Tales (Selection)

Summary

This selection gathers six of Edgar Allan Poe's best-known tales, two of them detective stories and four of them tales of terror, written between 1839 and 1846 and printed here from the Raven Edition of his works. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) opens with an essay on the analytical mind and introduces C. Auguste Dupin, a poor but brilliant Parisian gentleman who shares lodgings with the unnamed narrator. When Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter Camille are found horribly killed in a locked fourth-floor apartment, and the clerk Adolphe Le Bon is arrested, Dupin studies the newspaper testimony, notices that witnesses of several nations each heard the second voice as a foreign tongue, examines the window nails, and shows that the killer was an Ourang-Outang escaped from a Maltese sailor. The Purloined Letter (1844) brings back Dupin and the Prefect of police, G——, who cannot find a compromising letter stolen from a royal lady by the Minister D——, though his men have searched every inch of the Minister's rooms. Dupin reasons that a man who is both poet and mathematician would hide the letter by leaving it in plain sight; he finds it, turned inside out, in a card-rack over the mantel, and replaces it with a copy bearing a line from Crébillon. The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) follows a narrator summoned by his boyhood friend Roderick Usher, who suffers from a morbid acuteness of the senses in a decaying mansion beside a dark tarn. Roderick's twin sister, the Lady Madeline, wastes away with a cataleptic illness and is entombed in a vault below the house; days later, during a storm, while the narrator reads aloud from the Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning, she returns from the tomb, falls upon her brother, and the house splits and sinks into the tarn. In The Masque of the Red Death (1842), Prince Prospero shuts himself and a thousand courtiers in a walled abbey while a plague ravages the land, and holds a masked ball in seven colored rooms, the last black with blood-red windows and a great ebony clock; a masked figure dressed as the Red Death appears, and when the prince pursues it, he and all his guests die. In The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) a narrator who insists that he is not mad describes how he killed an old man whose pale, filmed eye he could not bear, hid the body under the floor, and then, sitting with the police, confessed because he thought he heard the old man's heart still beating. The Cask of Amontillado (1846) is told by Montresor, who lures his rival Fortunato, a wine connoisseur, into the family catacombs during carnival with the promise of a rare sherry, chains him in a niche and walls him up alive; he tells the story half a century later.

Plot or Argument

• The Murders in the Rue Morgue

  After an essay on analysis, Dupin reads the reports of two killings in the Rue Morgue, frees the accused clerk Le Bon, and proves through the witnesses' disagreement about the shrill voice, the window catch and a tuft of hair that an escaped Ourang-Outang was responsible.

• The Purloined Letter

  The Prefect G—— describes his exhaustive search for a letter the Minister D—— holds over a royal lady; Dupin, judging the Minister's mind, finds it openly displayed in a card-rack, stages a street disturbance to swap it for a copy, and collects the reward.

• The Fall of the House of Usher

  The narrator visits Roderick Usher, hears his song The Haunted Palace, helps entomb the cataleptic Lady Madeline in a vault, and on a stormy night sees her return from the tomb before he flees and the mansion sinks into the tarn.

• The Masque of the Red Death

  Prince Prospero and his court shut out a plague behind abbey walls and dance through seven colored chambers until a masked figure in grave-clothes appears and, followed into the black room, brings death to all.

• The Tell-Tale Heart

  The narrator explains his careful watching of an old man for eight nights, the killing, and the hiding of the body beneath the planks, then breaks down before calm police officers and confesses.

• The Cask of Amontillado

  Montresor leads the drunken Fortunato through nitre-covered vaults in search of a pipe of Amontillado, chains him in a recess, and seals him in with stone and mortar.

Characters

• C. Auguste Dupin, amateur detective

  An impoverished Parisian of good family who solves crimes by reasoning from overlooked details and by entering the mind of his opponent.

• The narrator of the Dupin stories, companion and chronicler

  Dupin's admiring friend and lodger, who records his methods and anticipates the role of Dr. Watson.

• G——, the Prefect of police, official investigator

  A diligent, conventional policeman who searches minutely but cannot imagine an unconventional hiding place.

• The Minister D——, antagonist of The Purloined Letter

  A bold and unscrupulous statesman, poet and mathematician who steals a letter to gain political power.

• Roderick Usher, master of the House of Usher

  The narrator's boyhood friend, an artist and musician afflicted with acute nervous sensitivity and dread.

• The Lady Madeline, Roderick's twin sister

  A silent, wasting figure subject to cataleptic trances, who is entombed and returns.

• Prince Prospero, ruler in The Masque of the Red Death

  A proud prince who believes he can wall out a plague with his wealth and his revels.

• The narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart, murderer and confessor

  An unnamed speaker who argues for his own sanity while describing a crime driven by obsession with an old man's eye.

• Montresor, narrator of The Cask of Amontillado

  A nobleman who nurses a grievance and carries out a carefully planned revenge.

• Fortunato, victim in The Cask of Amontillado

  A proud connoisseur of wine, dressed in motley for carnival, whose vanity leads him into the vaults.

