S8.3 Discussion Questions for The Complete Auguste Dupin Stories: "The Murders in the Rouge Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," "The Purloined Letter."

Movie poster from 1932 
(Universal Pictures)

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in Graham's Magazine in 1841.  It has been described as the first modern detective story.  

1. The title of the story is "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," but the narrator spends nearly the first third of the story on chess players, whist players, and Chantilly the comic/tragic actor.  What is the purpose of this long introduction to Dupin's method?   What would be the effect of jumping right into the murder plot?

2. In explaining his logic for his "tales of ratiocination", Poe talks about presenting clues for the reason to reason along with his protagonist.  Do we have the clues we need to solve this mystery before the sailor appears to explain all?   What is the purpose of presenting so much detail to the reader (e.g., the three spoons of metal d'Alger, the four gold Napoleons, etc.) that will never reappear in the story again?

3. The narrator describes Dupin as a perfect model of the "old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul".  The two parts of the soul that the narrator identifies are 1) imaginative or "creative", and 2) rational or "resolvent."  But "creativity" and "reason" also seem to be split between characters, such as the narrator and Dupin or the Prefect of Police and Dupin.   What role do these character foils play in proving the stories point about analytical verses analytical/ingenious minds?  

4.  How effective is "the Murders in the Rue Morgue" at making the case for ingenuity that it sets out to make? 

5.  What were your impressions of Dupin's character?  Why do you think Poe didn't provide a lot of insight into Dupin's feelings and his back story and what effect does this have on the reader's engagement in the story?   Did it make for a satisfying reading experience?  

6. Poe includes the following clues that lead to Dupin's conclusion that an orangutang committed the murders: No one was able to distinguish the language one of the voices was speaking the night of the crime; the non-human hair that was found at the crime scene, the incredible strength of the perpetrator, the questionable means as to how the perpetrator entered the scene of the crime, and finally the article in the newspaper advertising a lost orangutang.   Why do you think Poe used a wild animal as his murderer in the story?  Did you find it absurd or believable?  What similarities are there between Dupin's character and the Orangutan?  

7.  How is the figure of "the detective" a variation on the notion of "the police" during this time period? 

What similarities do you find in current day perceptions and response of law enforcement 181 years after the printing of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue?"   

illustration credit: Marc Trujillo 

8.  It is well documented that Poe's Dupin served as the role model for later, more famous detectives like, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's, Sherlock Holmes (1887's A Study in Scarlett) and Agatha Christie's, Hercule Poirot (1920's The Mysterious Affair at Styles).  Both Doyle and Christie chose to have their detectives follow similar patterns of deduction and reasoning as Dupin, but Sherlock or Poirot were given story lines where the secondary characters, be it person or setting, were allowed equal time to the famous detectives, giving a human quality to what were, like Poe's Dupin, very eccentric characters.    Why do you think Poe chose to make the character of Dupin so wooden and prone to, long, droning monologues of deductive reasoning eg., the description of the window and the nail head???  Do you think it might have had anything to do with insecurities within Poe himself, something maybe he felt he had to prove as a writer to be credible?  

9.  Dupin lives with an unnamed man?   What were your impressions of that relationship and why do you think Poe chose to keep that relationship private, even tho he allowed the unnamed man to be the narrator of his story? 

   Movie Poster from 1942 

     (Universal Pictures)

Marie Rogêt is based on a real-life crime that took place in New York City in 1841, when the corpse of a beautiful Cigar Girl at Andersons Tobacco Shop, called Mary Rogers, was found floating in the Hudson River.  The backstory on Mary is that she wasn't merely just a pretty girl, she was "the girl" in New York City and was known to attract the attention of men, including authors Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.  She created a stir in October of 1838 when she went missing for a brief period, but it was then determined that it was a publicity stunt for the shop she worked at.  So when she went missing again in three years later and her body later found in the Hudson River, her death caught the attention of the governor, William H. Seward, who offered a reward for information and Edgar Allan Poe became fascinated with the case.  In fact,  Poe's involvement with the case formally began with a letter written in 1842 to the NYC Police Department: "under the pretense of showing how Dupin....unravelled the mystery of Marie's assassination, I, in fact, enter into a very rigorous analysis of the real tragedy in New York." 

11. Why do you think Poe chose the Mary Rogers case for his companion story to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue?"  What personal motive might he have had to imply that he knew who killed Marie? What do you make of the blurred lines between fiction and reality in the story and what do you think it does to further help or hinder the character development and believability of his detective, Dupin?  

12. If Poe was so adamant about solving the real murder of Mary Rogers,  why move the fictional case from New York City to Paris?   Why not just move his character of Dupin to New York?   

