Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries

264 Pages·2008·23.38 MB·English

by  Richard Kopley (auth.)

Edgar Allan Poe and the
Dupin Mysteries
Edgar Allan Poe and the
Dupin Mysteries
Richard Kopley
EDGAR ALLAN POE AND THE DUPIN MYSTERIES
Copyright © Richard Kopley, 2008.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-60470-4
All rights reserved.
First published in 2008 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN 978-1-349-37253-9 ISBN 978-0-230-61644-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230616448
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C
ONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
I Formal Considerations of the Dupin Tales 7
II “ The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and
The Philadelphia Saturday News 27
III “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and
“Various Newspaper Files” 45
IV “The Purloined Letter” and
Death-Bed Confessions 65
V Autobiographical Considerations
of the Dupin Tales 77
Conclusion 87
Notes 91
Works Cited 119
The Murders in the Rue Morgue 141
The Mystery of Marie Roget 183
The Purloined Letter 235
Index 255
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Ia m happy to thank the Penn State administrators who have
directly and indirectly supported this project: John J. Romano,
Vice President of Penn State Commonwealth Campuses;
Sandra E. Gleason, Associate Dean for Faculty and Research, Penn
State University College; Raymond E. Lombra, Associate Dean for
Administration and Research, College of the Liberal Arts, Penn State;
Robin Schulze, Head, Department of English, Penn State; Robert L.
Caserio Jr., former Head, Department of English, Penn State; Anita
D. McDonald, Chancellor, Penn State DuBois; Mary-Beth Krogh-
Jespersen, Chancellor, Penn State Worthington Scranton; Maureen
Horan and Mary Mino, Co-Interim Directors of Academic Affairs,
Penn State DuBois; and Robert E. Loeb, former Director of Academic
Affairs, Penn State DuBois. Important support was provided also by
James L. West III, Director of Penn State’s Center for the History
of the Book, and Hester Blum, Director of Penn State’s Center for
American Literary Studies.
I am pleased to express my appreciation, as well, to the libraries
where I conducted research for this book, including the New York
Public Library (and its Rare Books Division and its Science, Industry,
and Business Library); the New-York Historical Society library; the
New York Society Library; the Library of Congress; the American
Antiquarian Society library; Butler Library of Columbia University;
the library of the Historical Society of Moorestown (NJ); the library
of Christ Church, Riverton (NJ); the Pattee/Paterno Library of Penn
State; the Holland/New Library of Washington State University; and
the Colindale Branch of the British Public Library. I am also grateful to
Whitlock Farm Booksellers, where I found Death-Bed Confessions.
For permission to publish “Edgar Allan Poe and The Philadelphia
Saturday News” (1991), now lightly revised, as chapter II of this book,
I am pleased to thank Jeffrey A. Savoye, Secretary/Treasurer of the
x Acknowledgments
Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. For permission to reprint the
three Dupin tales from the Mabbott edition, The Collected Works
of Edgar Allan Poe, I am glad to express my appreciation to Scarlett
Huffman of the Permissions Department of Harvard University
Press. And for permission to use the Napoleon Sarony portrait of Poe
for the book’s cover, I am grateful to Christopher Linnane, Rights
and Licensing Specialist, Harvard University Art Museums.
For conversations related to this project, I acknowledge, with
thanks, Kent P. Ljungquist (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) and
Theodore Price (Montclair State University).
And I am indebted to the perceptive reader for Palgrave Macmillan
and to the editorial staff, Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Senior Editor;
Julia Cohen, former Assistant Editor; and Brigitte Shull, Assistant
Editor.
It has been a pleasure to share this work with my family—my wife
Amy Golahny, our daughter Emily, our son Gabe, and my mother
Irene Kopley. And I thank my father-in-law Yuda Golahny for his
support.
I
NTRODUCTION
Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his 1973 An Introduction to American
Literature that Poe’s tales “of intellect” “inaugurate a new
genre, the detective story, which has conquered the entire
world. . . . ” Of these tales, Poe’s Dupin tales are especially honored;
indeed, Arthur Conan Doyle referred in 1908 to “those admirable
stories of Monsieur Dupin, so wonderful in their masterful force,
their reticence, their quick dramatic point,” and T. S. Eliot stated
