But Poe's oeuvre has often proved more likely to undermine efforts to construct coherent national literary narratives. This is not only because of his deconstructive engagement with the ideology of mythic American selfhood, which it has been the ur-project of Poe criticism in the last fifteen years to articulate. It is also due to his similarly deconstructive engagement with the ideology of nationalist identity. By first examining Poe's ambivalent response to the question of nationalism and literary nationalism, we can move on to what I think are much bigger questions about how nineteenth-century Americans imagined themselves as a nation; and further, how the most "otherworldly" of fiction (Poe's) could register the profoundly physical and biological basis of the imagined U. S. community, as well as the bio-logic of resistance against it.

Although Poe never responded to the debate about literary nationalism in a programmatic way, his scattered remarks reveal an ambivalence towards the literary nationalist agenda. On one hand he rejected the expressly political claims of literary nationalists by helping to pioneer the idea of an ideally transcendent literature--a literature "out of space, out of time." But he also acknowledged that literary culture could effectively produce a complex of national signs that would provide, as Lauren Berlant puts it, "the common language of a common space." What Berlant calls the National Symbolic, what Sartre called, with particular reference to Americanism, "the monstrous complex of myths and values," functions to produce a fantasy of integration. Berlant explains:

Its traditional icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals, and its narratives provide an alphabet for a collective consciousness or national subjectivity; through the National Symbolic the historical nation aspires to achieve the inevitability of the status of natural law, a birthright. This pseudo-genetic condition not only affects profoundly the citizen's subjective experience of her/his political rights, but also of civil life, private life, the life of the body itself.

The fantasy of integration works in two directions: it lends coherence not only to the body politic, but also to the individual subject's body. In the case of the United States in the mid 1800s, the integrative power of the nation, its essentially sacred quality, its distinctive, integral identity as opposed to other national identities--all of this cannot be overemphasized. Like his contemporaries, Poe clearly demonstrated an acute self-consciousness of being an American writer. But while his greatest aspiration as the leading professional literary critic of his day was to help cultivate an indigenous literature, he didn't believe that this indigenous product was contingent on the development of a well-defined national character or image. His famous preface from Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, where he flaunts: "Tomorrow I may be anything but German, as yesterday I was everything else," suggests the shape-changing, identity-swapping image of the American writer Poe had in mind. Poe's great distinction is that he did not unsuspiciously accept national culture either as an epistemological object or as a "sacred gift," but instead impiously pried into the means by which the modern nation is sacralized. "Ligeia" ia a key short story in this regard.

The famous first lines of "Ligeia" are: "I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the Lady Ligeia." From the beginning the deceased wife defies identification even with the most fundamental metonymy of homeland, or place: as it turns out the narrator cannot place her in his memory precisely because her historical placement is so ambiguous. The narrator knows nothing of her family, not even her family name. But finally he remembers something: "Yet I believe that I met her first and most frequently in some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine."

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an inhabitant of a decaying city near the Rhine could claim one of many national, ethnic, and/or linguistic identities--she could be Swiss, German, Flemish, French, Alsatian, or Dutch. The point with regard to Ligeia is not that she possesses one or another of these identities, but rather that she possesses them all; and so in a sense none of them. Keeping in mind the sacred import of nationality in the nineteenth century, Ligeia is thus a figure of blasphemy from the beginning. She is the site of a lawless (and unholy) commingling of the languages and cultures of Europe which romantic political ideology obsessively strove to differentiate. The narrator claims:

I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense--such as I have never known in woman. In the classical tongues she was deeply proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in regard to the modern dialects of Europe, I have never known her at fault.

The quality of Ligeia's voice "speaks" of her intellectual mastery, as well as her cultural and linguistic polymorphism. However, it is the body that serves as the privileged signifier of Ligeia's heterogeneity; and in the body her blasphemous status, her "wildness," is most salient: she has raven-black hair, a "lofty and pale forehead," "skin rivalling the purest ivory;" the delicate outline of her nose reminds the speaker of "the graceful medallions of the Hebrews;" her chin had "the gentleness of breadth, the softness and the majesty, the fullness and the spirituality, of the Greek...;" her eyes were "far larger than the ordinary eyes of our race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad;" and she possessed "the beauty of beings either above or apart from the earth--the beauty of the fabulous Houri of the Turk."

