Whats in the Box?

: Poes Subterfuge in Godeys Ladys Book Darren Hutchinson

At the end of the film Se7en, Detective Mills screams the question, Whats in the box? already knowing the answer: his wifes head. In that movie, John Doe, the serial-killing performance artist of the seven deadly sins, consummates his lifes work by delivering the coup de grace in the form of a Crosstown Express Truck delivery to the desert where he has led the police. Through this horrific package, Doe reveals his own destructive envy of the normal, happy human existence (decapitating Mills wife because he could not procure her love), while at the same time unleashing Mills vengeance, culminating in Mills shooting him in the head, perfecting his masterpiece, showing the world that depravity has no outside.

Se7en earned over 327 million globally. It would have probably earned less if it had explicitly dwelt on its subtext, a subtext involving the rage and impotence of the police, the futile pursuit of the individual criminal in an urban world of decay, and the impossibility of a good life within the bad one. But as skillfully aesthetic, intellectual filmmakers in America must do, Se7ens creators Andrew Kevin Walker and David Fincher constructed their own box for their message, delivering visceral social critique in the package of a flashy blockbuster featuring Americas favorites: cops, serial killers, and Brad Pitt.

Edgar Allan Poe lies buried at the root of the tree that bears the fruit of authors utilizing popular media in order to sell subversive ideas (as well as the fruit of works containing

bodies in boxes.) Although Poe eschewed the heresy of the Didactic in literature, he would not have counted hiding secret disclosive mirrors in vehicles of mass consumption as the imparting of moral lessons. Rather, he would have viewed the covert exposure of the ugliness of the audience to itself as merely a form of artistic truth, even if no one other than the writer received its pregnant effect.

The paradigmatic example of Poes strategy of marketing contained-exposures can be found in his insertion of the story Thou Art the Man into Godeys Ladys Book. In the November edition of 1844, Poes tale is set between a wonderful poem entitled The Stray Deer which regales us with the image of a man saving a child by wrestling an attacking stag and the generically labeled gem Lines written in an album where the author somehow endeavors to woo a woman through apologizing about his atrocious verse. Bookending these pieces are fictions by Anna Fleming about the visit of some Country Cousins where life-lessons are learned and the more serious, yet horribly sycophantic and sappy Two Periods in the Life of Haydn by Elizabeth Ellett, who was involved (possibly) in flirtations with Poe that resulted in pistols and death threats from her brother Colonel Lummis, who sought to retrieve her amorous letters.

Poe sets his own Chinese box within this auspicious enclosure of literary excellence. His story features an anonymous narrator who at the end turns out to be the central character in his own recounting. The supremely rational, yet macabrely obsessed narrator tells about the attempt by one Mr. Charles Goodfellow to pin the murder of Mr. Shuttleworthy on his nephew Pennifeather who stands to receive an inheritance in the event of

Shuttleworthys death. Desiring revenge on Pennifeather because of an altercation, Goodfellow concocts an elaborate plan to frame him, a scheme involving the murder and robbery of Shuttleworth, the planting of evidence, and the subtle leading of a search party to the conclusion of Pennifeathers guilt. We eventually learn that the invisible narrator, however, has caught onto Goodfellows plot and his faade (This is the narrators impression of Goodfellows front: Not a man of them but would have taken his bare word for a thousand at any moment; and, as for the women, there is no saying what they would not have done to oblige him.) In order to expose the evil beneath Goodfellows duplicity, the narrator undertakes an odious enterprise.

Off-camera of the story, he finds the rotting body of Shuttleworthy where Goodfellow has deposited it, hauls it up, takes it home, and then places it in a crate and has it sent to Goodfellow disguised as a belated gift of Chateau Margaux from his departed friend. Not only has the narrator stuffed the body inside the crate, but also he has somehow rammed a whalebone inside its putrid flesh so that it will spring up like a jack-puppet when the crate opens. When the lid is removed before a company of invited guests, the corpse pops out and our narrator secretly venquilotrizes Thou Art the Man, directed to Goodfellow from its rancid lips. Goodfellow confesses his crimes and instantly dies, and immediately after, it becomes clear that the story has been another confession, that of the narrator who exposes his own role in the construction of what had been called the Rattleborough miracle.

Poe himself did not confess to grabbing a smelly lump of decomposing viscera and forcing it between the pages of Godeys Ladys Book in a volume which contained an exquisite

dandyesque portrait of the moralist William Shay Arthur known for his temperance novel Ten Nights in a Bar-room and What I Saw There and another of a rejected teacher, eyes downward, who is urged to remember that A brighter torch than that of Hymen is kindled at a higher altar to light your onward path to the region where kindred angels await their coming favorite. But one might suspect that Poes spirit experiences posthumous joy since, in our cynical time, we are, like him, able to detect the reeking ooze of antebellum high culture, with its hypocritical moralism, its violent falsifications of human life, and its pressing of art into the eternal shallowness of commercial acceptability. If Poe had said that at the beginning of his story, it would probably not have been published.

