Bedlam is the Only Cure:

Inverting Panoptic Biopower and the Failure of a Psychotic Revolution in Poe's “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”

Abstract

While popular interpretations of Poe's dark comedy “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” describe the text, its themes, aesthetics, and narrative as satirical political commentary on American democracy, a latently subversive polemic against nineteenth Century American medico-legal praxes and their ancillary institutions, or as a parody of the works of other notable authors such as Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Parker Willis, the fact that Poe's narrative transpires within the confines of a Maison de Santé suggests that the text is also importantly theoretically complex. Referring primarily to Michel Foucault's discussion of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish (1975), his analysis of the relationship between sexuality and madness presented in The History of Sexuality (1976), and H. H. Scullard's historiographical study of the festival of Saturnalia and its public and private praxes in Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic (1981), this paper will explore how Poe's narrative presents madness and bedlam as a force and a site of actively disrupting the primary psychophysical principles of the panopticon's establishment and maintenance of biopower over its inmates. As such, this paper will examine the ways in which Poe presents madness and bedlam as 'cures-by-inversion' against the malady of the criminalization of socio-culturally excrescent forces/behaviours and the pathologising of discord, ruckus, sensuality, excess, and the absurd.