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Robin Miskolcze, Poe's ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ and the Dangers of Mobility, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 49, Issue 4, October 2013, Pages 382–392, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqt037
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Abstract
Edgar Allan Poe's ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ (1833) emerged within two significant contexts – one personal and one national. When Poe wrote his story about an unnamed narrator's unexpected collision and subsequent journey to the Arctic on a ghost ship, he was penniless, excommunicated from his adopted family and living in poverty in a Baltimore boarding house. Similarly, the story's narrator is ‘estranged’ from both his family and country as he departs from Java only to be thrown aboard a ghost ship during a storm at sea. An avid follower and supporter of sea exploration, Poe witnessed growing U.S. interest in funding expeditions to Antarctica as a means to signal its progress as a new nation. Although explorative travel narratives often allude to the ‘progress myth’, I argue that Poe's story invokes not only the typical myth of progress, but also a corresponding anxiety about the individual's disappearance within such national narratives of progress.
