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Racial And Cultural Anxieties In Poe's The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym, Alyssa M. Amaral

Undergraduate Review

This essay considers the cultural fears and anxieties that are portrayed in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Drawing upon Tsalal’s natural hesitancy for nature to intermingle with itself, in addition to the tragically brutal clashing of white and black cultures, Poe highlights 19th-century United States’ desire for segregation between North and South, while also depicting southern slave owners’ looming fear of slave uprisings.