A c c i d e n t a l
S o u t h e r n e r
Edgar Allan Poe
Born in Boston but Southern to the core in ways that count
By Nan Graham
One of the great
truths about the South can be found in Truman Capote’s famous quote: “All Southerners go home sooner or later . . . even if it’s in a box.” It has been frequently noted that Southerners who write must at some time leave the South to become enamored with the peculiar unique place the South is. They frequently return to stay.
So too, I believe, it is true that once in the South, Northerners — or those from someplace else as I call them to avoid the Y word — become “Accidental Southerners.” Once here, even temporarily, they are profoundly and sometimes unconsciously affected by the haunting strangeness of our part of the world. One of my favorites is Edgar Allan Poe. Though born in Boston in 1809, he traveled the Southern theater circuit with his actress mother, Elizabeth, down the Eastern Seaboard from Norfolk to Charleston. She may have even played here in Wilmington; I like to think so. The young Mrs. Poe performing here with toddler Edgar and his siblings in tow backstage at Innes Academy, the theater setting replaced in the 1850s by our jewel box of a theater, Thalian Hall. Edgar Allan Poe’s contribution to American literature cannot be discounted as a mere writer of horror stories. His is the first authentic American voice among the young country’s writers whose work were an imitation of Europe’s literature. Poe’s innovative accomplishments:
The Art & Soul of Wilmington
• He wrote the first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and so invented the genre we love today. • Poe was the very first American literary critic who assembled standards for poetry and prose. • He was an early developer of the short story form. And why his claim (and mine) that he is a Southerner despite his Boston birth? Mother Elizabeth Poe had the good sense to die in Richmond and thus sealed Poe’s fate to be brought up a Southerner. He was reared by a foster family, the Allans, in Richmond, Virginia, and always considered himself a Virginian. Women have been long idealized in the South, and few writers have been more obsessed with women than Edgar Allan Poe, like any good Southern man. According to Poe, the death and loss of a beautiful woman was the most elevated of all subjects for poetry and literature. In life the loss of his young mother, foster mother and wife became a pervasive focus of his writing. We see this theme over and over in his works: “Annabel Lee,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Berenice,” “The Raven.” The writer’s preoccupation with lyricism of words and language usage is a predominant feature in Southern writing. Much has been written on Poe’s sense of place, famous in Southern literature. His setting for “The Fall of the House of Usher” is the phantasmagorical swamp, low-country South at its creepiest. And Poe knew the Carolina lowcountry. His “The Gold-Bug” is set on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, where he was stationed as a soldier, an island which today sports names like Raven Drive and Goldbug Avenue, a nod to our Accidental Southerner. My last reason Edgar Allan Poe is really a Southerner? He married his first cousin when she was barely 14 . . . I won’t even touch that one! b Nan Graham is a true Southerner and the literary maven of the Cape Fear. September 2013 •
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