Poe Studies

"My premise," Alexandra Urakova writes in the introduction to Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, "is that literature, as a form of reflective thinking, had an important share in the intellectual discussion of the gift and the related issues of reciprocity, generosity, obligation, debt, and gratuity" [5–6]. In order to uncover "'a literary counter-genealogy'" of the gift, she examines a wide range of texts that illustrate how "'danger enters into the gift-giving process at multiple points'" [6, 13]. As her title suggests, however, Urakova's focus is ultimately less on gifts as objects of exchange than on giving as an action. Situating her study between the rise of the gift book in the 1820s and the rampant commercialization of Christmas in the 1890s, Urakova provides chronological literary case studies of the multiple ways in which the ideal of disinterested giving often masks a dangerous and violent underside. Instead of freedom, dangerous giving exacts subservience; instead of self-reliance and autonomy, it exacts indebtedness. In its most extreme form, dangerous giving leads to civil or physical death in which persons become things and the drive for perfection leads to loss of life.

In her study, Urakova uses anthropological and philosophical approaches to gift theory to frame close readings of representative texts. Her sources include five novels—Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Oliver Wendell Holmes's Elsie Venner, Mark Twain's (unfinished) The Mysterious Stranger, and Henry James's The Wings of the Dove—along with a wide range of periodical fiction. In the process, she recovers and analyzes a number of lesser-known nineteenth-century American texts. She gives particularly illuminating readings of Edmund Quincy's "Dinah Rollins," published in The Liberty Bell in 1840; William Dean Howells's "Christmas Every Day," published in 1886 in St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks; and Mary Wilkins Freeman's "The Reign of the Doll," first published in Harper's Monthly Magazine in 1904. She also uses digital archives to provide data about the prevalence of writing about gifts and giving. For example, she reports that "a word search in volumes of Godey's Lady's Book from 1830 to 1845 reveals meanings of [End Page E14] gift that vary from a token to the gift of money or estate" [4], and that "by the late 1870s the words 'giving' and 'buying' were often being used interchangeably" [193]. These data points underscore her analytical pivot from the gift as a category to giving as a social action while also signaling the commodification of gifts arising from a growing post-bellum market economy. They offer a provocative distant reading to contextualize the close readings of selected texts that constitute the majority of her analysis. In the examples above, she does not cite specific databases or search parameters that she used, making it difficult for other scholars to replicate or build on her claims. In general, however, Urakova is clear and compelling in her overall finding that "there is a broad scope and array of meanings" in depictions of giving or exchange [4].

The only Poe text included in her study is "The Purloined Letter," which appears in an early chapter on "Un-Gendering the Gift Book." Urakova categorizes this text as a paradigmatic example of "dangerous giving" on three fronts. First, it was published in the literary annual The Gift: A Christmas, New Year, and Birthday Present. As a genre, gift books are dangerous because they "obscure the commercial strategies of their publishers" in order to appear to exemplify disinterested, "'true' giving" [72, 71]. They inherently mislead the receiver. Second, the tale's publication in The Gift invites us to read the letter itself as a "fictional double" for the gift book: a gift within a gift [89]. The synecdochic connection between book and letter is troubling, however, given the plot's emphasis on the letter's theft and manipulation. Third, the violence is in the service of destabilizing—or "un-gendering"—fixed gender roles. Poe marginalizes the "heteronormative exchange of sweet tokens" represented by S—'s correspondence with the Queen and replaces it with a violent homosocial "exchange of 'evil turns'" between Monsieur Dupin and the Minister D—, "his old enemy and double" [12, 218, 88]. The middle-class white female audience that is the primary audience of gift books will, Urakova posits, experience such "subversion" as dangerous [72, 75].

