“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” 879leads the narrator to conclude that the crimes have
been committed by a madman, but then he shows
the narrator and the audience the fallacies of that
line of thinking. The voice of experience here is
teaching the audience to think, to see the limita-
tions of each error, to see the only logical conclu-
sion. Deduction leads Dupin to show unwaveringly
that only a “tawny, Ourang-Outang of the Bornese
species” would have the strength to have committed
the crimes.
Obviously, with such an unusual ending, the
audience is freed from having to think about a
human having inflicted this sort of savagery on
the victims. More, though, Poe has shown that
even unusual situations, ones that we would never
imagine happening, can be explained through care-
fully reasoning if sufficient attention is given to the
details. Thus, the voice of experience here essentially
teaches the narrator, the future Dupin, to think
open-mindedly about any potential outcome, even
the most unexpected. And the voice of innocence
learns to not rely on emotive, fallacious, or worn-out
thinking in order to solve problems as they arise.
Eileen Sweeney
natIonaLISm in “The Murders in the
Rue Morgue”
The theme of nationalism is a common one in liter-
ature. Characters live their culture’s norms and stan-
dards while showing audiences the assumed better
qualities of that particular national identity. There
are two sides to nationalism as a literary theme:
creating a sense of pride in characters and audiences
and allowing those same groups to live in sociocen-
tric ignorance. In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders
in the Rue Morgue,” characters display both the
positive and the negative aspects of nationalism.
The inherent problems of nationalism as a theme
and living ideology are shown fully through the wit-
ness testimonies that keep the Parisian police from
solving the murders of two women, Madame and
Mademoiselle L’Espanaye. This idea of a national
identity becomes central to “The Murders in The
Rue Morgue” because each witness who testifies
about the crime in the Rue Morgue claims to have
heard a distinctive voice, one clearly not belonging
to his particular national group, creating for each
character a sense of group identity and showing full
participation in sociocentric thinking.
In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the
testimony of witnesses is essential to the police
understanding of the crime and the newspaper
reports. Unfortunately, the witnesses fail to agree
on a single, vital detail: the voice of the murderer
in the room with victims, Madame and Mademoi-
selle L’Espanaye. It seems that if the police could
identify the voice, the crime could be solved, but
the witnesses each point their fingers at an unseen
perpetrator of a different nationality, disallowing
that anyone of their own backgrounds could be
capable of such brutalities. What Poe sets up here
is a case for national pride, for nationalism at its
potential best, as each cultural group wants to see
only the good of its own, never the potential for such
wickedness.
Of the voice of the murderer, each witness looks
to the rest of the world’s population to be the perpe-
trator. The French gendarme witness “believed the
language to be Spanish.” Henri Duval, a French-
man, “was not acquainted with the Italian language. . . but was convinced by the intonation that the
speaker was Italian.” William Bird, an Englishman,
thought the voice “appeared to be that of a German
. . . [d]oes not understand German.” Another wit-
ness, a native of Spain, thought the voice belonged
to an “Englishman . . . [d]oes not understand the
English language, but judges by the intonation”;
while another Frenchman, who does not speak Rus-
sian, just assumed the voice belonged to a Russian.
Clearly knowledge of the language being pointed
to—and therefore the culture represented—is not
necessary. The witnesses each must point away from
their own groups toward any other.
For this story and as a thematic goal, nationalism
creates a problematic text and ideology. The testi-
monies allow people to willingly admit that they do
not know the language and therefore the perpetra-
tor’s national identity; however, each witness does
point to what he does not know as the cause for
the murder. This sense of pride in one’s own nation
creates a backlash against the identity of others—
allowing ignorance to sound like the truth to those
reading the news accounts and trying to solve the
crime. However, the audience is shown the problem