Poe, Drunk

What happens if we think about intoxication not as a pathological state but as a state of personhood, or about addiction not as a disease but a desire? Thinking through nineteenth-century anxieties about and debates over... [ view full abstract ]

What happens if we think about intoxication not as a pathological state but as a state of personhood, or about addiction not as a disease but a desire? Thinking through nineteenth-century anxieties about and debates over temperance and intemperance, this paper examines the relevance of the concept of intoxication to our understanding of competing ideas of subjectivity and consciousness in the context U.S. liberalism, itself predicated on fantasies of rationality and reason. Taking Edgar Allan Poe’s work as my object, with particular attention to “The Black Cat” and “A Tale of the Rugged Mountains,” I argue that Poe’s alcoholic practice (both literary and biographical) makes use of toxic and intoxicating substances as a mode, or even genre, of subjectivity.  By generating modes of consciousness based in delirium, Poe’s work emphasizes the circulation of forms of subjectivity within and alongside nineteenth-century norms of common sense and critical rational discourse.