ABSTRACT
The flaneur’s complex dynamic of intoxication and disengagement within his interiors may also be read in Poe’s approach to exterior environments. Later in this chapter, I will examine the ways Poe applied the principles of flanerie to his readings of (super)natural as well as urban topographies, but I shall begin by examining Poe’s physiognomy of the city. Having spent most of his life living in various metropolitan centers on the Eastern seaboard (Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York), Poe was certainly sensitive to both the pleasures and the dilemmas of city life. As Catherine Quoyeser suggests, “Poe’s own literary or aesthetic responses to the characteristic sights and sounds of city life can be summed up in a contradiction: he embraced and reviled them” (147). And as Dana Brand has illustrated, he was also thoroughly familiar with the practices of the literary flaneur as urban observer; critics like Quoyeser have suggested that Poe’s “Doings of Gotham” series emulated the work of Nathaniel Parker Willis, whom she views as a prime example of the nineteenth-century American literary “salaried flaneur” (158). In Chapter Two, we considered Poe’s ambivalence regarding conventional flanerie and his mockery of its more facile pretensions and shallowness as a commodified literary genre. Elsewhere, though, Poe clearly registers his fascination with the flaneur’s problematic relation to his urban environment.
