ABSTRACT

In Cotton Mather's early diary, and in Edgar Allan Poe's tale 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar', the 'shadowy' presence of Jewishness reembodies itself. More specifically, a particularly troublesome bodily particular, the circumcised Jewish penis, reasserts and rearticulates itself as a highly animated tongue, issuing hyperactive outbursts. Mather, in a manner echoing what Daniel Boyarin has shown in early Christian negotiations of Jewish scripture and circumcision, refused to embrace a bodily practice of marking the penis. In other words, within Mather's emergent notion of American Puritanism, circumcision was to be available for figural purposes, as a word but not as a corporeal practice. Edgar Allan Poe found much of this noxious. A conglomeration of aesthetic, biographical, and temperamental differences made Poe a self-willed alien to New England literary culture. The sense of Valdemar's shifty nationality is fortified by the allusions to his command of multiple national languages.