See also my The Very Spirit of Cordiality: The Literary Uses of Alcohol and Alcoholism in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Baltimore, MD: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1978.

5 Strangely, Mabbott—in Collected Works, vol. 2, p. 238—is reluctant to credit this tale with any value, citing in support Robert Louis Stevenson’s denigration dating from 1875. A more convincing critique is Louis A. Renza’s “Poe’s King: Playing it Close to the Pest,” in Edgar Allan Poe Review 2:2 (2001), pp. 3-18.

6 Such is the argument of Clark Griffith in “Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics,” in University of Toronto Quarterly 24 (1954), pp. 8-25.

7 I assess this technique in “Blackwood Articles à la Poe: How to Make a False Start Pay,” in Perspectives on Poe, edited by D. Ramakrishna, New Delhi: APC Publications, 1996, pp. 63-82.

8 Interestingly—in regard to playing off supernatural and natural—Poe revised what in “The Assignation” had first read as “the Demon of Romance that stalked up and down the narrow canal” to “the Genius of Romance that stalked up and down the narrow canal.” This change eliminates any hint of supernaturalism and substitutes, fittingly, a word that has as its root meanings “creator” and “begetter,” thus deftly preparing for the lack of creativity, artistic or sexual, in old Mentoni as contrasted with both in the Marchesa’s lover, who probably fathered her child.

9 Since racial issues have been connected with Pym so often in recent years, one might profitably consult Randall Kennedy’s Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. See especially Kennedy’s “Introduction” and chapters 3, 6, and 7. Noteworthy, too, is Kennedy’s observation: “Distinctly underdeveloped is the literary tradition that portrays interracial relationships that are at least potentially rewarding” (pp. 137-138). Naturally, as a person of his time, Poe would have had conflicts concerning racial issues, and in expressing any thoughts regarding these matters he no doubt would be ambiguous. That Dirk Peters survives when Pym and their Tsalalian hostage do not may register such uncertainties. See also Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 579-580, 590-591. Joseph V. Ridgely’s assessment of Poe and racism (in which he reminds us that the author of an extremely pro-slavery article in the April 1836 Southern Literary Messenger was not Poe) should confute more speculative ideas concerning Poe and race. See Ridgely’s “The Authorship of the ‘Paulding-Drayton Review’,” in Poe Studies Association Newsletter 20:2 (Fall 1992), pp. 1-3, 6. See also Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson’s The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, pp. 200, 205; and Terence Whalen’s Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, chapters 5 and 6. For earlier worthwhile opinions about Poe’s novel, see G. R. Thompson’s “Romantic Arabesque, Contemporary Theory, and Postmodernism: The Example of Poe’s Narrative,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 35:3, 4 (1989), pp. 163-272; and Poe’s Pym: Critical Explorations, edited by Richard Kopley, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1992. Poe’s debts in Pym to another influential tradition in his day are illuminated by Kent Ljungquist’s The Grand and the Fair: Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques, Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1984, chapter 2.

10 A gloss on these masculine-feminine mergings may be found in Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, pp.