Original story of Marie Rogers

by J. H. Ingraham, Esq. 1844

Daguerreotype thought to be of 

Mary Rogers, circa 1840

12. "Marie Rogêt" is different than "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in that it is based on a real case, uses a human suspect, there is no investigation, relies on newspaper stories for the details and ultimately provides no confirmed resolution.   What impact did each of these  changes have on Poe's use of ratiocination as a means to solve a crime and did any of these changes make the story more plausible than the Rue Morgue story? 

13.  Some critics of Poe have said that "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" reads more like an essay than a work of fiction.   Yet, others have said that the essay format of the story enhances our understanding of Dupin, his logic, his ability to ferret out the hidden story and makes him further believable as a detective?  Do you are agree or disagree and why?   

12. In Marie Rogêt, Poe's Dupin continues to portray the police as bumbling and inept, and he adds in this element of the newspapers as intentionally sensationalizing headlines about the murder in order to sell more newspapers.  Sound familiar?   What parallels can we draw from Dupin's characterizations with today's headlines and the public's distrust of the police and journalism?  Do you think Poe bears some responsibility for further sensationalizing Mary Rogers (Marie Rogêt)death? 

14.  There is virtually no character development in this story outside of Dupin, and virtually no plot.  It's merely Dupin giving his opinion on the sensationalized newspaper accounts of the story.  Why do you think it was so important for to Poe to prove the newspapers wrong?  Why do you think Poe left out 

15. Poe originally wrote the story of Marie Rogêt in 2 installments and the 2nd installment solved the case, stating that Marie (Mary) had died at the hands of a spurned lover, but Poe later changed the story and added new evidence, a 3rd installment,  to include the "premature delivery" (the name of an abortion in those days) when it became known that an innkeeper named Frederica Loss on her deathbed confessed that Mary Rogers and her companion had come to the inn she owned and that Mary died during an abortion procedure and Fredrica's son dumped her body in the river to keep the police from finding out.  Why would Poe change his story if he claimed in his initial letter to the police that his fictional Dupin had solved the case? What impact does the "new evidence" have in the case and does it do anything to discredit the genius of Dupin? 

16. Discuss what role imagination plays in "The Purloined Letter."  At what point do the characters appear to be using (or misusing) their imaginations?

17. What is the conflict in The Purloined Letter and does it make it a successful detective story?  Why or why not? 

18. Why does everyone in "The Purloined Letter" seem so uninterested in what the letter actually contains?  Is there any good reason to assume that the scandal is sexual in nature? 

19.  Why does Edgar Allan Poe have his character Dupin replace the real letter with a facsimile? 

20.  What are the prefect's strengths and weaknesses as a detective in "The Purloined Letter?" 

21.  Why does Poe have the Prefect leave before Dupin begins his explanation to the narrator concerning the solving of the crime?  

Edgar Allan Poe 

Born: January 19, 1809 Boston, MA

Died: October 7, 1849 Church Home & Hospital, Baltimore, MD

Spouse: Virginia Eliza Clemm- Poe's first cousin

Married at age 13 years, 1836-1847, died of consumption

Biography

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination, so too has Poe himself. He is often seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809, but within three years both of his parents had died. Poe was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia, while his brother and sister went to live with other families. Mr. Allan reared Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe dreamt of emulating his childhood hero, the British poet Lord Byron. The backs of some of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal early poetic verses scrawled in a young Poe’s handwriting and show how little interest Edgar had in the tobacco business.

 

In 1826 Poe left Richmond to attend the University of Virginia, where he excelled in his classes but accumulated considerable debt. The miserly Allan had sent Poe to college with less than a third of the funds he needed, and Poe soon took up gambling to raise money to pay his expenses. By the end of his first term Poe was so desperately poor that he burned his furniture to keep warm. Humiliated by his poverty and furious with Allan, Poe was forced to drop out of school and return to Richmond. However, matters continued to worsen. He visited the home of his fiancée, Elmira Royster, only to discover that she had become engaged to another man.

 

The heartbroken Poe’s last few months in the Allan mansion were punctuated with increasing hostility toward Allan until Poe finally stormed out of the home in a quixotic quest to become a great poet and to find adventure. He accomplished the former by publishing his first book Tamerlane when he was only eighteen; to achieve the latter, he enlisted in the United States Army. Two years later he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point while continuing to write and publish poetry. But after only eight months at West Point Poe was thrown out.

 

Broke and alone, Poe turned to Baltimore—his late father’s home—and called upon relatives in the city. One of Poe’s cousins robbed him in the night but another relative, Poe’s aunt Maria Clemm, became a new mother to him and welcomed him into her home. Clemm’s daughter, Virginia, first acted as a courier to carry letters to Poe’s lady loves but soon became the object of his desire.

