"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

Although Lemay reaches a different conclusion, he makes a convincing argument that "the sailor and the orangutan are a double for Dupin. That also means, of course, that they are doubles for one another; and since Dupin is a double for the narrator, all four characters are symbolic doubles" (170). A risk of seeing too much doubling, however, is the loss of responsibility for action (no one is responsible for an act). Lemay goes on to argue that the two women also function as doubles of the four males: "all three sets of characters are symbolic doubles" (171). He claims that, combined, the six equal one genuine being in Poe's mind: the "implied final unity of the three couples--Dupin and the narrator, Madame and Mademoiselle L'Espanaye, and the sailor and the orangutan--suggests the proper ingredients of what, in Poe's vision, constitutes an achieved unified life" (173). But this conflation re-eliminates the women as such and makes investigation and ascription of responsibility for their murder futile.

Poe's great "analyst" (117), Dupin, prefers an all-male world of the intellect--he lives hermetically with the narrator ("We existed within ourselves alone" [121])--and in this realm where "mind struggles with mind" (119), he exults in and excels at competitively establishing his mental superiority over other men. Poe's protagonist rises superior because together with his great reasoning powers he possesses a "truly imaginative" (120) sensibility, an "ingenuity" that derives from his whole being, as it were, head and body both. He deems this imaginative acumen a male power, for when he bests the superficially rational Prefect of Police, he mocks the unimaginative man as castrated: "I am satisfied at having defeated him in his own castle.... the Prefect is somewhat too cunning to be profound. In his wisdom is no stamen. It is all head and no body, like the pictures of the Goddess Laverna'" (155). Dupin's attraction to events in the Rue Morgue involves more, however, than his competition with the Prefect: given his biases, and those of his creator, he must see in the circumstances of these two women, and modern women generally, their possession of new powers--intellectual, material, and sexual--and therein must experience an excruciating affront to man's, but above all, his own superiority.

In his satirical criticism Poe often attacks intellectual women, the so-called bluestockings, as, for example, in "Fifty Suggestions," where he writes, "When we think very ill of a woman, and wish to blacken her character, we merely call her 'a blue-stocking'" (Complete Works, 14:170). One notes the menace in his emphasized "black" and "blue." In "Murders in the Rue Morgue" he symbolizes the women's doomed association with intellect by having them, like Dupin and the narrator, reside on the top floor of their building, and, then, as Lemay suggests, allegorizing man's reasoning powers vanquishing woman's "mind" (171). Instructively, Poe locates meaningful, rational discourse in the two men and limits the two women to "'shrieks'" and "'screams'" (129). In the tale the often insolvent Poe also takes aim at woman's material wealth. His Dupin could take no joy in learning that the mother and her daughter "have money" (128) and own the large house in which they have lived. Dupin himself leads a materially impoverished life. Of an "illustrious family" (120) now reduced to penury, he exists frugally on a "small remnant of his patrimony" (121), a son forced in modern times to subsist on the resources of a fallen father. Again, given his masculinist philosophy, he must hold that these women, a mother and daughter and thus matrilineal, wrongly possess wealth and power and a future properly belonging to men, to fathers and sons patrilineally. Poe's tale in fact mocks the legitimacy of Madame L'Espanaye's wealth by several times repeating the rumor that she "'told fortunes for a living'" (128), thus contrasting her fraudulent use of the mind to gain "fortunes" with Dupin's virtuous reasoning. And it is to the point that the women not only receive a large sum of money from the bank (delivered by Le Bon) just before their murder but also receive that sum in testicle-like sacks: the daughter "'took from [Le Bon's] hands one of the bags, while the old lady relieved him of the other'" (130), as if the arrogant women have appropriated phallic power. From the standpoint of Dupin their illegitimate affluence and its attendant powers warrant a punishing attack.