Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and the Birth of Detective Fiction

Art often represents life; nothing inspires the imagination like reality. No other writer understood this more than Edgar Allan Poe, whose literature spans the gamut from love poetry to gruesome tales of horror. While Poe is recognized mainly for his contribution to the horror genre, it should not be forgotten that he also made a significant contribution to the detective genre. His short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" represents a new way to tell a story, a new way to shed light on the human condition, and a new way to deliver a gruesome narrative with grisly details. The mystery story entered circulation at a time when society was experiencing growing pains. Urban development opened the door for new crime waves, and Poe possessed the mental agility to capture the nuance of this era in fiction. Taking his horror stories one step further by deepening the reader's experience and response, Poe inspired the detective fiction genre for decades to come. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" emphasizes Poe's talent and highlights the fact that the best art springs forth from life itself.

The era in which Poe lived was one of change. Times were volatile and so were temperaments. Lawrence Frank maintains that one of the most interesting aspects of the story is the fact that it first appeared in 1841 at a time when "both a resurgent evangelicalism and a conservative Natural Theology were confronted by a positivist science" (Frank 169). The story depicts a "culture in which disagreement and discord are everywhere" (170), according to Frank. In addition, the witnesses' inability to distinguish the voices in the apartment at the time of the murders points to "debates of the 1830s and 1840s about the origin and meaning of the universe" (170).

This disarray is seen in the monstrosity of the murders and the disorder of Mademoiselle L'Espanaye's apartment. Furniture was "broken and thrown about in all directions" (Poe 63), and the bed was thrown into the middle of the floor. The daughter was stuffed in the chimney "head downward" (63) with such force that her body had been "thrust up and disengaged" (63). The mother's body was found outside with her "throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off" (63). These scenes are remarkable for two reasons. First, Poe is credited with placing such mysteriously heinous crimes at the center of a detective story, thereby creating a new literary genre. Second, the same narrative format can still be seen today in television series such as Law and Order, Monk, and CSI. Poe did not simply write a story; he assembled elements that simultaneously shocked and captivated his society.

Art reflects life in both historical and personal ways. Poe moves from the "timeless dreamlike worlds of remote gothic mansion, turrets, and dungeons to the social realm of neighborhoods, shops, newspapers, and political intrigue, where the investigation of seemingly isolated crimes against women uncovers a network of covert gender-related crimes that pervades the entire social order" (Jordan 12). Poe composed this story at a time when crime was of great public interest, driven in large part by rapid urban growth. Frank writes that Paris — where the story takes place — was filled with "men and women of different nationalities and languages" (170), and he likens the city to a "nineteenth-century Babel" (170). The story can suggest "the individual within a Parisian Babel of controversy, anticipating in its own outré way the possible ascendancy of one evolutionary vision of the universe" (187). Dupin becomes the "individual as the creature of history" (187), while the orangutan represents the "terror of a history secularized and devoid of design" (187). This plot was to usher in a new genre that looked at the universe in a fundamentally new way. The detective story, as a result, "responds to a new era of world history" (187).

The crimes against the women can also be read as symbols drawn from Poe's own past, as he lived through the deaths of the women he loved most. Tragedy inevitably makes its way into Poe's fiction, and the grisly murders of these two women could easily represent the deaths of Poe's mother and cousin.