Toni Morrison has identified The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as a racialized text. What relationships / patterns do you see between Poe and race in his other works?

Subject and Section Professor’s Name Date Exploring Edgar Allan Poe’s Work: An Examination of Racial Allegories Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre, eerie worlds are not merely articles of fiction but are fraught with racist themes and tropes of the nineteenth century. In the paper, “Playing in the Dark,” critic Toni Morrison also suggests “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" as a racialized text pointing to the country's late racial paranoia. It will discuss and analyze the other works of Poe, namely "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Black Cat," which contain signs of racism and racial motifs that are characteristic of 19th-century American literature. To provide the connection between these themes from the selected works of Poe while integrating textual proof with contemporary studies and real-life present-day similarities, this work will benefit from the concepts by Morrison to explain the applicability of these stories today to analyze current racial matters. Some of the significant themes showcased in Poe's “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” are the outrageous experiences of the protagonist Pym as he is lost in the sea and individual dangerous encounters. Passages like these illustrate how Poe's narrative exploits racial fear to heighten the story's tension. The portrayal of the Tsalal as fundamentally other and threatening taps into broader societal fears of racial mixing and the unknown. Since the main plot of the short story focuses on the two lost travelers, the Tsalal, who can be considered firmly differentiated physiologically and culturally from the white protagonists, are racialized in a way that echoes the prejudice of Poe's time. For instance, while narrating the Tsalal people, Poe refers to them as ethnically different: "jet black skin" with “thick and long woolly hair.” This laying off the groundwork not only juxtaposes the white sailors, who are portrayed as the epitome of civilization to the “savage” inhabitants but also heightens the racial aspects that are already encompassed in their relations. A deeper look at key passages that describe people of color shows just how pro-racial prejudice the text is. There is one scene that demonstrates how the incomprehension and fear of otherness affecting Pym and his crew culminates in the violent confrontation with the Tsalal people, alluding to racism. Such passages reveal how Poe employs racial fear in the text to intensify the story's suspense. The realization of the Tsalal as abject and dangerous signifies the externalization of society's anxiety regarding miscegenation and the unknown. This is illustrated by the explicit detailing of how the Tsalal's setting is portrayed as a strange and unforgiving territory, an aspect that re-emphasizes the impossibility of the races to unite. This tension repeats such modern problems as immigration, xenophobia, and profiling, and, again, fear of another evokes conflicts and divisions–presented data by various studies and articles. The reading of race that comes out of all these, which Morrison has given classic sophistication in “Playing in the Dark, “is the one through which these racist themes are to be viewed. Morrison argues that Poe's construction of race reflects a more significant concern with the constitutive fragility of white subjectivity and the looming disquiet of miscegenation. This reveals how these racial concerns become integrated into the tale's plot and contribute to the dissemination of the racial beliefs of the antebellum South as subscribed to by Poe. This insight is quite relevant, especially about the timeliness of the article, because it attempts to explain the longevity of fear that has racial connotations. In the same way that the characters of Poe's tales are burdened by their fear of the Tsalal, the society of the present age is not immune to the questions of racial fear and prejudice, which such discussions as the ones on immigration and systematic racism can further exemplify. Therefore, Morrison's reading of it enriches the appreciation of Poe's writing and reveals contemporary race relations. Therefore, using elements of gothic fiction, Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a narrative of the downfall of the Usher family and their abode as a symbol of race and its decline. I will work base...