That would have been regrettable, since then we would also not be able to witness the juxtaposition of Thou Art the Man with The Three Breakfasts by William E. Burton. By 1844, there was certainly no love lost between Poe and Burton. And since Poe had many enemies on which to inflict symbolic justice, it would be a stretch directly to identify Burton with Goodfellow and Poe with the beleaguered Pennifeather whom Goodfellow attempted to destroy, it certainly is an irony that Burtons work surfaces here near this particular tale where such direct revenge can be so efficiently accomplished.

For instance, in the final section of The Three Breakfasts, Burton engages squarely in the heresy of Didacticism as we follow the individual fates of criminals about to be hanged, learning about each that there were extenuating circumstances to his crime, so that the punishments at the end come to be seen as brutal and unjust: at the conclusion of the piece Burton satirically condemns the hangmen:

In a quarter of an hour, ere yet the hanging men were free from the spasmodic lingerings of death, good humor reigned triumphant at the jail breakfast; the sheriff complimented the chaplain on the quiet behavior of his clients; and, in return, the clerical functionary praised the executive arrangements . . . [and] with an expression of meekness, saidIt was, indeed, a mornings work of which he was justly proud! One can imagine Poes Schadenfroh here not only because his story exposes the moralistic shallowness of those who write like Burton, finding such Goodfellows to be hypocritical sham artists, quick to judge but also secretly willing to throw their companions under the capitalist train at a moments notice, but also because it reveals that these Goodfellows perpetually whip public sentiment for their own advantage: as Poes narrator asks in his story, Cui bono? In this case, Poe would find Burton pandering to the liberal sympathies of his Ladybook constituency, educating them in the moral sentiments of Christian pity that they already have in order to secure their affections. With the sharpness of Nietzsche, Poe pushes the soiled background of the good shepherd and his followers in their faces: as Burton and the good readership of Godeys sit in their chambers sipping their cordial wine, congratulating themselves on their moral superiority, the voice of Poes narrator emanates with its deathly timbre: Thou Art the Man.

Or even, the narrator may have said, Thou Art the Men. In the context of its bound volume, Poes story also reveals the dangerous gullibility of the mob. After all, it is not Goodfellow who actually captures and condemns Pennifeather: rather, the stupid villagers are led each step of the way according to his machinations. Such stupidity, for instance,

might be suspected of the idealized New York Colonists in the issue who instantiate noble virtues: If in New York there was less obvious religious zeal than in Massachusetts, there was less also of bigotry; if there was less enterprise, there was also more contentment; less of public spirit, there was more personal independence. And, Poes narrator would perhaps continue, if there was less temptation to puritanical witch-burning, there was also more inclination to mindless rioting and panic; if there was less pathetic Europhilia, there was also more blind Americanism. In his story, Poes narrator inhabits the (at that time) undeveloped zone of the enlightened spectator of culture, cognizant even of its own underlying madness and obsessions, calling the other to confess while confessing itself. Along with the bodies of the deaths on which American culture was built through movements of crowd madness, in his box-story Poe has also hidden a lens: the eye of criticism which remains undetected by the rabble, even when it exposes its miracle at the end, even when it reveals that it too is plagued by vengeful needs.

By masquerading his game of exposure as a rational narrative with a twist, Poe inserted his poison pill into the heart of polite literature and yet also made little money to help ward off starvation. Other than his grotesque imagery, which helped his work to sell through its novelty in the settings in which it was presented, it is doubtful that his contemporary readers would have encountered his tale as anything other than light entertainment. Given the lack of specific geographical details and the references to French wine, for instance, the readers of Godeys might have assumed that the hunt for Shuttleworthys body took place

in an idyllic European landscape and that his trial was carried out in a rustic English village. They might have thought that in the distance, one might glimpse the Haddon Hall from the portrait A Day at Chatworth and Haddon, without noticing that Poe found death and unreason everywhere, on and beneath all idyllic surfaces: the bloody marks of the wounded horse on the ground, the stinking well, and the hiddenness which allows bodies to be deposited out of sight (for the one body the clever narrator discovers, thousands remain beyond his vision.) These readers might have even believed that Poes work represented just another ethical fable like Ana Maria Halls (writing as Mrs. S.C. Hall) The Fair Client which extols female cleverness over male manipulation: perhaps, even, they would have viewed Poes tale as expressing the simplest of moral themes: Be sure your sins will find you out.

Unfortunately for poor Poe, a certain publics recognition of the wicked immorality of his tales, an immorality beyond the sensationalism of returns from the grave, came too late: in his life, the hope for acknowledgment was as dead as his lost mother. But for those of us who stand in the lineage of Poe, for those of us who look for boxes to be sent, who eagerly await their arrival, Poes subterfuges flash as part of his brilliance, allowing us to retrieve his corpse from time to time. For those of us educated by Hitchcocks boxes, for instance, like the one containing the dead body at the center of the room in Rope, as hidden in plain sight as the subtext of sexual violence in all of his popular films or the boxes of Fincher or the Coen Brothers or Warhol, all of whom owe a debt to Poes espionage, Poes putrescent package in Godeys is the true centerpiece engraving and organizing structure. For his final act of revenge, Poe provided a box in which the rest of the material surrounding it could be

stuffed. For us, the inheritors of Poes anachronistic cynicism, outside the quarantine zone of nostalgia and historical curiosity, the other works that provide a context for Poes story in the issue in which it appeared smell like dead meat.