Lessons

• Reason that sees what others overlook

  Dupin succeeds where the police fail, not because he searches harder but because he thinks differently. In the Rue Morgue he attends to what the witnesses disagree about; in The Purloined Letter he asks what kind of mind the thief has. Poe shows that close observation must be joined to imagination about other people.

  • Why does the Prefect's minute search of the Minister's rooms fail?
  • What does Dupin mean when he says that truth is not always in a well?
  • How does Dupin use the witnesses' disagreement about the shrill voice as evidence?

• No wall keeps out death

  Prince Prospero's welded gates and endless revels are an attempt to buy safety from the plague while his people die outside. The ebony clock that halts the dancers every hour and the uninvited guest at midnight make the old lesson of the memento mori into a single vivid picture.

  • Why does the music stop each time the ebony clock strikes?
  • What does the order of the seven rooms suggest, from blue in the east to black in the west?
  • Is the tale more about the plague or about the prince's attitude toward it?

• Conscience will speak

  The narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart plans his crime coolly and hides it well, yet he betrays himself to police who suspect nothing. Whether the beating he hears is real or imagined, Poe dramatizes the power of guilt to break through careful self-justification.

  • Why does the narrator keep insisting that he is not mad?
  • What sound does he hear at the end, and where might it really come from?

• The cold logic of revenge

  Montresor states rules for perfect vengeance: the avenger must punish with impunity and the wronged man must know who punishes him. He follows them exactly, yet he is still telling the story fifty years later. The tale invites readers to weigh what such revenge actually gains.

  • What injuries has Fortunato done to Montresor, as far as the story tells us?
  • How does Montresor use Fortunato's pride to lead him on?
  • Why do you think Montresor's heart grows sick at the end, and why does he explain it away?

• A house and a mind in ruin

  In The Fall of the House of Usher the crack in the mansion's front, the stagnant tarn and Roderick's poem The Haunted Palace all mirror the collapse of a family and a mind. Poe's method of unity of effect makes every detail of setting serve the single impression of dread.

  • What details on the narrator's first approach prepare us for the ending?
  • How does the poem The Haunted Palace describe Roderick himself?

Context

Poe wrote these tales during the 1830s and 1840s, when American magazines and gift-book annuals were growing quickly and paid for short fiction. He argued in his 1842 review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales that a short tale should be read at one sitting and that every word should serve a single preconceived effect. The Gothic tradition of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and the German tale of terror supplied many of his settings, while his interest in cryptograms, chess, phrenology and the new science of the mind shaped the reasoning of Dupin and the voices of his unstable narrators.

Composition

The Fall of the House of Usher appeared in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in September 1839, while Poe was its co-editor. The Murders in the Rue Morgue was published in Graham's Magazine in April 1841 and The Mask of the Red Death (later retitled The Masque) in Graham's in May 1842. The Tell-Tale Heart appeared in James Russell Lowell's The Pioneer in January 1843, The Purloined Letter in the annual The Gift for 1845 (issued in 1844), and The Cask of Amontillado in Godey's Lady's Book in November 1846. Poe revised several tales for later printings; the library text follows the five-volume Raven Edition published by P. F. Collier in 1903, as transcribed by Project Gutenberg.

Reception

The Dupin stories are generally regarded as the first modern detective fiction, and Arthur Conan Doyle acknowledged Dupin as a forerunner of Sherlock Holmes. Charles Baudelaire's French translations, begun in the 1840s and 1850s, made Poe a major influence on French Symbolist writers. In America his reputation was long colored by Rufus Griswold's hostile obituary and memoir, but the tales have remained among the most widely read and taught American short stories.

Comparisons

• the-raven

  The Raven (1845) applies to verse the same principle of a single dark effect, and its mourning speaker, alone in his chamber with a visitor of ill omen, resembles the narrators of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart.

• the-narrative-of-arthur-gordon-pym-of-nantucket

  Poe's only novel (1838), written just before Usher, carries his interest in terror, burial alive and the edge of the known world into a long sea voyage.

• the-adventures-of-sherlock-holmes

  Doyle's Holmes inherits Dupin's method of reasoning from overlooked details, his scorn for official police, and his admiring narrator-companion.

• the-moonstone

  Wilkie Collins's 1868 novel expands the detective form Poe invented into a full-length mystery told by several narrators, with a patient professional detective in Sergeant Cuff.

• the-strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde

  Stevenson, like Poe, makes a short tale of terror out of a divided mind and a hidden crime, and both depend on confession and a narrator who withholds the truth.

• macbeth

  Macbeth's hallucinated knocking and Lady Macbeth's bloodstained hands prefigure the imagined heartbeat that compels confession in The Tell-Tale Heart.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• How Dupin explains his reasoning step by step, and what the narrator and the Prefect fail to notice.
• The first paragraph of each tale: how quickly Poe establishes mood and who is speaking.
• Narrators who protest too much, especially in The Tell-Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado.
• Colors, clocks, sounds and architecture as symbols in Usher and The Masque of the Red Death.
• What each tale leaves unexplained, such as Fortunato's insult or the source of the final heartbeat.

Key terms and names

Ratiocination

Poe's word for the process of exact reasoning that Dupin uses to solve his cases.

