878 Poe, Edgar Allan
and all the individuals it involves; he maintains,
in other words, his habitual distance from society.
This distance is crucial to his ability to, like the
analytical player of draughts, throw himself into
the spirit of not only the murderer but the police.
By identifying the latter’s investigative deficiencies,
he solves the mystery of the murders. Regarding
the police, he comments that “not trusting to their
eyes, I examined with my own.” While he segregates
himself from the society in which he lives, Dupin
knows human nature well. The narrator writes: “He
boasted to me, with a low chuckling laugh, that most
men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their
bosoms.” Through this analytical insight, Dupin
knows in what ways the Parisian police have failed
in their investigation of the murders and, resultantly,
how the murders were carried out by the fugitive
orangutan.
Derrick Spradlin
Innocence and experIence in “The
Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Edgar Allan Poe uses the key concept of emotional
and intellectual balance in his development of the
theme of innocence versus experience in “The
Murders in the Rue Morgue.” What Poe sought
to show in nearly all of his writings is that when
the intellect and the emotions are out of balance,
when one lives too wholly in the mind or in the
heart, something is fundamentally askew. Humans
are balanced individuals, and for Poe, the study of
what happens when that balance is thrown off is
essential to American romanticism, something that
is pragmatically applied to this story in particular. In
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe creates two
primary characters through which the audience wit-
nesses the discussion of victims of a gruesome crime.
Dupin becomes the voice of experience, the mind
that has learned to live wholly in the logical realm,
capable of both inductive and deductive reasoning,
desirous of teaching the narrator to think openly.
The narrator becomes the voice of innocence, inca-
pable of separating his revulsion for the crime or his
awe of Dupin’s thinking skills from the crime itself;
his goal is to learn how to think from Dupin, to
move beyond ordinary assumptions into analytical
thinking at work.
In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe
presents reasons for the weak thinking on the part
of the Parisian police and the narrator. Two women,
Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye, have been
savagely murdered. One witness, the bank clerk
Adolphe Le Bon, testifies that three days before
the murder, Madame L’Espanaye withdrew 4,000
francs from her account and that the gold was in the
house. Robbery therefore becomes a key and erro-
neous assumption in the investigation. The police
enter the room where Mademoiselle L’s body has
been stuffed inside the chimney, and the newspaper
report recounts that “no person was seen. The win-
dows, both of the back and front room, were down
and firmly fastened from within . . . locked, with the
key on the inside.” Repeatedly, through witnesses,
police, and newspapers, the audience is shown that
the crime entailed shrieks that were “very awful and
distressing”; that the corpse of Mademoiselle L was
“much bruised and excoriated,” while the corpse of
Madame L was “shattered” and “horribly mutilated”;
that overheard was the word diable; and that the
crime was so heinous it “struck every one present not
less with horror than with astonishment.” Because
of the ferocity of the attacks on the two women,
all parties involved in the solving of the case have
difficulty moving past the emotive response to the
nature of the killings. In Poe’s theory of romanti-
cism, then, those set on solving the case are out of
balance, incapable of doing much of anything until
they find balance. These are all voices of innocence
in critical thinking—unbalanced because of the
emotive stranglehold.
Dupin, as the voice of experience, informs the
audience at large that he alone has noticed key
details because he has been able to quickly accept
that the murders are savage and has moved on to
cataloguing the details of the crimes. Dupin explains
that “[t]ruth is not always in a well . . . the depth
lies in the valleys where we seek her”; but in order
to find the truth, the seeker must be willing to look
beyond the simple—to the core of the matter. Dupin
focuses on the differences of the witness testimonies
in order to achieve his ultimate conclusion. Deduc-
ing that because no witness can agree on the origin
of the “culprit’s” voice, coupled with the crime’s
“strength superhuman, a ferocity brutal,” Dupin