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Building on Poe, Queerness, and the End of Time (Palgrave 2022), this chapter proceeds to consider Poe’s characters who deviate—or attempt to—from the normative experience of time (that which regulates individuals both in terms of daily routine and larger life patterns and trajectories) in a manner that might be labeled as queer. Here, I focus specifically on the physical and geographical spaces where this temporal deviance occurs in Poe’s fiction, from the village of Vondervotteimittiss in “The Devil in the Belfry,” the Venice palazzo in “The Assignation,” the suite of colored rooms that are the setting of “The Masque of the Red Death,” and the shared residence of detective C. Auguste Dupin and his companion in the trio of mystery stories beginning with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The chapter explores an evolution of perspectives on Poe’s part about the challenges some spaces might pose to the potential for temporal deviance as well as the consequences for the physical spaces of individual and widespread rejection of temporal norms. In “The Devil in the Belfry,” the temporal deviation caused by the stranger’s takeover of the small village’s clock-tower is seen as having only negative effects upon the lives of every inhabitant. In “The Assignation,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and the Dupin mysteries, the spaces of temporal deviance are designed or modified specifically to allow the inhabitants to evade or reject temporal norms. Both the visionary’s palazzo and the suite of ballrooms in Prospero’s abbey attempt, if ultimately unsuccessfully, to enable individuals to be liberated from the regulating temporality of the clock. And the mansion in Paris’ Faubourg Saint Germain that is the home of Dupin and his companion is used by them to resist normative temporal routines, specifically in their practice of using the shutters to keep out daylight, allowing them to live exclusively as if it were perpetually night. The shift in tone about the spaces in these works suggests Poe’s changing perspective; while the narrator of “Devil” can only see nonnormative temporality as a threat to society, the Dupin stories offer a vision of individual temporal deviants creating a space for themselves free from much temporal regulation, an existence that allows them to become a genuine benefit to their society rather than a potential threat to it.

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The Spaces of Temporal Deviance in Poe’s Fiction

  • 章节

  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Paul Christian Jones

摘要

Building on Poe, Queerness, and the End of Time (Palgrave 2022), this chapter proceeds to consider Poe’s characters who deviate—or attempt to—from the normative experience of time (that which regulates individuals both in terms of daily routine and larger life patterns and trajectories) in a manner that might be labeled as queer. Here, I focus specifically on the physical and geographical spaces where this temporal deviance occurs in Poe’s fiction, from the village of Vondervotteimittiss in “The Devil in the Belfry,” the Venice palazzo in “The Assignation,” the suite of colored rooms that are the setting of “The Masque of the Red Death,” and the shared residence of detective C. Auguste Dupin and his companion in the trio of mystery stories beginning with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The chapter explores an evolution of perspectives on Poe’s part about the challenges some spaces might pose to the potential for temporal deviance as well as the consequences for the physical spaces of individual and widespread rejection of temporal norms. In “The Devil in the Belfry,” the temporal deviation caused by the stranger’s takeover of the small village’s clock-tower is seen as having only negative effects upon the lives of every inhabitant. In “The Assignation,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and the Dupin mysteries, the spaces of temporal deviance are designed or modified specifically to allow the inhabitants to evade or reject temporal norms. Both the visionary’s palazzo and the suite of ballrooms in Prospero’s abbey attempt, if ultimately unsuccessfully, to enable individuals to be liberated from the regulating temporality of the clock. And the mansion in Paris’ Faubourg Saint Germain that is the home of Dupin and his companion is used by them to resist normative temporal routines, specifically in their practice of using the shutters to keep out daylight, allowing them to live exclusively as if it were perpetually night. The shift in tone about the spaces in these works suggests Poe’s changing perspective; while the narrator of “Devil” can only see nonnormative temporality as a threat to society, the Dupin stories offer a vision of individual temporal deviants creating a space for themselves free from much temporal regulation, an existence that allows them to become a genuine benefit to their society rather than a potential threat to it.