As Joan Dayan has pointed out, this catalogue suggests that Ligeia is a mestiza; and perhaps as a result of her racial hybridity the speaker "trie[s] in vain to detect the irregularity and to trace home [his] own perception of 'the strange'" that imbues her loveliness. Yet its the expression of her eyes that fascinates the narrator most. As in many other Poe stories, the eyes displace the I--they metonymically signify Ligeia's ineffable identity; and just as conventionally, they are the corridor inward to the soul-identity the narrator wishes to know and to name. But Ligeia's black eyes only confound his efforts. Not only are they black, like her raven-black hair--they are "the most brilliant of black;" which is to say that they are reflective. They lead the interrogating eye outward instead of inward. As is suggested by the wierd, occult catalog of analogies the narrator draws on the one hand between Ligeia's eyes and the natural world: rapidly-growing vines, moths, butterflies, running streams; and on the other hand, between her eyes and the world of culture: sounds from stringed instruments, passages from books--those eyes are located along a great circle of resemblance that moves from culture into nature and back to culture, and thus confounds their distinction.

This act of confounding culture and nature, spirit and flesh, was indeed a kind of philosophical cause celebre for Poe. It is what Joan Dayan refers to in her book, Fables of Mind, as Poe's "logic of convertibility," whereby he put to rout the metaphysical notion of a spirituality transcending materiality.

As Dayan illustrates, Poe was the great nineteenth-century deconstructor of the cant of metaphysics; and his considerable deconstructive spleen was directed against those romantic writers, the New England transcendentalists above all, who believed in the pure ideality of language. But in targeting the transcendentalists, Poe was also targeting the metaphysical and holy ideal of the nation on whose behalf the transcendentalists believed they were vested with the authority to speak. Displaying a political acumen not usually attributed to him, Poe saw the transcendentalist's conviction that they spoke for and spoke forth the nation in their inspired musings as a stratagem on the part of the Northeast to further extend the hegemony of its liberal-progressive ideology over the rest of the country; and nowhere, of course, was that ideology more threatening than in the agrarian, slave-owning South, Poe's homeland.

But despite the fact that the social arrangements and disciplinary operations of the North and the South were evolving in dramatically different ways in the years leading up to the Civil War, the perceived Northern threat, represented most viscerally for Poe by the New England literary establishment, was mitigated on a point of considerable importance. At the same time that the continued existence of slavery was being jeopardized by the increasingly mainstream liberal-progressivist politics of the 1830s and '40s, what Reginald Horsman refers to as "romantic racial nationalism" was on the rise. By the 1840s, in the United States as well as Western Europe, "...race was exalted as the basis of a nation;" and the perpetuation of an undefiled Anglo-Saxon bloodline came to be seen as the key to the United States' continued historical ascendancy. Racialist-supremacist theories were disseminated in books and scholarly and popular journals at an astonishing rate in the antebellum period; and although the most virulent of these theories logically fared better in the Southern states, the basic notion of inherent racial inequality, a radically particularized reappropriation and modification of the Great Chain of Being, was accepted in Boston just as it was in Richmond. Thus Emerson wrote in his paean to Anglo-Saxonism and -Normanism, English Traits (1856): "It is race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of India under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe? Race avails much... [it] is a controlling influence in the Jew... Race in the negro is of appalling importance."

Due to the increased mobilization of theories of racial difference and hierarchization in the antebellum period, it came to be assumed that African-Americans were not only not white, but that they were also not human. And as the separate species theory gained ascendancy, miscegenation assumed a far more fearsome and loathsome cast in the popular imagination than it ever had before. "In the catalog of Southern nightmares," writes Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "none loomed more ominously than than the notion of a pairing of sister with black male." But miscegenation had nightmarish qualities in the North too; it was widely believed to constitute a greater threat to the future well-being of the nation than the North/South political and cultural breach caused by slavery itself. The fear of tainted blood, of race suicide, which would bear such bitter fruit later in the century, was beginning to take hold; and the maintenance of "good blood" was deemed essential for the continued westering progress of the U. S. nation. But racial purity came to be seen not only as the essential factor in the United States' historical ascendancy; it became inextricably linked to the very divinity of the nation. What is important to understand at this point is how the rejection--or rather, the abjection, to borrow Julia Kristeva's terminology--of the defiled non-Caucasian from the race of "mankind" functioned as the very ground upon which white American-Anglo-Saxonism in the nineteenth century could be normalized, made docile, obedient, purified, and spiritualized.