The lens of dangerous giving that Urakova provides, both in her reading of "The Purloined Letter" and in the book more generally, provides a potentially useful framework for thinking about other dimensions of Poe's life and work. The most obvious is to think about the history of Poe's publications in The Gift in terms of the commercial vs. free binary that Urakova identifies. For example, his first Gift publication, "Manuscript Found in a Bottle," appeared despite his writing its publisher, Henry C. Carey, that it had been published elsewhere and "sen[ding] another tale in place of it" [Kathryn K. Shinn, "Gift Books," in Edgar Allan Poe in Context, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge: Cam-bridge Univ. Press, 2013), 182]. Poe's letter raises the question of the relation between "dangerous giving" and literary reprinting in gift books. Urakova [End Page E15] contrasts the purloined letter to the romantic ideal of gift-giving in "The Necklace," an engraving published alongside of Poe's tale. In doing so, she builds on Meredith McGill's exploration of the "disjunction between word and image" in antebellum gift books "that was dictated by their method of publication and reinforced by their aesthetic" [Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 29] as well as Gila Ashtor's detailed analysis of "the mini-cluster of poetry and images" surrounding "The Purloined Letter" in The Gift and how they "undermine prevailing suppositions that narrative alone can structure readings" of the text [Gila Ashtor, "The Gift (Book) that Keeps on Giving: Poe's 'The Purloined Letter,' Rereading, Reprinting, and Detective Fiction," Poe Studies 45.1 (2012): 62]. While Urakova's interests are more philosophical than material, her inclusion of the engraving nonetheless reinforces the idea that what readers may perceive as a generous and selfless gift—a book for displaying as well as reading—can constitute an example of "dangerous giving" when authors are not properly recognized or when it subverts social expectations about gender and genre.

In the preface to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe gestures to the complexities of dangerous authorial giving when the fictional Pym articulates his reluctance to "give my narrative to the public" and corresponding concern that "the public were […] not at all disposed to receive it as fable" [PT, 1007–08] (my emphasis). The dangers of receiving fiction as truth are here underscored by the rhetoric of giving and receiving. The concept of "dangerous giving" underscores the degree to which the ideal of disinterested giving—that is, that the author only has the interests of the readers/recipients at heart—not only obscures the professional status of the author but can also mislead the public. At the same time, Poe's own ambiguous investment in the ideals of sentimental exchange in the context of courtship are evident, for example, in his decision to sit for and give a daguerreotype portrait to Sarah Helen Whitman on the day of their engagement in November 1848. It was the only portrait that he directly commissioned himself [Michael J. Deas, The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1989), 42]. The engagement lasted only a month, and Whitman then kept the daguerreotype hidden for decades because she "'thought it did not represent him truly'" [Deas, Portraits and Daguerreotypes, 42]. A sentimental token meant to commemorate an engagement is instead hidden away as an uncanny and inaccurate representation of a dead ex-fiancée. Like the Bronzino portrait in The Wings of the Dove that Urakova discusses, this daguerreotype miniature shows the dangerous connections between "art, for all of its immortality, and death" [184]. [End Page E16]

Throughout her study, Urakova repeatedly returns to the idea of death as a form of dangerous giving. Beginning with Hobomok's sacrifice in Child's novel and extending through James's depiction of Milly Theale's dangerous bequest, she shows how nineteenth-century U.S. authors depicted death as at once the ultimate gift from God and the only way to end a constant cycle of indebtedness that characterizes life on earth. Whether ceremonial or sentimental, gift giving almost always invites the expectation of reciprocity. God's gift of death and eternal salvation as a form of grace, on the other hand, cannot be reciprocated. This vertical, "asymmetrical exchange between God and the believer" replaces horizonal social relations [172] and is at the heart of representations of gift giving in domestic novels such as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar. It also underlies Louisa May Alcott's depiction of Beth March's death in Little Women, a novel that Urakova does not mention. Alcott juxtaposes Beth's death against multiple forms of both reciprocal and disinterested giving, beginning with a Christmas scene featuring wrapped copies of Pilgrim's Progress and charitable and neighborly gifts of food and ending with Aunt March's bequest of Plumfield to start a school.

By the end of the nineteenth century, skeptical writers like Twain had pivoted to see death as attractive not because it is a gift from God but rather because it "spares a person from debt" [175]. In focusing on this critique of indebtedness, Urakova draws a through line between Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Gifts," one of three theoretical "nodes" with which she begins, and Twain's satirical emphasis on self-reliance. "We wish to be self-sustained," Emerson writes in "Gifts." "We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten" [qtd. on 29]. In this respect, Urakova's study provides a useful framework for seeing anew the uneasy juxtaposition between self-reliance and community building that has a long history in claims of American exceptionalism. Indeed, Urakova concludes that the patterns of dangerous giving she studies have "a distinctly American accent and contributed to the building of an American national identity" rooted in a "resistance to any form of coercion […] and a pathological fear of being indebted" [221].

