has] fragments scatteredthrough material whose massed effect” is very different.70 The first example is Huck. Hissuperstitions are not based on any real fact. He just believes in them. Sitting at his window,Huck claims “the wind [is] trying to whisper something to [him].”71 Then “a spider wentcrawling up [his] shoulder,” and he flicks it into the candle.72 To him, this is a bad omen. Hegets up, turns around three times, crosses his breast three times, and ties a lock of his hair in athread “to keep witches away.”73 Jim, the runaway slave, has different superstitions. He alwayshas “that five-center piece” around his neck because he says it is a charm the devil gave to himto call witches.74 Jim also has a strange hairball that he claimed holds a spirit, and “it knowedeverything.”75 However, Huck’s father, Pap, has superstitions that spring from a differentorigin: his own guilt. When he was drunk one night, he begins “screaming and saying there wasdevils a-hold of him” and that the dead were coming after him.76 But this age was crying formore than superstitions; it had an “insatiable appetite for wonders,” and Edgar Allan Poe was“usually three jumps in advance of the boldest of his contemporaries.”77 He never falls intotradition, but creates his own.78 “Into regions of terror where Hawthorne [and] Irving wouldhave shrunk back disgusted,” Poe plunges ahead, writing stories and poems such as “The Fall ofthe House of Usher”, “Ligeia”, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Raven.”79 At theirbest, Poe’s works are vehicles for “exploring the hidden hinterland of the human mind.”80 Nevertheless, this exploration will soon come to a momentary halt because America will haveother things on its mind, namely the Civil War.Amid all of the bloodshed an...
