jacksonian man of parts :: essays research papers

The recent International Poe conference saw a number of panels and individual presentations dedicated to examining the authors works in their well-disposed and historical contexts, suggesting that contemporary Poe criticism is moving in a ethnical direction long overlooked by scholars and critics. With no less than two in effect(p) panels devoted specifically to issues of race in Poes writing, and other papers addressing issues of cultural identity, gender politics, Poes relationship to American literary nationalism, and the authors ties to both antebellum society and Jacksonian democracy, this conference provided overwhelming evidence of a current desire to emplace Poe more specifically within his cultural and historical milieu. In a broader sense, such attention to the historical and cultural dynamics of Poes writing suggests increased attention of late to Poes knowledge Americanness. This critical trend toward assessing Poe as a distinctly American writer has, of course, also informed such excellent recent works as Terence Whalens Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses (1999) and the essays collected by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (1995). This paper represents an attempt to further such inquiry into the American face of Poe by examining the ways in which Poes unfortunately neglected tale The Man that Was Used Up complicates the authors position in relation to American racial and national politics. One of Poes most biting satirical pieces, this tale raises vexing questions regarding the connections between matters of race, masculinity, and national identity as these concepts were imagined and constructed in Jacksonian America.A minor tale in the canon of Poes short fiction, The Man That Was Used Up was first published in the venerable, 1839 issue of Burtons valet de chambres Magazine and subsequently revised and published twice more in Poes lifetime, first in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), and, final ly, in the 9 August 1845 issue of the Broadway Journal. In this odd story, which chronicles the compromised stature of a military hero of the Indian Wars, Poe makes what would seem to be one of his most scathing, if indirect, commentaries on contemporary American politics. Specifically, the tale evokes the troubled relationship between the oppressive racial policies of the United States in the Age of Jackson and the burgeoning sense of national purpose and unity body forth in the figure of the robust, heroic, Jacksonian self-made man. Composed at a time when the United States was embroiled in the Second Seminole War (1835-42), among the longest and costliest of the Indian Wars, the story positions its central figure, Brevet Brigadier General John A.