Poe is also generally credited as the inventor of the detective story, although scholars have established that he was drawing on earlier sources when he created the character of the ratiocinative detective C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin, who has a genius for devising intellectual solutions to baffling mysteries, clearly inspired Arthur Conan Doyle when he created his own, more famous, intellectual detective, Sherlock Holmes. And writers, for television and movies as well as print, have been devising variations on this type of character ever since. Every year the Mystery Writers of America recognize Poe’s central importance to the genre by giving out awards for excellence called the Edgars.
Poe’s major stories, despite their differences in details of plot and setting, focus on some central themes: themes of murder and madness; of engulfment, confinement, and catastrophe; of mind over matter, in the form of doubles and life after death; and of puzzles and cryptography. These are by no means exclusive or definitive categories. Poe scholars have grouped and regrouped his stories into many different schemes over the years. But nearly every one of his tales can be considered in light of at least one of these themes.
Madness and Murder. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Black Cat” are all narrated by murderers, and not very sympathetic ones. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” the narrators might have gotten away with terrible crimes, but their guilty consciences overwhelm their attempts to appear normal. In “The Cask of Amontillado,” the narrator did get away with murder; the story itself is his confession fifty years after the fact.
In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator insists that he is not mad, then proceeds to tell a gruesome story of murdering the invalid old man he looks after and dismembering and hiding the body. He confesses to the crime because he can still hear the beating of the old man’s heart under the floor where he hid it. In “The Black Cat,” the narrator starts in similar fashion, proclaiming his sanity despite the incredible events he describes. Alcoholism led him to abuse his wife and the pet cat he felt a special attachment to; after he killed the cat in a fit of drunken spite, a similar-looking one came along, seeming to the narrator like a vengeful double of the first. He tried to kill the second cat and struck his wife dead with an ax when she got in the way. He, too, hid the evidence of his murderous act, but when he accidentally walled up the cat in the basement with his wife’s body, the animal’s cries gave him away.
Both of these stories have retained the power to shock in the matter-of-fact way the narrators confess to their crimes. Nameless and seemingly lacking any real motive or sense of remorse, they are perfect examples of what author Hannah Arendt, in a different context, referred to as “the banality of evil.” The killer in “The Tell-Tale Heart” claims to love the old man—it’s just that his vulture-like “pale blue eye” stares at him, chilling his blood. The drunken husband of “The Black Cat” attributes his terrible behavior to “perverseness,” which has a ring of authenticity about it in terms of an alcoholic’s self-loathing justification of his actions. In both cases the men seem to be lashing out murderously against a sense of being trapped in their own lives. They try to wall up the evidence of their discontent, but it still breaks through and exposes them.
“The Cask of Amontillado” is a variation on the same plot, with Montresor burying his nemesis, Fortunato, in the family catacombs where he keeps his wine. Killing him in this way also serves to hide evidence of Montresor’s madness. At least he offers a motive that makes sense: he intends to avenge himself on Fortunato for a “thousand injuries” and one insult, though neither injuries nor insult are specified. We are never told what Fortunato’s crimes against Montresor were, but it is hard to imagine that they rival Montresor’s evil act of vengeance. Montresor is more successful as a murderer than the narrators of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” but the fact that he is telling the story to someone suggests that ultimately his crime could not stay hidden either.
In each of these stories Poe utilizes one of his favorite devices, the unreliable narrator. And his narrators—high-strung, opium addicted, frequently delusional or psychotic—are especially unreliable. Their insistence on their sanity tends to have the opposite effect of confirming their craziness. They are intent on justifying themselves and consequently are oblivious to the immorality of their behavior. Montresor in “The Cask of Amontillado,” for example, and the narrator of “William Wilson” never seem to realize that they are actually the villains of the stories they tell.
Tales of Entrapment, Engulfment, Catastrophe. Some of Poe’s most overtly fantastic adventure stories convey a sense of being trapped, engulfed, or otherwise overwhelmed by hostile natural forces. These tales are dreamlike or allegorical in that they seem to make the most sense when understood in symbolic terms. “Ms. Found in a Bottle” and “A Descent into the Maelström” are set at sea, but they are not really sea stories, in the sense of Robert Louis Stevenson’s or Herman Melville’s. Poe’s interest in the sea is like that of Coleridge in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: as the setting for man to have an existential confrontation with the enormousness and the indifference of nature. In “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” the author of the manuscript is the only survivor when his ship sinks in a hurricane. He writes from an enormous ghost ship that is being pulled along in the same storm, on which the decrepit crew does not acknowledge his presence. Himself a ghostly stowaway on the ship’s doomed voyage, he can only watch as they are sucked into a whirlpool at the South Pole, pulled down to an uncertain fate.
“A Descent into the Maelström,” with a description of the Norwegian coast at the beginning to help establish its authenticity, also features a giant whirlpool. Unlike the narrator of “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” who apparently dies at the end of the story, the Norwegian fisherman sucked into the vortex in “Descent” is able to lash himself to a barrel and thus float to the surface rather than going down with the ship, as his brother does. The fisherman (who, in a slight variation on Poe’s usual technique, tells his story to the narrator) relates how, when he was certain he was going to die, he could appreciate the beauty of the nighttime sky seen from the depths of the whirlpool. Still, the terror of his experience that night aged him, turning his hair completely white.
