"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

On an evening just before the murders the two men have been walking when Dupin suddenly enacts upon the narrator one of his preternatural feats of mind-reading. "He boasted to me ... that most men wore windows in their bosoms," the narrator has said, but now it is his turn to be penetrated by an analyst who demonstrates "intimate knowledge" (122) of the man's inner world. Part of what Dupin discloses involves the narrator's thinking about "Epicurus" (125) and by association sensual pleasure, but the content is less important than the fact that Dupin can enter the interior of the narrator but the latter cannot do the same with his companion. The narrator finds himself in the passive/receptive position. And on that same evening the narrator gets knocked to the ground by a passerby but remains unable to assert an objection: he tells how a "fruiterer, carrying upon his head a large basket of apples, had nearly thrown me down" (124); Dupin firmly corrects him, saying the fruiterer in fact "'thrust you upon a pile of paving-stones.... [You] slipped, slightly strained your ankle, appeared vexed or sulky, muttered a few words ... then proceeded in silence'" (124-25). Immediately following the narrator's being knocked down and penetrated, the two companions become engrossed in--"arrested" (126) by--the newspaper's account of the murdered women. Given Dupin's investment in these events, we can now surmise that in them the narrator gains from Dupin's penetrating attention being diverted, identifies with a lethally "powerful man," and symbolizes the annihilation of woman within his psyche. He would make Venus vanish within himself.

Poe suggests that Dupin himself risks and resists association with internal femininity. Poe's analyst triumphs in his interpretations because of reason and imagination, but in his metaphysics he must link the latter, with its endless variability, to woman as such. Thus he has the problem of how to be powerfully imaginative without being a woman. "Murders in the Rue Morgue" evasively addresses this dilemma and consequent anxiety by identifying Dupin with the orangutan and then tentatively associating the animal with androgyny. People at the scene of the murders recall having heard strange articulations: "'Could not be sure whether it was the voice of a man or of a woman'"; "'Could not be sure if it was a man's voice. It might have been a woman's'"; "'Was sure that the shrill voice was that of a man'" (129); "'Might have been a woman's voice'" (130). Poe's protagonist, too, when aroused, expresses himself in a shrill voice ("his voice ... rose into a treble" [122]). As Jordan approvingly deduces, Dupin himself herein evinces an androgyny ("crossing gender boundaries"), especially "when he recounts the experience of a female victim" (15). But for men in Poe's work this uncertainty about gender in fact signals both in the mind and in the world a danger not a desideratum. When in the tale it is demonstrated with certainty that the perpetrator is in fact a blameless wild beast with the strength of a "very powerful man" (132)--indeed, explicitly a "He" (150)--all the men obtain deliverance, the women unrequited annihilation. And insofar as Poe represents his interests in those of these men, he convicts himself of a blameworthy misogyny.