originally published in 1841. In this story Poe invents the first literary detective, named Auguste Dupin, who sets about solving the mysterious double murder of a Parisian lady and her daughter in a street named Rue Morgue (Mortuary Street). A man has been wrongly accused and Dupin, having found an auburn-coloured hair, deduces a most unlikely culprit. Further investigation shows Dupin to be correct. The story is the first example of a fictional crime solved by the principle of deduction based on ingenuity, evidence and reason. It set the benchmark for later literary detectives, such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.
In The Fall of the House of Usher, originally published in 1839, Poe delves into matters of psychological illness, with the central character Roderick Usher, suffering from all manner of mental disturbances. In Poe’s day, psychiatry had not yet defined specific conditions, but Roderick Usher had overly sensitive physical senses, an obsession with getting ill and was filled with extreme angst and anxiety about life. These days these symptoms would be classified respectively as hyperaesthesia, hypochondria and hysteria. Roderick Usher lives in large house, where his sister has recently died and awaits being interred in the family tomb. The narrator of the story has come to stay with Roderick and witnesses various spooky events, whilst Roderick himself grows increasingly disturbed. The narrator reads Roderick a story to distract him, but this only serves to make things worse as the events in the story seem to embody themselves elsewhere in the house, and the narrator flees in fright.
His first critical success came when he published his famous narrative poem ‘The Raven’ in 1845. Again, it was an exploration into mental illness and madness. In 1847 his wife Clemm died of tuberculosis. She had been with Poe for 12 years and when she died Poe went into a decline. He became depressed and apathetic, turned to alcohol, and only a few years later came to the end of his own life. A man named Joseph Walker had found Poe walking the streets of Baltimore in an incoherent and distressed condition. He was taken to hospital but his condition worsened and he died four days later. He had never been lucid enough to explain what had happened to him just prior to his death.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is Edgar Allan Poe’s only completed novel, a collection of ponderings which form an adventurous ocean journey.
Published in 1838, the novel is now regarded as a prototype for the genre, influencing authors such as Jules Verne and Herman Melville. Poe was writing in the mid-nineteenth century, when explorers were expanding the limits of the known world and sharing exotic myths, legends and artifacts from their travels. The interiors of Africa and South America were not yet mapped, and Antarctica was yet to be explored at all. To many readers, and especially to those of the nineteenth-century, there is something thrilling about the idea of embarking on an expedition into the unknown.
The novel structure was not yet fully established when Poe was writing, and this gave an opportunity for experimentation with form and style. The novel is written in a free-form manner, almost as if the tale is a sequence of dreams hurriedly scribbled down upon awaking. Poe eventually found that the short-story format was better suited to his style (see ‘His Works’), and he is probably best known for these, and for his narrative poem ‘The Raven’.
Some regarded The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket as the work of genius, while others dismissed it as the ramblings of madness, and this polarized view of the novel persists to this day. Poe himself later disparagingly mentioned his novel in a letter: ‘You once wrote in your magazine a sharp critique upon a book of mine – a very silly book – Pym.’
CONTENTS