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva explores how "one's own clean and proper body," the law-abiding, normalized, hygenic social body, constitutes itself and assumes its identity through ritual acts of exclusion. Against this body is that which is excluded, the abject: "what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect border, positions, rules. " But the abject is not radically "other": "[it] is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine...," Kristeva writes. The abject is of the body at the same time it is expelled from the body. It thus bears a relation to the Freudian uncanny, as well as to Lacan's spin on the uncanny, the Real.

If we reorient ourselves from the psychological to the sociological register, then Kristeva's observations become relevant with regard to the matter of nineteenth-century nationalist racism: we can thus interrogate white supremacy as a strategy of abjection by which the modern nation-state assumes its "clean and proper body." But it does so under the condition of a double bind, for purity can be established only in its relation to filth:

"filth becomes defilement," Kristeva writes, "and founds on the henceforth released side of the 'self and clean' the order that is thus...sacred."

In her compelling book, American Anatomies, Robyn Wiegman makes much the same point about the calculus of racial purity and impurity in the antebellum period and beyond. She writes, "the differential of 'blackness'...carr[ies] a modern, double burden: signifying itself, it also anchors the differential meaning of whiteness by lodging it...in the epistemology of black skin." In Wiegman's analysis, however, the crucial leavening agent in the ascendancy of racism (and modernity) in the nineteenth century was the deterioration of the classical episteme's faith in optical verity, so that vision itself would come to be taken for "referential illusion." Ultimately, as Michel Foucault has thoroughly argued and documented, this led in the modern episteme to increased disciplinary power being focused on the body and its "invisible recesses." In The History of Sexuality Foucault refers to this as bio-power.

As Wiegman observes, the rise of bio-power in response to the threat of the unseen had important and tragic consequences for the African-American in the nineteenth century:

As biology assigned to "man" a new sphere of specificity, the racial determinations wrought through this sphere produced not simply the constancy of race as an unchanging, biological feature, but an inherent and incontrovertible difference of which skin was only the most visible indication. The move from the visible epidermal terrain to the articulation of the interior structure of human bodies thus extrapolated in both broader and more distinct terms the parameters of white supremacy, giving it a logic lodged fully in the body.

This dehumanizing logic of supreme, spiritual whiteness firmly anchored in the defiled African-American body is an analogue for the double bind of abjection. It is also related to Poe's literary-philosophical cause celebre, which we noted earlier (via Joan Dayan) was precisely the confounding of spirit and body.

Situated in the context of the intertwining and mutually reinforcing ascension of racist and nationalist ideologies, I hope it is clear (or will become clear) that Poe's abominable mingling of spirit and body has a significance that is political and cultural just as much as it is literary/philosophical. In addressing himself to the black eyes of Ligeia--eyes that reflect the natural world even as they intimate an unknowable soul-identity hidden within; mysterious eyes that are a corrrelative of the speaker's own failure to visually ascertain the secret of Ligeia's being in her physiognomy--Poe draws on the same logic of identity-in-difference that Wiegman establishes as the cornerstone, as well as the inherent contradiction, of white supremacy.

So the question is: How does Poe locate himself with regard to this logic? How does it operate in his fictional writing? While Poe makes no bones about the force of his own racist convictions in works such as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and "The Gold Bug," he never reveals himself to be merely a garden-variety racist; which is to say that instead of masking the deadlock of white supremacy with specious science, fallacious argumentation and/or fervent emotional appeal, as the legions of race propagandists did throughout the course of the nineteenth century, he perversely lingers over the trauma of that deadlock, revealing in curious little fictions its devastating implications for the notion of disembodied and integral white identity.

In a sense, Poe parodies in "Ligeia" the operations by which the nation is sacralized. In so doing, he not only exposes the machinery of white supremacy, he also reveals how, in the words of Thomas L. Dumm, "the achievement of our united states is an ongoing sexual accomplishment." Ideally it's heterosexual, for as the genre of historical romance that emerged early in the nineteenth century reveals, the well-being of the clean and proper white nation hangs on the binary logic of sexual difference just as much as it hangs on the binary logic of racial difference.

