which his new course of life had led her to anticipate, it is easy to fancy then, that the quickness of woman’s imagination immediately conjured up in her mind the gloomiest forebodings at such an unlooked for request, but, without daring to expostulate, she purchased the liquor and placed it in his hands, he planted it firmly before him, exclaiming “While it was behind me and out of sight I was always thinking of it and fearing it, but now that it is before me and I can face it, I fear it not and defy it.” The point represented by the artist is where “the enemy” has been placed before him and he is complacently facing and reflecting upon it.
It will be remembered that the original is by the Artist who painted the popular picture of “SPARKING,” published by the American Art-Union a few years since.
A copy of this print should be in the house of every Temperance man, and, to bring it within the means of all, the price has been reduced to
ONE DOLLAR.
John P. Ridner, 497 Broadway, Art-Union Building, New-York.27
Interestingly, in both the painting and the sketch on which it was based (fig. 8), the precariously seated carpenter is situated between two emblems also found in Poe’s “The Black Cat”: alcohol and an ax. Moreover, in Poe’s story, the main character’s purported nemesis is the “Fiend Intemperance.” In Edmonds’s painting and sketch, the old man tilts back in his chair as he looks at the “enemy”—the flask purposefully set on a box on the windowsill. Neither Briggs’s interpretation that “the man bends back in his chair as if to get out of harm’s way” (BJ, 1:306) nor Ridner’s story of his determined rejection makes sense if the “old toper’s” countenance and position are considered. The posture of leaning back on two chair legs suggests a nervous or vulnerable person, not someone bent on getting out of harm’s way. In addition, the man’s brow is furrowed rather than determined. The painting’s setting—a place of work threatened by the desire for pleasure that the bottle of alcohol implies—includes a subtext of violence, as indicated by the ax.
Kevin Avery mentions the ax in describing how Edmonds carefully changed the drawing when he made the painting. Avery notes that in moving “from preliminary sketch to finished painting, Edmonds defined the setting and subject in the thorough and thoroughly compelling manner to which his viewers and patrons had become accustomed.”28 In the painting, the ax leans against an upright log surrounded by broken chips (in Avery’s terms, a “chopping block”), indicating that the ax has been used recently. In the sketch, on the other hand, the ax rests against a longer log that lies on its side, uncut. It appears that Edmonds decided that the “history” of the setting in the painting should seem less relaxed than that depicted in the drawing. He purposefully changed the more relaxed environment by illustrating the strenuous—if not violent—act of having lodged an ax into a log numerous times. These conscious decisions made in the move from sketch to painting, in addition to the man’s precarious way of “facing the enemy,” all signal a complex and ironic response to the Temperance Movement—not the determined, purposeful rejection of alcohol that Ridner wanted to see.
Poe incorporates similarly conflicted images of the alcoholic in “The Black Cat” and “King Pest” (first published in 1835 and republished in the October 18, 1845, issue of the Broadway Journal). Each story presents a highly dramatized picture of drunken debauchery and its consequences—one excessively violent, the other humorously bawdy. That Edmonds knew “The Black Cat” as the story of an alcoholic who kills his wife by axing her through the head—ostensibly because the “Fiend Intemperance” drove him to do so—cannot be ascertained definitively. However, since “The Black Cat” was published in the Philadelphia magazine United States Saturday Post in August 1843, the same year that Poe won first prize in Philadelphia’s Dollar Newspaper’s contest for “The Gold Bug,” Poe’s story must have drawn some attention in the Sketch Club’s literary discussions. Surely, these two sensationalist stories would not have been overlooked by a society devoted to discussing contemporary literature and art. That Edmonds included an ax in the foreground of his painting is quite purposeful; its prominence could easily be considered a nod to Poe’s alcoholic protagonist in “The Black Cat.”
Two of Poe’s other stories, “The Sphinx” and “The Cask of Amontillado”—both written in 1845 at 85 Amity Street—could easily be read as gesturing toward Edmonds’s Facing the Enemy. It would have been difficult to overlook or forget this painting, since it appeared in two arts venues and was posted throughout the city in Ridner’s broadside in 1845. As in Facing the Enemy, the primary image in “The Sphinx” is a man sitting by a window. It is there that he sees what he mistakenly takes to be a monster or enemy; his deranged response would have led to his mental unraveling, if not for his friend’s rational explanation. In “The Cask of Amontillado,” the narrator uses the lure of amontillado to lead his enemy Fortunato, a former friend who had insulted him, to an untimely death. Due to his drunken lightheartedness, Fortunato is unable to see the obvious signs that indicate he is “facing the enemy.” In both stories, the act of seeing plays a prominent role: in the former, distortion causes trauma; in the latter, the unwillingness to see leads to death. Both stories undercut the message of Ridner’s broadside, which urges men to forgo alcohol by simply invoking the will to do so. In neither of Poe’s stories do men succeed in “facing the enemy” with mere willfulness: in “The Sphinx,” the narrator cannot will away his visual hallucination without the help of his friend’s rational explanation, and in “The Cask of Amontillado,” Fortunato cannot see how a trowel could foretell his death. Neither man can simply push himself away from danger; one would have gone mad without his friend’s helpful research, and the other dies.
William Sidney Mount (1807–1868)
Poe’s regard for William Sidney Mount’s work can only be surmised, since Poe does not mention Mount in any of his writings. At first, it might seem that Poe would not have been attracted to realistic images of everyday country life, and many of Mount’s paintings depict such country scenes, often with children. This is indeed the case in the painting The Trap Sprung, which appeared as an engraving in The Gift Book for 1844 alongside Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” Yet to say that Poe would have considered Mount’s work too pedestrian or sentimental might not be as apt as this initial surmise suggests. Although Mount’s paintings look like homely renderings of country life, often, if not always, they include underlying, wry social critiques that, like Poe’s responses to the zealous advocates of the Temperance Movement, reveal a cynical approach to social change. For example, as Deborah Johnson points out, Mount’s 1830 painting School Boys Quarrelling “is also a sly commentary on the warring camps of the American art establishment of the 1830s, with the young combatants representing the conservative American Academy of Fine Arts, led by John Trumbull, and the upstart National Academy of Design, presided over by Samuel Morse. As a clue to his underlying subject, Mount placed a grammar book in the lower left corner inscribed with the words ‘Ocular Analysis.’”29 Poe was likewise cynical about social change, as evidenced in a letter he wrote to James Russell Lowell on July 2, 1844: “I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity” (Letters, 2:449). This sentiment is again expressed in Poe’s 1846 sketch “The Domain of Arnheim” when the narrator reveals his friend Ellison’s perspective on social change: “In the possibility of any improvement, properly so called, being effected by man himself in the general condition of man, [Ellison] had (I am sorry to confess it) little faith” (Tales, 2:1271). Mount, too, must have held this belief, since his paintings promoted both Whig and Democratic causes, depending on the expediency of the commission. Expediency rather than ideological belief was the underpinning of his political and social scenarios.
Mount was known for using wordplay in his images. For example, as Johnson observes, in “Bargaining for a Horse (1835),” two characters cheerfully—and completely calculatingly—negotiate