The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Central to any detective fiction is the disequilibrium created through uncertainty. Because the entire point of a mystery centers around uncovering the unknown and unseen, Poe, as creator of this genre, incorporates different layers of ambiguity in this work. Certainly, there are literal clues pertaining to the featured crime, which are either misread or unnoticed except by the most attentive, but perhaps more intriguing is how Poe cloaks the identity of his narrator. Character ambiguity does not feature as a device in the more well-known characters of the genre like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson or Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Arthur Hastings. In these stories, both detective and sidekick are fully fleshed. However, in Poe’s seminal work, the narrator is given no name, and readers discover little of his background. So ambiguous is his identity that a viable interpretation of his character is that he is merely another aspect of C. Auguste Dupin.

The epigraph, which alludes to “what name” and “hid himself,” hints at the author’s purposeful playful veiling: “What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture” (1). This quote, from Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk, posits questions that cannot be answered. Because the protagonists and events of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” “are not beyond all conjecture,” any interpretation of truth and identity is rendered possible. Essentially, Poe puts the reader into the detective role.

It is generally agreed that Edgar Allan Poe never visited or lived in France. However, he excelled in French studies at the University of Virginia. Of note is Poe’s influence in France after his death. He was influential in the French Symbolist Movement and his works were widely popular through translator authors like Baudelaire. It is no coincidence to this story that the first organized civilian police force was established in Paris, France, in 1812, making this European metropolis the perfect place to launch the genre of detective fiction.

Poe’s constellation of the story in Paris as the macro setting anchors the plot and grounds its themes. The title itself containing the words “Rue Morgue” is uniquely French. The first line of the narrative declares, “Residing in Paris during the spring and part of the summer of 18–, I there became acquainted with a Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin” (3). Everything that proceeds from both the title and this first line is understood as an outflow of place. French vernacular abounds in the story. Names and titles, in particular, would be jarring to the native-only English speaker and would garner the attention of the English/French bilingual. One of the effects of crafting an overtly foreign setting is to destabilize the reader, to immerse them in an unpredictable and potentially unknowable dialogue. Poe introduces a foreign land and in so doing forces the use of context to make sense of the action. Even his characters are cosmopolitan, all seeming to have originated elsewhere. The plot itself capitalizes on language difference through various witness testimony where distinguishing the French language from others will ultimately point to the perpetrator and victims’ motives and behavior.

The micro setting of the L’Espanayes’ apartment has its own function. Poe introduces a concept now widely used in detective fiction: the locked room. The apartment, with no apparent exit for the perpetrator, creates a mystery within a mystery.