"To make Venus vanish": misogyny as motive in Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue"

ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly), June, 2006 by Joseph Church

I believe these conclusions mistaken. Far from working as a "feminist critic" to disclose the gendered "mechanics of cultural control" and to tell woman's untold story, Poe and his avatars such as Dupin work to punish and silence womankind in the world and its correlatives in the mind that threaten a masculinist ontology. We discern this unambiguous enterprise of suppression in a closer examination of Dupin's part in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Although less-sanguine commentators than Person, Dayan, and Jordan have called attention to the psychological hostility toward women in the tale, none has adequately set forth the extent of its misogyny. Bonaparte ultimately reduces the story's murder of two women to a fantasy of a Freudian "primal scene" (445). Terry J. Martin views the deaths through the lens of Dupin's "lack of mental proportion," his intellectual one-sidedness, that sets him in severe opposition to women generally; hence, Martin holds that the tale's murdered mother, whose "head is severed from her body, ... vividly portrays Dupin's failure to integrate thought and feeling" (41-42). And in "The Psychology of 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,'" J. A. Leo Lemay envisions the attacks on the women as primarily symbolizing the deleterious consequence of modern humankind's sexual repression. Lemay clarifies some of the psychological machinations, especially the unconscious doubling, in the story, but he deplorably errs when he claims that the women bring their murders upon themselves: "by their deliberate suppression of sexuality, by their denial of the body, [they] have created the monster who kills them" (186).

Most know the events in "Murders in the Rue Morgue": the brutal and evidently motiveless deaths of a Parisian mother and daughter have baffled the police until the brilliant Auguste Dupin solves the crimes by deducing and demonstrating that a sailor's escaped orangutan has carried out the carnage. Often overlooked, however, is the tale's leaving the women's deaths strangely unpunished. The man mistakenly arrested for the murders, the bank clerk Le Bon, of course gains instant release. The orangutan, a blameless creature, obtains a new home along the Seine in the Jardin des Plantes. And the sailor, although indirectly involved, proves guiltless, as Dupin insists from the first: "'Cognizant ... of the murder'" although "'he was innocent of all participation in the bloody transactions'" (148). The sailor even gets a "very large sum" (154) from the Jardin for the animal. Women murdered, men rewarded and going free (the orangutan is a male; the name itself Malaysian for "man of the woods")--one suspects the likelihood of misogyny. Indeed, a closer reading of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" reveals not only an intense ambivalence toward women in the tale but also Dupin's and the narrator's (and by extension Poe's) own misogynistic satisfaction in the deaths of the mother and daughter. In fact Poe's self-disclosing narrative depicts both Dupin's and the narrator's identifying with the sailor and his orangutan and their bloody deeds. Representing the author's interests, the men's aims differ only superficially in their object: Dupin would attack woman primarily in the world, the narrator in the psyche.