"Tawdry Physical Affrightments": The Performance of Normalizing Visions of the Body in Edgar Allan Poe's "Loss of Breath" (2003)

In response to a gift copy he received from the illustrator a new Poe volume, William Butler Yeats complained, Analyse the Pit and the Pendulum and you find an appeal to the nerves by tawdry affrightments, at least so it seems to me who am yet puzzled at the fame such things (77). Yet while the popularity sensationalism in antebellum American literature, professional medical journals, magazines, and theater undoubtedly influenced the composition Poe's fiction, this fiction opposed the mass cultural entertainment Poe's day, entertainment in which extreme bodily violence, sensationalistic suspensions reality, and hyperbolically performances abounded. Poe strove to construct prose works finer taste and sophistication than those he believed he encountered in popular culture by exposing the crudeness and absurdity the literary bodies commonly consumed by American readers. Certainly, there are bizarre physical affrightments aplenty in Poe's own work: dismemberment, decapitation, violent medical intrusions on the body, and murder. Moreover, Poe's penchant for creating characters with abnormal bodies is evident in phases his career. The short-statured Pompey, Hugh Tarpaulin, and Bon-Bon appear in the comic and satiric tales the 1830s while later, more horrific tales, such as Hop-Frog, feature protagonists with multiple abnormalities. These intriguing visions extraordinary bodies for which Poe is so famous, however, ultimately are founded on a core vision bodily normality that forms the ground for his critiques antebellum popular culture. To diverge from established bounds normality, or the presumed natural conditions human bodily existence, is, in the context Poe's short fiction, to be aesthetically vulgar, linguistically disruptive, and racially inferior. In satirizing antebellum popular literature and entertainment from this point view, Poe simultaneously reinforced his culture's racist ideology. This essay considers how one early comic tale--Loss Breath--demonstrates the profoundly conservative nature Poe's vision the body, a vision that insists upon the enforcement rigid, normalized conceptions the body, the transgression which results in collapse into aesthetic, social, and political absurdity. Breath (titled A Decided Loss when first published in November 1832), depicts the misadventures a narrator, appropriately named Lackobreath, who--while preparing to scream insults at his wife--suddenly loses the ability to breathe and must comically struggle to live as a body without respiration in a world where such a body is, course, an impossibility. Structurally, the tale is quite odd. Its central conflict occurs in the opening paragraphs while the remainder the text offers only a loosely plotted description the trials and tribulations Lackobreath suffers as a anomaly, ordeals which only render his body even more abnormal. While travelling in a cramped coach he is crushed by three men of colossal dimensions, such that ultimately all [his] limbs were dislocated and [his] head twisted on one side. They then hurl him from the coach, causing the breaking both [his] arms, and when they throw his trunk after him, they fractured [his] skull. Lackobreath is soon picked up and, believed dead, sold to a surgeon who, he claims, cut off my ears ... made an incision in my stomach, and removed several my viscera for private dissection (67). (1) Poe's darkly slapstick humor becomes, in its excess, farcical. While one might be inclined to read the tale as a comedic quest, an impaired man's odyssey to correct his deficiency, Lackobreath spends very little time actually searching for his lost breath and stumbles upon the resolution to his dilemma (bargaining with Mr. Windenough for some his surplus breath) by accident. …