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Summary 3's Source Poe's connection to the Freemasons...

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POE AND THE AMERICAN AFFILIATION WITH FREEMASONRY Publication Information Related Subjects Listen

Full Text: Edgar Allan Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" (1846), over 150 years old and much commented on, still has some fresh insights to offer about American culture. I am thinking particularly of this story's treatment of American Freemasonry--not just overt references to Freemasonry that readers often focus on, but the larger cultural picture involving American culture's affiliation with an old, secret society. In effect, it has taken us a long time to understand that this tale not only draws heavily on issues prominent in 1846 concerning American Freemasonry, but the tale itself actually enacts a Masonic ritual in a way that would not be evident to anyone except Masons and Masonic scholars. Without this historical context, this tale is simply another example of Poe's skillful manipulation of gothic effects--the praise usually given in commentary on the tale. [1] Read in its proper historical context, this tale is participating in Freemasonry's discussion of an emergent national character and the distinct notion of a "sa cred" dimension in national culture in the early nineteenth century in America. Critics in the twentieth century have consistently misread the Masonic dimension of this tale primarily because cultural literacy has changed drastically since 1846, and Freemasonry, no longer a power in politics and popular culture, is not now something many people know about. Nineteenth-century readers would have understood most or all of Poe's Masonic references. We will understand them here only by looking for connections between Masonic texts and art and Poe's use of ideas and motifs from those sources. Bear with me--I am not arguing that Poe was a Mason, or knew an especially lot about Freemasonry, but, rather, that in 1846 everyone knew about Freemasonry in America and, whether they wished it or not, had an inadvertent affiliation or tie with Freemasonry, if only through the popular media. I am also arguing that the misreading of Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" is not just an instance of critics overlooking something that Poe's readers would have readily seen (although this is true). If we take affiliation in its usual definition as establishing a tie, or a commitment, even in the extreme sense of determining a blood tie as in the paternity of an illegitimate child, then the failure to see Poe's affiliation with Freemasonry in this tale is symptomatic of a larger cultural failure to see the American affiliation with Freemasonry as a major channel to eighteenth century values and ideals, and to the generational affiliation of ideas across eras. Freemasonry was a great force in early America, sometimes an overwhelming one, and failing to recognize the impact of this cultural force has been a lapse in American Studies, at least as it is practiced by literary scholars. Freemasonry still has a presence in American culture, a presence acknowledged by history scholars to a very limited degree, but it is a n affiliation not generally credited for its tremendous impact on the country's ideas and values. In what follows, I am discussing two texts, "The Cask of Amontillado" as it reflects ideas of Masonic art and also a piece of Masonic temple art as it embodies a cultural narrative about

democratic values. I view this story and this painting as occasions for glimpsing that larger, neglected picture concerning how Freemasonry has tried to interpret, and is still trying to interpret, the nature of the "sacred" in American culture and the role of the working class as the champion of these ideas. As is quite common in Poe's tales, the narrative direction of this story moves toward a confinement of living space for a protagonist. The result is to provide the gothic and confining environment within which crimes seem naturally to happen. But whereas the common scenario of Poe's stories is spatial disorientation, "The Cask of Amontillado" creates that scenario within a gothic setting almost entirely out of the influential (but little understood) frame of Masonic culture in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America, I am thinking particularly of the idea of the "lodge" as the fundamentally Masonic context for any event and a setting for a characteristically Masonic and "American" sacred space. A recounting of this story's action leads directly to the Masonic material. The story is set during Carnevale (Mardi Gras) in Italy--probably in Viareggio, the famous Carnevale site--during the early nineteenth century. Central to the action is the narrator Montresor's plan to trick his "friend" Fortunato into visiting his wine cellar so that Montresor can there entomb the friend behind a brick wall. They go to the cellar, ostensibly, so that Fortunato can test Montresor's recent purchase of Amontillado, a light sherry. Once in the wine cellar, their exchange oddly turns to Freemasonry, and the following dialogue comes just before the entombment as the two men drink a glass of wine, and Fortunato makes an odd gesture with a wine bottle. "You do not comprehend [the gesture]?" he said. "Not I," I replied. "Then you are not of the brotherhood." "How?" "You are not of the masons." "Yes, yes," I said; "yes, yes." "You? Impossible! A mason?" "A mason," I replied. "A sign," he said, "a sign." "It is this," I answered producing from beneath the folds of my roquelaire a trowel. (1444) The reader is invited initially to share the joke that Montresor, claiming to be a Freemason, will soon be a literal (an "operative") mason in Masonic terminology, who will seal his friend's tomb with real brick and mortar. Fortunato seems actually to be a Mason, while Montresor may be pretending to be a Mason merely to advance his intrigue. A motive for murder begins to emerge in the story when Montresor finally admits that he begrudges Fortunato's station in life "as rich, respected, admired, beloved." "You are happy," he says to Fortunato, "as once I was" (1443). A moment later, Montresor describes his own family as having