This tradition of resistance was accompanied and enabled by the structural and individual coercion of "slavery and racism" and "the forcible removal of Native American population[s]" [221]. Within the book, this shameful history of slavery and genocide functions somewhat like the purloined letter: hiding in plain sight as the most egregious example of dangerous giving even as the narrator pursues other leads. For example, rather than front-loading as a "theoretical node" Frederick Douglass's insistence, in "Bibles for the Slaves," that giving Bibles to enslaved persons is "a shame, a delusion, and a snare," [End Page E17] Urakova embeds this stunning critique in a later chapter on "Racial Identity and the Perils of Giving" [qtd. on 108]. As a piece of stolen property, Douglass insists, an enslaved person cannot receive or hold other property as a gift, and all abolitionist energies should be used in giving the "gift" of freedom [109, 108]. The contradictory position of the enslaved within a reciprocal gift economy is also the focus of Urakova's illuminating analysis of Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which she reads Topsy as an unwanted gift to Ophelia who gains "salvation" by learning to give sentimental, disinterested gifts, such as flowers, that "trump" her own enslaved status [136].

Rather than starting with the question, "how does nation building in the nineteenth-century United States account for its indebtedness to stolen lands and people?" Urakova leads readers into this shameful fact, showing the ways in which critical emphasis on the legacy of self-reliance and determination, as well as the expansion of market relations and commodity culture, can obscure their reliance on the nation's history of receiving dangerous gifts of land and people. Having exposed this key concept, she seeks to subvert established white social conventions by analyzing texts that imagine a more equitable future. While not occupying the bulk of her analysis, these texts stand out as important interventions in reframing literary study of the period. For example, Quincy's "Dinah Rollins" depicts a Black woman who, following the death of her enslavers, provides food and shelter to a disabled white woman. By overturning "the metanarrative of white benevolence," Urakova shows, Dinah exemplifies "an act of pure disinterestedness" and "exceptional generosity" [112, 111]. In light of Emerson's and Douglass's understanding of disinterest as a pre-condition of self-reliance, Dinah becomes a figure who combines sentimental ideals of generosity with "exceptional" self-reliance. Urakova provides another example of positive gift giving in the Black community in her study of the antebellum manuscript friendship album of Amy Matilda Cassey, a free Black woman living in Philadelphia. The writings and drawings in the album highlight the ways in which "the Black contributors to albums affirm themselves as communal proprietary subjects precisely in the act of giving" and thereby exemplify a non-hierarchical gift exchange [118]. Finally, Urakova concludes her study with a brief coda on the reciprocal exchange in the ceremonial giving of (pretend) coffee in Sioux writer Zitkala-Sa's "The Coffee-Making," one of the essays in Impressions of an Indian Childhood. In her reading, this essay, while "on the margins of the nineteenth-century literary canon, offers a glimpse of an alternative, non-Euro-American vision and attitude" [225].

Overall, Urakova's study lives up to its claim that literature is a form of "reflective thinking." In this case, she encourages reflection not only on the importance of the gift economy to nineteenth-century U.S. nation building [End Page E18] but also to the specific connection between writing and gift giving. Just as the purloined letter becomes a figurative double of the gift book, writing in general gains a "metaphorical affinity" with giving. For this reason, she observes, "writers and scholars are especially sensitive to [the] effects" of a "culture that pursues and supports" connections between "writing and giving, the text and the gift" [17–18]. This metanarrative permeates her text and raises questions not only about the ways in which nineteenth century authors like Poe used fiction to figure their own concerns about the "gift" of writing but also about the gift economy in academia. In a post-pandemic moment when peer review is under strain, the question of how to recognize and reward uncompensated academic labor is more urgent than ever. In that context, books like Urakova's underscore the continuing importance, and pleasure, of reciprocal scholarly exchange, even, or especially, in the context of a national and international reckoning with the legacy of dangerous giving. [End Page E19]