"The State of Their Stomachs": The Politics of Consumption in Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

ABSTRACT: From gorging gulls to masticated men, appetitive concerns litter Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . And yet, critics have infrequently attended to the metaphors of eating at play in Poe's only novel. This article takes its place at the critical table through a literary and theoretical analysis of consumption in Pym , a work composed against the backdrop of early nineteenth-century dietary reform movements that sought to advance nationalist ideologies. Using critical eating studies as a framework, I contend that acts of ingestion in Poe's only novel often destabilize nationalist rhetoric linked to imperial expansion and subject-making. Beginning with a brief examination of Poe's testy relationship with literary nationalism and its correlation with Pym's ironic embodiment of emerging US nationalist attitudes, this article then closely reads instances of cannibalistic, spatial, and animalistic consumption. In so doing, it parses the differences between an impersonal hunger often ascribed to animals and "appetite"—defined herein as a culturally encoded desire often concretized through imperious, extractive behaviors. In locating these differences, I identify how various modes of eating within Pym disturb that nationalism which Poe found so unpalatable.