“The Masque of the Red Death” is another story of enclosure, set within the walled palace of a prince. The courtiers around the prince dance away their lives, arrogantly assuming that they are safe from the plague that ravages the world outside their quarantined luxury—except when the clock tolls the hour and the orchestra stops, reminding them of time’s irresistible passing. The end of the story, when the courtiers are all felled simultaneously by the red death, is Poe at his most chilling. The specific symbolic intent of “The Masque of the Red Death” has been debated by critics, some of whom consider the story an antiaristocratic fable, while others take its theme to be more universal. Clearly, though, like “A Descent into the Maelström” and “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” it offers a vision of man’s helplessness against nature’s capacity for annihilation.
Stories of Mind over Matter. The presence of doubles in characters’ lives and the apparent possibility of life after death are recurrent themes in Poe’s stories and verse. They seem to represent the mind’s control over the physical laws of the universe. In “Ligeia” the title character is the narrator’s deceased first wife, a student of the occult who wills her own return from beyond the grave. She takes possession of the narrator’s second wife, Lady Rowena, through a glass of wine Rowena drinks. The narrator passes a harrowing night as Rowena dies and is reborn as Ligeia, with her long, black hair and otherworldly eyes. Curiously, the story ends there, leaving the reader to wonder what happened after the two lovers reunited.
In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” considered by many critics to be Poe’s best story, the lady who seems unable to live in the world is Madeline, twin sister to Roderick Usher. The last members of a family weakened by intermarriage, Roderick and Mad
eline look alike, and they are destined to die in each other’s arms. They both suffer from unusual mental conditions: Madeline has spells of deathlike trances, and Roderick (like the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart”) is oversensitive to the slightest sensory stimulus. Again, the processes of the mind are given a morbid physical expression—most notably in a poem by Roderick called “The Haunted Palace,” in which he dramatizes the tormenting thoughts that haunt the palace of his mind: “Vast forms that move fantastically / To a discordant melody.” (Poe first published “The Haunted Palace” separately from “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in the American Museum of Science, Literature, and the Arts, April 1839.) The story climaxes with the deaths of the last two Ushers leading to the literal collapse of the family home, the haunted palace of inbred generations of the Usher family.
Poe was fascinated with the death of a beautiful woman as a literary device, but there’s no sense of triumph or joy when Ligeia and Madeline return from the dead. Rather, those stories provoke terror over the double, that creature who should not exist but somehow does. The same theme is explored in “The Black Cat,” with the mutilated Pluto and his ominous double, and, most fascinatingly, in “William Wilson.” In that story the narrator describes his encounters with his doppelgänger, also named William Wilson (the narrator uses an alias to tell the story), who foils his schemes to cheat, seduce, and steal from gullible targets. The narrator, because he is the one telling the story, gets to be the William Wilson; nevertheless, it seems clear that the other Wilson is probably the more honorable person. Despite the fact that the narrator is a scoundrel, Poe successfully conveys chilling moments when he looks upon his twin and realizes with terror that he is not unique in the universe.
Stories of Detection and Ratiocination. After his gothic tales, Poe is best known for “inventing” the detective story, with “The Gold-Bug” and stories featuring the eccentric French detective C. Auguste Dupin, including “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.” There were intellectual detectives, and mysteries solved by rational means, in stories and novels before Poe’s; but by focusing the story on the process by which the mystery is solved, and by giving the detective a companion to narrate his ingenious solutions, Poe established a format for detective stories that has been followed ever since. As he observed in a letter to his friend and fellow writer Philip Pendleton Cooke, his detective stories operate by a kind of literary sleight of hand that makes Dupin’s deductions seem more impressive than they actually are: “In the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling?”
The Dupin stories and “The Gold-Bug” show Poe at his most pedantic. Novelist D. H. Lawrence called these stories “mechanical tales” in which the “interest is scientific rather than artistic.” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” opens with the narrator, a friend of Dupin’s, giving an extended introduction about the powers of the analytical mind, then describing the rare gift for analysis that Dupin possesses. For Dupin, men seem to have “windows in their bosoms”—that is, he can easily see the truth about them that lies beneath their superficial appearance. He gets most of the facts he needs to solve the Rue Morgue case from newspaper accounts of the incident. The unusual details described in the newspaper, combined with a cursory examination of the physical evidence, tell Dupin that the deaths were not murders at all, since the killer was not human but an escaped animal. In “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin matches wits with a government minister who is also a thief and an extortionist. The police, as effective in this matter as they were in the Rue Morgue case, have searched the minister’s home but are unable to find the sensitive letter he has stolen. Dupin astonishes them by producing the letter; and the rest of the story is his lengthy explanation of a fairly simple solution: the minister was hiding the letter in plain sight, in a card-rack hanging from the mantelpiece. Dupin’s explanation of how he arrived at his solution by putting himself in the mind of his adversary anticipates the prominence that such “profiling” is given in criminal investigation today.