been in the past "a great and numerous family" (1444), and Montresor basically objects to the comelately crassness in bearing and manners that he sees in the upstart Fortunato. To begin with, an American reader of the early nineteenth century would not so readily agree on who is a Mason and who is not. In fact, in the conflict between Montresor and Fortunato is the playing out of a contemporary Masonic political conflict. That is, in the early nineteenth century in America there was a rift between two kinds of Masons. As Montresor is committing his crime, for example, he tells how he "forced the last stone into its position [and] plastered it up. Against the new masonry," he reflects, "I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them" (1446). "New Masonry" here, doubtless, is the wall Montresor has just created. In point of fact, in the late eighteenth century, or about "half of a century" before, as Montresor's narrative states, a great Masonic debate arose concerning the emergence of a "new masonry." The first-ever Masonic Grand Lodge was established in London in 1717 consisting of upper-middle class gentlemen-"speculative Masons" in the sense of gentlemen--and not actual working ("operative") masons. The first Grand Lodge in America was St. John's Lodge in Philadelphia established in 1730. Like its English counterpart, St. John's drew its members predominately from the upper-middle class in America. The members were, as Steven C. Bullock says, "many of the province's most prominent men in a society that proclaimed their gentility, cultivation, and high social standing" (Bullock 1990, 348). In the middle of the eighteenth century in America, there was a counter movement of working-class men who joined the Philadelphia and Boston Lodges and sought to control Masonry in those cities and beyond. These men demanded that lodges be adaptable in attitude and procedure to suit the demands and interests of working people and change specific lodge policies. This dispute was over nothing less than who controlled the development and future of Freemasonry. This conflict, which began in England and America, spread throughout the Masonic world, helping to shape Masonic culture and much of the eighteenth-century culture it conveyed in Europe and America. The political and ideological dispute attendant to this transition split the Masonic establishment with fierce acrimony and hatred and eventually, as the upstarts won, gave Freemasonry the workingclass identity it would have from the early nineteenth century to the present. By the last decade of the eighteenth century, this "new Masonry" from the working class had triumphed everywhere in the United States. Oddly, this new Masonry called itself "Ancient" Masonry "to distinguish it from the previous lodges that," the "Ancient" brothers claimed, "had profaned the sacred traditions of the fraternity" (Bullock 1990, 348). The "Ancient" brothers ironically dubbed the older order the "Moderns," in effect, casting the prior order as a heretical falling away from the orthodox and supposedly true tradition of Freemasonry that they believed themselves to stand for. Bullock notes that doctrinal disputes between the two groups were less at issue initially than the simple question of who was in power--working men or upper-middle class gentlemen? Bullock remarks, "the well-documented divisions in [Boston and Philadelphia] involved such significant Revolutionary figures as Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Oliver, and James Otis among the older Masons [the 'Moderns'] and Paul Revere and Joseph Warren among the newer [the 'Ancients']" (Bullock 1990, 349). So great was this dispute that when Benjamin Franklin died in Philadelphia in 1790 and "an estimated 20,000 people, in a city of about 42,000, watched the [funeral] procession," there was no official Masonic attendance of any kind (Bullock 1990, 347). Montresor, in other words, takes up the position of the "Ancients," wrongly maligned and still eager to be socially empowered, while Fortunato is cast as one of the effete "Moderns," an upper-class faction of Freemasonry that supposedly lost touch with its traditions. So when Montresor then says, "against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones," he comments about the defeat of "Modern" Masonry through appeal to orthodoxy that the bones--with their central iconographic significance relating to the authority of tradition in Masonry, which I will return to-stand for. The defeat

of Fortunato, a defeat for the "Moderns," has a definite political and historical significance for Freemasonry as an institution and for what it meant in the early nineteenth century to be a Mason and, really, even to be a citizen of the Republic.

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