later to characterize Southern Gothic: a great house and family falling into decay
and ruin, a feverish, introspective hero half in love with death, a pale, ethereal heroine
who seems and then is more dead than alive, rumors of incest and guilt – and, above
all, the sense that the past haunts the present and that there is evil in the world and it
is strong. Typically of Poe, who turned his own life into drama, this Southern
dimension is also a matter of self-consciousness: the causes he espoused, the opinions
he expressed, the stories he told about himself. “I am a Virginian,” he wrote in 1842,
“at least I call myself one, for I have resided all my life, until within the last few days,
in Richmond.”
Despite all his aristocratic sneers at the bourgeois dullness and correctness of
Boston, and his complaints about Southerners “being ridden to death by
New-England,” he was actually born there. He left at the age of two to be raised by a
Richmond merchant, John Allan. It was from John Allan that, by choice, Poe took his
middle name. And it was with the Allans that Poe lived in England from 1815 to- Poe then entered the University of Virginia in 1826, but relations between him
and Allan were by now severely strained. Allan wanted Poe to prepare for a legal
career. Poe, however, left university for Boston, where he began a literary career with
his first volume of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827). Published
anonymously and at his own expense, it went unnoticed. But it clearly announced
his poetic intentions: aims and ambitions that were later to be articulated in such
seminal essays as “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and “The Poetic
Principle” (1850) and further put into practice in the later volumes, Poems by
E. A. Poe (1831) and The Raven and Other Poems (1845). The poet, Poe wrote in his
essays, should be concerned, first and last, with the “circumscribed Eden” of his own
dreams. “It is the desire of the moth for the star,” Poe says of the poetic impulse in
“The Poetic Principle.” “Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the
grave,” he goes on, “we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and
thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements,
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