“The Gold-Bug” initially seems to be about another of Poe’s obsessed, deranged protagonists. The amateur entomologist Legrand worries both his faithful slave, Jupiter, and the narrator, another nameless figure who, like Dupin’s companion, is on hand to play the role of straight man to his brilliant friend. The golden scarab beetle that Legrand has found is ultimately incidental to the plot. It leads him to the surprising realization that he is in possession of a pirate’s treasure map. He keeps Jupiter and the narrator literally in the dark until they actually find the gold; then, like Dupin, Legrand explains in excruciating detail how he solved the cryptogram that led them to the treasure. As in the Dupin stories, Legrand’s puzzle solving seems less impressive if one remembers that Poe created the puzzles with the idea that his characters would solve them. But Poe was proud of his ability to decipher codes like the one in the story, and in another article on the subject invited readers to send in cryptograms of their own for him to solve.
Poe as a writer was fascinated with extreme states of consciousness, of the sorts experienced by dreamers and madmen. But he put great stock in the rational mind, as well. The narrators of “A Descent into the Maelström” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” are examples of Poe protagonists who use their wits to survive in extraordinary situations.
Poe’s Poems
Poe considered himself a poet first and foremost. He wrote verse precociously, publishing his first collection, Tamerlane and Other Poems, when he was eighteen years old. By the time he was twenty-five, in fact, he had composed most of the poems he would ever write. In the 1830s and 1840s, Poe turned more to writing stories and reviews as a way to make ends meet. He did return to poetry in the last years of his life, when he wrote most of the poems that he is remembered for today—“The Raven,” for example, was introduced to the public in 1845, and “The Bells” and “Annabel Lee” were rushed into print after his death in 1849.
Poe’s poems are symbolic, rhythmic, otherworldly, and allusive. He strove for a “unity of effect,” as he explained in his 1845 essay “The Philosophy of Composition”; he planned for “The Raven” to be short enough to read in one sitting and to combine a melancholy tone and language with a beautifully sad poetic subject, the loss of a beloved woman. Critics continue to argue about how serious Poe was regarding his methods in “The Philosophy of Composition”—some claim that the essay is actually one of his literary hoaxes. However he wrote “The Raven,” though, it was undeniably the popular success he designed it to be. It was reprinted around the country, which brought Poe widespread fame but (because of the copyright laws of the day) little financial reward.
“A Dream Within a Dream.” Dreams and dreamers are common in Poe’s verse, as a glance at the titles of his poems makes plain: “The Sleeper,” “A Dream Within a Dream,” “Dream-Land,” “Dreams.” Other poems, such as “The Valley of Unrest” and “The City in the Sea,” while not expressly descriptions of dreams, are dreamlike in the symbolically charged fantasy landscapes they portray. Dreams were important to the Romantics for the visions they provided of other planes of existence or of a timeless mythic past, and Poe was more vision haunted than most. His embrace of the poet’s role as visionary brings an intensity to his poems—the “unity of effect,” without which they might seem artificial and dated.
Sleep is also linked with death in Poe’s poems, and as such it leads naturally into his favorite poetic topic. “The Sleeper” is dead, and the narrator prays that nothing will disturb her eternal rest: “Soft may the worms about her creep!” “Dream-Land” is a nightmare vision of a land of death “Out of SPACE—Out of TIME.” Poe’s dreamland is not a pastoral scene but an apocalyptic landscape with “surging” seas, “skies of fire,” and “lone and dead” lakes. Similarly, “The City in the Sea” takes as its subject the biblical story of God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah
; as in a dream, the poem’s vision of a sunken (or sinking) city, with a hellish light that seems to illuminate it from below, is simultaneously vivid and indefinite. The poem is haunting, but it defies clear description.
Poe’s Romantic preoccupation with dreaming was, in a way, entirely conventional and in fitting with the style of the time. It is his use of the convention, his fervent search for the visionary experience to be found even in nightmares, that distinguishes his verse.
The Death of a Beautiful Woman. Poe rather famously wrote in “The Philosophy of Composition” that the death of a beautiful woman “is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”—that is to say (facetiously or not), it is the one that most readily creates the atmosphere of melancholy he thought was the most beautiful literary effect. It is not necessary to delve too deeply into his life story to appreciate why Poe would be drawn to death as a poetic subject; beginning with his mother when he was two years old, he lost a succession of women in his life. But Poe does not mourn those women in his poems, at least not directly. “Ulalume,” “Lenore,” and “Annabel Lee” are all examples of dead women as poetic subjects. The poems tell us nothing about what they were like as living women; their main importance for Poe is the musical quality of their names.
“Nevermore.” Poe’s famous late poems, “The Raven,” “The Bells,” “Ulalume,” and “Annabel Lee,” are almost experiments in their poetic effects, as he spelled out in “The Philosophy of Composition.” Thematically, these poems are in keeping with his earlier works: They are about the death of a loved one and the subsequent escape, or the inability to escape, into a world of dream or fantasy. What most makes them remarkable are their rhyme schemes and rhythmic language. No other poet of early America paid such close attention to the musicality of the words he chose.
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