Edgar Allan Poe and the American Mind Essay -- Edgar Allan Poe

Throughout the first half of the 19th century, America gazed at itself in a mirror and sawthat it was good. As a beacon for democracy, the United States appeared to shine bright as thelight of the world, demonstrating through the 1828 election of professorship Andrew Jackson thateven a commoner from the countryside had the potential to rise to the top of the politicalhierarchy. On another level, under the growing success and influence of the industrialRevolution, the American people seemed to ascribe widely to the belief that nature could beconquered by man, that no danger posed by the natural world was beyond the salvation offeredby human technology. And then there was the overarching vision of manifest destiny, thenations blessed calling to expand its territory from marine to ocean and thereby fulfill its purposeas a paradigm of virtue amid the savagery of the New World. Beneath the surface of eachfavorable reflection, however, lay shadows of hypocrisy that casted silent judgment upon theseshining images of prosperity the fact that democracy empowered the people, but only if theywere white males the reality that with industrial progress came egalitarian reasoning backward and the truththat manifest destiny served as but an imperialist justification, a sort of divine mandate, for theremoval and massacre of countless Native Americans.This tension amidst negative undertone and positive faade, between dark realities andtheir euphemized reflections, created a critical dissonance in the 19th century Americanconscience, such that the nation appeared plainly promising on the surface, and yet remained ravaged by storms of contradiction underneath. Perhaps inspired by this internal strugglebetween delusion... ...nly reality within the pass of the person.Works CitedFisher, Benjamin F. The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2008. Print.Gargano, James W. The Black Cat Perverseness Reconsidered. Twentieth Century Interpr etations of Poes Tales. Ed. William L. Howarth. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice Hall, 1971. 87-94. Print.Hammond, J.R. Edgar Allan Poe Companion The Short Stories. capital of the United Kingdom MacMillan Press, 1981. Print.Jones, Paul Christian. Slavery and Abolition. Edgar Allan Poe in Context. Ed. Kevin A. Hayes. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013. 138-147. Print.Quinn, Arthur H. Edgar Allan Poe A Critical Biography. 1941. Print.Robinson, E. Arthur. Poes The Tell-Tale Heart. Critics on Poe. Ed. David B. Kesterson. Coral Gables, FL University of Miami Press, 1973. 107-115. Print.