Dupin reads in the evening newspaper about the grotesque and puzzling murder of a mother and her adult daughter in the Rue Morgue, he seizes the opportunity to demonstrate his own mental prowess, solving the case on the basis of newspaper accounts alone. One account reports that the murder occurred on the fourth story of an almost empty house; it describes the mutilated bodies, one shoved with brute force up the chimney, the other lying on the pavement below. Another news story contains interviews with witnesses on the street, who heard two loud voices—one belonging to a Frenchman and the other variously identified as Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, or Russian. Remarkably, every witness is from a different European nation, and each identifies the second voice as speaking a language he does not understand. That being the case, Dupin remarks to his friend, “You will say that it might have been the voice of an Asiatic—of an African. Neither Asiatics nor Africans abound in Paris; but, without denying the inference, I will merely call your attention to three points. The voice is termed by one witness ‘harsh rather than shrill.’ It is represented by two others to have been ‘quick and unequal.’ No words—no sound resembling words—were by any witness mentioned as distinguishable.”2 Therefore, the detective concludes, the voice is not a human voice: this is the crucial insight that enables him to solve the case without viewing the crime scene. Although Dupin has the solution right away, he decides to visit the scene in order to develop a strategy for flushing out the murderer and proving his conclusion.
According to police reports, the door and windows to the apartment were locked from the inside at the time of the murder, but Dupin discovers a hidden egress from a window and measures the considerable distance between the window and a lightning rod that would have provided the only way down. Just as the voice had been bizarre, “there was something excessively outré—something altogether irreconcilable with our common notions of human action”—about these killings: the height the perpetrator had to descend in making an escape, the superhuman strength required to shove the daughter’s body up the chimney, the decapitation of the mother with a few strokes of a straight razor, the strange disarray of heavy furniture, and the abandonment of money bags in plain sight.3
In short, the “murderer” is a Bornean orangutan, a species about which Dupin has read in the works of Baron Georges Frederic Cuvier, a founder of comparative anatomy. It turns out that the human voice was that of a French sailor, who was able to negotiate the tenuous handholds on the side of the building almost as easily as the ape because he has had years of experience in the rigging. Operating on this conjecture, Dupin places a false ad in the newspaper, luring the sailor to his apartment, where, at gunpoint, the frightened man confesses that he owns the orangutan. The ape has killed not from malice but from the instinct to imitate his master, who was shaving when the orangutan snatched the razor and escaped with it. The disarray in the apartment and the strange disposal of the bodies are the result of the beast’s “consciousness of having deserved punishment” and his efforts to conceal his misdeeds.4
The game is over and reason returns: Dupin has solved the case, an innocent suspect is released, the prefect of police makes a partial and grudging concession, and the orangutan is sold for a large sum to the zoo. But loose ends remain, story particles that are indeclinable, irreducible. The setting of the murders in the Rue Morgue suggests a link between the murders in question and the murders of other unidentified victims of unidentified crimes by other unidentified murderers. The orangutan’s voice makes sounds that are identified by “earwitnesses” as human language. Even though these witnesses are mistaken about the speaker, they have made a perfectly understandable error. In more modern times, we are able to distinguish between a human voice and a machine-generated voice on the telephone on the basis of intonation, and humans with cybernetic voice-producing implants, such as those given to laryngeal cancer patients, inevitably sound different from other people. Intonation, then, is a distinctive feature of human language, and the same is true of animal communication. Thus, Poe drives home the similarities between human beings and other animals.
If Dupin has restored reason within the frame of the story, Poe was unable to do so outside the frame. Kant’s work had compromised faith in the limitless power of reason, and only a few decades before Poe wrote his story, the French Revolution had temporarily destroyed this faith by enshrining reason and committing atrocities in its name. At the same time, science was beginning to suggest that evolutionary kinship with apes was a real possibility—although, in the industrialized nations, fear of other primates developed long before Darwin’s work formulated and confirmed the close kinship between humans and nonhuman primates. Poe lived in frightening times.
However, Poe’s source for information about apes, Georges Cuvier, tried to alleviate the fear of the atavistic human. The most respected scientist in France during the early decades of the nineteenth century, Cuvier carried out foundational work in paleontology, comparative anatomy, and zoology. As a paleontologist, he sifted through the fossil record offered by the countryside around Paris and developed a theory of periodic catastrophes, in which all life ended, followed by successive creations. So, unlike many other European scientists who struggled with fossil evidence for a chain of life, Cuvier assured his contemporaries that humans were not at the end of an unbroken evolutionary chain that might have included ape ancestors. As an anatomist, Cuvier specialized in skeletal comparisons, and he concluded that differences in anatomy determined differences in function—not the other way around. Thus, humans were physiologically fitted from the get-go for technological prowess, and apes for an arboreal life (though it must be added that, in Cuvier’s time, so little was known of the anthropoid apes that even their nomenclature was contested). At least to the satisfaction of many of his scientific contemporaries, Cuvier effectively sealed off the human from the ape by using comparative anatomy to reinforce his theory of separate creations.
One particularly nasty aspect of Cuvier’s comparative anatomy was its emphasis on differences among races, which, he speculated, might have been created separately, as separate species or varieties with separate physical and mental abilities. Indeed, many scientists at the time found the geographical proximity of the darker races to the pongid apes suggestive. Cuvier’s work was a boon to proslavery Europeans and Americans, just when the forces of humanitarianism and democracy were threatening slavery, a labor system that had resulted in enormous wealth for the industrialized world. How convenient to speculate that the different races of humans might also be different species!
Such racist implications of Cuvier’s work can be found just below the surface of Poe’s story, in which uncivilized Asians and undercivilized French lower classes are potentially savages. Here, Poe’s narrator muses, after perusing a page from Cuvier’s work, “It was a minute anatomical and generally descriptive account of the large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands. The gigantic stature, the prodigious strength and activity, the wild ferocity, and the imitative propensities of these mammalia are sufficiently well known to all. I understood the full horrors of the murder at once.”5 But the murders are not murders because they are not committed by a human being in command of his faculties. What, then, of other murders, committed by beings without full control of their faculties—individuals of other races, other classes, other ways of life less rational than one’s own? Are these crimes really murders if the perpetrators’ actions are determined by different internal categories, beyond the reach of reason? Poe’s story celebrates reason, but with an undercurrent of fear that there is more to the human experience than rationality and cognition. For Poe, this “more” was not simply, as Kant would have it, the benign categories of time and space, or a morally neutral preference for raspberries over strawberries or the music of Rameau over Mozart, but an indefinable horror.
Poe was not the first to document the conscious or unconscious fear that our bodily likeness to other primates disposes us to lose ourselves beyond the boundaries of reason, and he was certainly not the first to suggest that some humans are closer to animals than others. But “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was written just when these issues were gravitating to the raging center of scientific and cultural debates about species, on the one hand, and human rights, on the other. Racial differences were exaggerated, the taxonomy of simians was debated, the line between human and animal species was