While Poe was in Baltimore, John Allan died, leaving Poe out of his will, which did, however, provide for an illegitimate child whom Allan had never seen. By then Poe was living in poverty but had started publishing his short stories, one of which won a contest sponsored by the Saturday Visiter. The connections Poe established through the contest allowed him to publish more stories and to eventually gain an editorial position at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. It was at this magazine that Poe finally found his life’s work as a magazine writer.

Within a year Poe helped make the Messenger the most popular magazine in the south with his sensational stories and his scathing book reviews. Poe soon developed a reputation as a fearless critic who not only attacked an author’s work but also insulted the author and the northern literary establishment. Poe targeted some of the most famous writers in the country; one of his victims was the anthologist and editor Rufus Griswold.

 

At the age of twenty-seven, Poe brought Maria and Virginia Clemm to Richmond and married Virginia, who was not yet fourteen. The marriage proved a happy one but money was always tight. Dissatisfied with his low pay and lack of editorial control at the Messenger, Poe moved to New York City and to Philadelphia a year later, where he wrote for a number of different magazines. In spite of his growing fame, Poe was still barely able to make a living. For the publication of his first book of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, he was paid with twenty-five copies of his book. He would soon become a champion for the cause of higher wages for writers as well as for an international copyright law. To change the face of the magazine industry, he proposed starting his own journal, but he failed to find the necessary funding.

 

The January 1845 publication of “The Raven” made Poe a household name. He was again living in New York City and was now famous enough to draw large crowds to his lectures—he also began demanding better pay for his work. He published two books that year, and briefly lived his dream of running his own magazine when he bought out the owners of the Broadway Journal. The failure of the venture, his wife’s deteriorating health, and rumors spreading about Poe’s relationship with a married woman, drove him from the city in 1846. At this time he moved to a tiny cottage in the country. It was there, in the winter of 1847, that Virginia died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four. Her death devastated Poe and left him unable to write for months. His critics assumed he would soon be dead. They were right. Poe only lived another two years and spent much of that time traveling from one city to the next giving lectures and finding backers for his latest proposed magazine project to be called The Stylus.

 

He returned to Richmond in the summer of 1849 and reconnected with his first fiancée, Elmira Royster Shelton who was now a widow. They became engaged and intended to marry in Richmond after Poe’s return from a trip to Philadelphia and New York. However, on the way to Philadelphia, Poe stopped in Baltimore and disappeared for five days. He was found in the bar room of a public house that was being used as a polling place for an election. The magazine editor Joseph Snodgrass sent Poe to Washington College Hospital, where Poe spent the last days of his life far from home and surrounded by strangers. Neither Poe’s mother-in-law nor his fiancée knew what had become of him until they read about it in the newspapers. Poe died on October 7, 1849 at the age of forty. The exact cause of Poe’s death remains a mystery.

 

Days after Poe’s death, his literary rival Rufus Griswold wrote a libelous obituary of the author in a misguided attempt at revenge for some of the offensive things Poe had said and written about him. Griswold followed the obituary with a memoir in which he portrayed Poe as a drunken, womanizing madman with no morals and no friends. Griswold’s attacks were meant to cause the public to dismiss Poe and his works, but the biography had exactly the opposite effect and instead drove the sales of Poe’s books higher than they had ever been during the author’s lifetime. Griswold’s distorted image of Poe created the Poe legend that lives to this day while Griswold is only remembered (if at all) as Poe’s first biographer.

Orphanhood and Foster Family

Poe's natural parents, David and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, both actors, were employed by Mr. Placide's Theatre Company in Boston. They were married in Richmond while on tour in 1806 and had three children. On December 8, 1811, while again in Richmond, Elizabeth Arnold Poe died of tuberculosis. The two children who were with her--Edgar, not quite three, and Rosalie, only eleven months old--were taken in by Richmond families: Edgar by John and Frances Valentine Allan and Rosalie by William and Jane Scott MacKenzie. Mr. Allan was a partner in the merchant firm Ellis and Allan. At this time, Allan and his wife were living in quarters located above the firm's offices at Thirteenth and East Main Streets.  Poe adopted the middle name "Allan" from his Richmond family.

Poe's mother, Elizabeth, was buried in the churchyard of St. John's Episcopal Church where her memorial stone may be seen. St. John's is the oldest church in Richmond and is famous as the site of Patrick Henry's rousing "liberty or death" oration shortly before the Revolutionary War.

The Richmond Theatre where Edgar Poe's mother had performed, burned to the ground on December 26,1811, only eighteen days after her death. The fire took the lives of many Richmonders including the Governor of Virginia, George Smith, and his wife. At the site of the tragedy on East Broad Street, Monumental Episcopal Church was erected as a memorial to the victims. The Allans maintained pew number 80 in the church where young Edgar worshipped with his Richmond family. Today, Monumental Church is owned by Historic Richmond. 