in 1927, “In real keenness of wit and the way in which this keenness
is exhibited no one has ever surpassed Poe’s Monsieur Dupin.”1
Each of the three tales has had its advocates. Mark Twain wrote
in 1896, “What a curious thing a ‘detective’ story is. And was there
ever one that the author needn’t be ashamed of, except ‘The Murders
in the Rue Morgue’?” G. K. Chesterton asserted in 1939, “ . . . I do not
think that the standard set by a certain Mr. Edgar A. Poe in a story
called The Murders of the Rue Morgue, has ever been definitely and
indisputably surpassed.” And Philip Van Doren Stern agreed, stating
in 1941, “Like printing, the detective story has been improved upon
only in a mechanical way since it was first invented; as artistic prod-
ucts, Gutenberg’s Bible and Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’
have never been surpassed.” Yet Dorothy Sayers considered “The
Mystery of Marie Rogêt” in 1929 “the most interesting of all [of the
Dupin stories] to the connoisseur,” and Richard P. Benton supported
this judgment in 1969: “One would have to agree with Dorothy Sayers
that ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ is caviar for the gourmet. . . . ”; it
is “a masterpiece of detective fiction. . . . ” However, Poe described
“The Purloined Letter” in 1844 as “perhaps, the best of my tales of
ratiocination” (Letters 1:450). Ellery Queen concurred, terming this
tale in 1968 “artistically Poe’s finest achievement in the genre he him-
self invented,” and T. O. Mabbott characterized it in 1951 as “surely
unsurpassed in detective fiction and perhaps unequaled.”2
No matter which assessment we share, we recognize that with
these three tales Poe invented conventions that have lasted 165 years,
shaping diverse subgenres of detective fiction, from the hard-boiled
to the metaphysical.3 Meriting particular attention is Dupin’s ratio-
cinative process. In each tale, the detective brilliantly works to solve
2 Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries
the mystery of the crime that has been committed.4 Yet also in each
tale, another mystery remains—that of the literary work itself. For
this mystery, we may learn from Dupin to become our own Dupin.
His detection may be taken as an allegory of our own potential
reading. Poe’s sleuth may help us to sleuth Poe.
Monsieur Dupin employs a methodology involving close atten-
tion to relevant evidence (“a minuteness of attention” [Collected Works
2:546; see also 3:753]), including evidence seemingly outside the case
(“things external to the game” [2:530; see also 3:752]), with particular
concern for the unusual (“deviations from the plane of the ordinary”
[2:548; see also 2:549n, 3:736–37]) and the too-evident (the “exces-
sively obvious” [3:989–90]), and a willingness to identify with anoth-
er’s point of view (“ . . . the analyst throws himself into the spirit of
his opponent . . . ” [2:529; see also 3:984–85]). With varying elements
of this blended approach, Dupin is able to infer what must have hap-
pened, identify the culprit (in “Rue Morgue” and “Marie Rogêt”), and
find the letter (in “The Purloined Letter”). Using a similar blended
approach, but attending to literary creation rather than crime, we
may understand anew the origins of a genre. The principle of iden-
tification invites our application of the methods of Poe’s detective
to solve the mysteries of Poe’s detective fiction—to detect what has
hitherto gone undetected.
The “minuteness of attention,” with concern for the unusual and
the too-evident, may be seen as corresponding to a close reading of
the text, a formal analysis. This approach enjoyed its heyday in the
1940s and 1950s as the New Criticism, and, despite the ascendancy of
other approaches since then, close reading has remained a powerful
method of investigating a literary work. And we now see discussion
of a “new formalism,” an effort “to reinstate close reading.”5 Close
reading is especially rewarding in the case of a writer of such consum-
mate artistry—and hermetic inclination—as Poe. Richard Wilbur
has said, “I think that if he’s read word by word, he turns out, at his
best, to be a very rich and intentional writer.”6 And Poe intimated
the need for close reading himself in January 1842: “The analysis of
a book is a matter of time and of mental exertion. For many classes
of composition there is required a deliberate perusal, with notes, and
subsequent generalization” (Collected Works 2:3).
Chapter I, “Formal Considerations of the Dupin Tales,” offers
a “deliberate perusal” of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The
Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” and “The Purloined Letter.” We find that
like the “words” that “stretch, in large characters, from one end of the