White Gothic and Black Detection in Edgar Allan Poe and Barbara Neely.

This essay argues that Barbara Neely reconfigures tropes and dramatic elements that appeared in Edgar Allan Poe's gothic and detective tales to formulate a Black, feminist, working-class detective fiction. In Blanche on the Lam (1992) and Blanche Passes Go (2000), Neely relocates the moral decay and material degeneration of aristocratic estates that Poe depicts in works like "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Black Cat" to the town of Farleigh, North Carolina. There, she reframes the gothic landscape as one designed to safeguard the power of White elites, disavow histories of Black enslavement and servitude, and imperil her protagonist, a Black domestic worker and amateur detective named Blanche White. Neely also reconceives the powers of detection Poe depicts in his Dupin mysteries from the social and economic vantage point of her working-class Black protagonist, for whom detecting is a form of agency and a means of defense against the violence that domestic workers face. In availing herself of Poe's literary materials, Neely reveals patterns of criminality that are sustained by White wealth in the US South, while underscoring the role of detection as an instrument of working-class resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]