It is important to observe, however, that the relation between race and gender binarisms is not just supplemental; for the categories of race and gender in the nineteenth century conjoined themselves in strange ways. As Wiegman points out, what emerged in the antebellum period was "an understanding of race that pivoted on the paradigm of sexual difference." Gender became analogous to race; and their systematic confusion in the construction of white male superiority, and within the matrix of the nation, was a broad cultural phenomenon. It found literary expression, for example, in the light/dark, good girl/bad girl antinomy within the representation of the feminine that became a virtual trademark of nineteenth-century historical romance. Walter Scott's Ivanhoe is a good example here, especially given Scott's enormous influence on Poe. In Scott's novel, Ivanhoe's marriage to the fair, utterly passive, spiritual, and very Anglo-Saxon Lady Rowena coincides with, and is a figure for, the achievement of national harmony and nationalist legitimacy. But Ivanhoe is sorely tempted by Rowena's dark opposite, the sultry Jewess, Rebecca. Her description is powerfully evocative of Poe's Ligeia, and therefore worth noting:

Her form was exquisitely symmetrical, and was shewn to advantage by a sort of Eastern dress, which she wore according to the fashion of the females of her nation. Her turban of yellow silk suited well with the darkness of her complexion. The brilliancy of her eyes, the superb arch of her eyebrows, her well-formed aquiline nose, her teeth as white as pearl, and the profusion of her sable tresses which...fell down upon as much of a lovely neck and bosom as a simarre of the richest Persian silk... (and so on)

Rebecca's description is characterized by the same dusky orientalism as Ligeia's. But there is an important difference. Whereas Rebecca's form is "exquisitely symmetrical," Ligeia's is emphatically asymmetrical: "...her features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen;" and so it is that her strangeness of proportion defies the speaker's efforts to definitively name and know her according to classical aesthetic categorizations. Rebecca's beauty is dark and oriental; it arouses lust, and so it is allied with the demonic in the novel; but like the fair and spiritual Rowena's, it is ultimately re-presentable and objectifiable; and the persons of both women are thus reducible to objects of exchange negotiated between the men who vie for supremacy on the national stage of Scott's romance--the Knight Templar Bois-Guilbert, the Norman Lord de Bracy, Cedric the Saxon, Athelstane, and of course Wilfred of Ivanhoe.

If by the end of the novel Scott's Rowena can be possessed by Ivanhoe, and Rebecca can be expelled from the shores of England, Ligeia can neither be so possessed nor expelled. Instead, she is the one who possesses, and who returns. Her sexuality confounds what would normally be an exercise of mastery on the part of the husband, and "hero." Ligeia is instead the master (her name is anagrammatically related to the Old French, liege), and the speaker, "sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy," resigns himself "with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation..."

Suffice it to say here that if in Ivanhoe national union is a sublimated form of sexual union, and if sexual union acquires its presence, its fullness of meaning through its metaphorical association with nation-building, then the situation is far different in "Ligeia." The narrator of "Ligeia" gets a lot of intellectual guidance, but he doesn't get any sex: "in death only," the narrator claims, "was I fully impressed with the strength of [Ligeia's] affection."

While the deferral of heterosexual desire disrupts nationalist legitimacy, it doesn't signal its breakdown. What does signal its breakdown is the abandonment of heterosexual desire, and phallocentrism. In the climax of the story, which takes place in bed, Ligeia affects her return from the dead by commingling her magical blood with that of the narrator's dying second wife--none other than the fair, blue-eyed, Anglo-Saxon, Lady Rowena, Trevanion of Tremaine. In effect, the mestiza Ligeia, reduced to a kind of orgasmic essence without body, simultaneously makes love to and murders Rowena in this final death-bed scene. What the narrator interprets strictly as Rowena's agony in death is also the sign of her bodily pleasure.

But the speaker too is "startlingly aroused" by the passinate death scene. He claims he must perform some duty. From the perspective of the heroic patriot--and especially from the perspective of the aristocratic Southern gentleman, which is what Poe always pretended to be--the duty must be to protect the integrity of Rowena's sacred blood against the threat of miscegenation. But if this is indeed the duty in question, it is decisively overridden by the speaker's fascination with the act of defilement he witnesses.

In the case of both the fictive speaker and Poe himself, it is precisely the defilement enacted in this lurid deathbed scene that is the ultimate turn-on. As in Ivanhoe, Rowena's sacred blood is invested with a national valence; Insofar as her name marks her conventionally as an embodiment of racial and sexual purity, I am suggesting that the nation-state, which is constituted and regulated by these fantasies of purity, is the target of Poe's deconstructive horror.