Poe and the Old Stone House

After escorting Lafayette to the Richmond Randolph Masonic Lodge, Poe and the honor guard took the General to the Old Stone House, the residence of the Ege family which had helped supply Lafayette’s troops during the Revolution. Lafayette is said to have picked up the Eges’ son and showed him so much attention that the family named the boy Lafayette. Poe would have been guarding the outside of the house. In the years to come, Poe would pass the house several times on his walks down Main Street to Rocket’s Landing. He would have known of it since the house was already appearing in guidebooks as a Richmond landmark during Poe’s lifetime. An 1843 book already refers to the century-old house as “the old Stone House” and calls it the oldest house in Richmond. There is no evidence that Poe ever entered the house and any association it might have had with Poe was less important to the city than its association with Lafayette. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the house, then used as a curio shop, was called “Lafayette’s Headquarters” or “Washington’s Headquarters” even though neither had actually used it as their headquarters at any time. In fact, Washington had never even visited the house.

Preservation and the Poe Museum

The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities saved the building from destruction in 1913 and loaned it to the Poe Foundation for use as a Poe Museum which opened in 1922. Beginning in 1927, the surrounding buildings were removed or cut back to reveal three sides of the house. A 1970 restoration removed later additions like mantels and wood paneling and replaced the deteriorating floorboards in the west room, but the floorboards in the east room are believed to still be original or at least very old. Examination of the tree rings on the removed floorboards has dated them to 1754. The wooden shingles were installed on the roof during this restoration. In 2012, the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (now called Preservation Virginia) formally donated the Old Stone House to the Poe Museum.

A peculiar feature of the house is the insignia “IR” to the right of the east window on the south side of the house. One theory holds that the initials stand for “Jacobus Rex” meaning “King James” and that the house was built during the brief reign of James II from 1685 to 1688. Other theories suggest that the stone was either found among the ballast stones thrown ashore from ships coming to load up with tobacco at the Port of Manchester or that the stone was left by Christopher Newport when he first reached the Falls of the James in 1607 during the reign of James I.

History of the Garden

The Poe Museum opened to the public in 1922, featuring the Old Stone House and Enchanted Garden.  The Museum's Founders were inspired by Poe’s poem “To One in Paradise.”

Thou wast that all to me, love,

For which my soul did pine—

A green isle in the sea, love,

A fountain and a shrine,

All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,

And all the flowers were mine.

*Painting of the Enchanted Garden, 1924 by S. Shelton, Poe Museum Collection

Enchanted Garden Highlights

The stone benches sitting along the edges of the garden were taken from the Yarrington Boarding house, which was located near the Capitol along Bank Street (the site where Poe married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia). Ivy taken from Eliza Poe’s grave at St. John’s Church creates a border around the garden.

Visitors may also notice shards of broken glass atop the garden walls. This early version of a security device can be found in Poe’s short story “William Wilson”. Towering above the back of the garden is our Hackberry tree which was planted in the 1920’s.

One of our greatest highlights in the garden is, of course, the Poe Shrine. The Shrine was built of bricks and building materials from the office of the Southern Literary Messenger where Poe was employed and which was located just a few blocks from the museum. Inside the Shrine sits a “pallid bust” of Poe greeting visitors from all over the world.

Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Daniel Voth wrote this haunting instrumental called "Ghost Song."  As you listen to it,  see if you can pick out the various personality traits of Dupin (Poe) in the music.  

Poe Trivia

Poe wrote 70 books and only 15 were horror stories.  He wrote poems, adventure stories, scientific studies and Poe's only living bestseller was a book about....drum roll please...

SEASHELLS! 

Here is the details of that book:

In 1839, Edgar Allan Poe accepted a somewhat sketchy writing job: remixing and condensing an existing book, Thomas Wyatt's Manual of Conchology, into a cheaper version that would be useful to students. Wyatt's Manual was beautiful and expensive, selling at the high price of $8; Poe's was simple and could be bought for $1.50.

Wyatt, who asked Poe to create this abridged version, wanted a book that would be easy to sell at lectures. Because Wyatt's original publisher disliked the idea, thinking it would dilute the market, the more famous author looked for a writer who would put his name on a CliffsNotes version. Poe, who needed the money, was willing. 

Poe re-ordered the plates, arranging the organisms from simplest to most complex, and contributed a new preface and introduction. Though the book was intended "expressly for the use of Schools," the author appears to have done little calibration of his writing style for a young audience. Poe biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes: "Poe's boring, pedantic and hair-splitting Preface was absolutely guaranteed to torment and discourage even the most passionately interested schoolboy." 

Because of the shady circumstances of the book's publication, Poe sustained some career damage, being accused of plagiarism and finding himself blacklisted for a time with Wyatt's publisher. Nonetheless, the book's first edition sold out in two months; during Poe's lifetime, the Conchologist's First had the best sales of all his books.