Unreliable narrator

A storyteller whose account the reader has reason to doubt, like the speaker of The Tell-Tale Heart.

Unity of effect

Poe's principle that every detail of a short tale should build toward one intended impression.

Gothic

A literary mode of gloomy old buildings, family curses, secrets and terror, inherited from late eighteenth-century novels.

Catalepsy

A trance-like state with rigid body and slowed vital signs, which Lady Madeline suffers and which can resemble death.

Amontillado

A pale dry Spanish sherry, the bait Montresor uses to draw Fortunato into the vaults.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Where does Dupin find the purloined letter, and why had the police missed it?
2. Comprehension Who or what killed Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter, and which clues lead Dupin to the answer?
3. Comprehension How does Montresor persuade Fortunato to go deeper into the vaults even though Fortunato is coughing?
4. Interpretation Is the narrator of The Fall of the House of Usher a reliable witness, or is he affected by the house as well?
5. Interpretation What is the masked figure in The Masque of the Red Death, and why can no one lay hands on it?
6. Interpretation Why does the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart confess when the police suspect nothing?
7. Big Question Poe offers both the clear light of Dupin's reason and the darkness of minds in ruin. Can reason alone protect a person from guilt, fear and death?

Faith Connections

• Romans 12:19 (Scripture)

  Paul tells Christians not to avenge themselves but to leave room for the wrath of God. Montresor claims vengeance for himself and finds, fifty years later, that he is still telling the story.

• Luke 12:16-20 (Scripture)

  The rich fool stores up goods and is told that this night his soul will be required of him; Prince Prospero's abbey of pleasures cannot keep out the visitor at midnight.

• Numbers 32:23 (Scripture)

  Be sure your sin will find you out. The hidden crime of The Tell-Tale Heart is exposed by the murderer's own conscience.

• Augustine, Confessions, Book X (Church Fathers)

  Augustine marvels at the depths of memory and the mind; Poe's narrators show what happens when those depths are entered without light.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: In The Purloined Letter Dupin reasons: the Minister is both poet and mathematician and expects to be searched; a man who expects a search will not use any hiding place a search would examine; therefore the letter must be hidden in plain view, where the police would never think to look.

Rhetorical device: dramatic irony through an unreliable narrator. The Tell-Tale Heart opens by asking why you will say the speaker is mad, and every proof of calm he offers makes the reader more certain that he is not.

Debate: Resolved: that Dupin's method of entering the mind of the criminal is more reliable than the Prefect's method of exhaustive search.

Memory Work

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

there is such a thing as being too profound. Truth is not always in a well.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose two tales from this selection and explain how Poe uses setting, narrator and the final sentence to create a single effect. Quote the text at least three times.

Comparison with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Compare Dupin in The Purloined Letter with Sherlock Holmes in A Scandal in Bohemia, which also turns on a compromising document held over royalty. How are the detectives' methods and the narrators who describe them alike and different?

Medical Lens

Poe wrote when physicians spoke of nervous temperament, monomania and moral insanity, and his tales are frequently cited in the history of psychiatry. Roderick Usher's morbid acuteness of the senses, his terror of fear itself and his sister's wasting illness with cataleptic trances draw on contemporary medical vocabulary; the narrator calls Roderick a hypochondriac, and Madeline's entombment while alive reflects the period's widespread fear of premature burial, a subject Poe treated directly in other tales. The Tell-Tale Heart is a study of an unreliable narrator whose claims to calm, method and heightened hearing are offered as proofs of sanity; readers have described him as showing paranoid or obsessive features, though such labels are interpretive readings of a fictional voice rather than diagnoses. The Masque of the Red Death imagines a fictional hemorrhagic plague with sudden onset and death within half an hour, written a decade after cholera reached North America in 1832; it is often read alongside the history of quarantine and of the rich fleeing epidemics. Dupin's opening essay on analysis treats the reasoning mind itself as an object of study. Fortunato's intoxication is the instrument of his death.

• The Fall of the House of Usher, the narrator's first interview

  Roderick describes his constitutional and family evil: food, clothing, flowers, light and sound all oppress his senses, and he fears the effect of fear itself.

  Neurosis Anxiety Hypochondria
• The Fall of the House of Usher, Madeline's illness and entombment

  Madeline's settled apathy, gradual wasting and cataleptic affections baffle her physicians; her body, with a faint blush and lingering smile, is placed in a vault for a fortnight.

  Death Dying Melancholia Depression
• The Masque of the Red Death, opening paragraph

  The Red Death is described by its symptoms, sharp pains, sudden dizziness, profuse bleeding at the pores and death within half an hour, and by the abandonment of the sufferers.

  Plague Epidemic Public Health Sanitation
• The Tell-Tale Heart, opening and conclusion

  The narrator offers his acute hearing and careful planning as proof that he is not mad, and finally hears a beating he attributes to the dead man's heart.

  Madness Psychosis Obsession Monomania
• The Cask of Amontillado, the descent into the vaults

  Montresor plies Fortunato, who already has a cough from the damp, with Medoc and De Grâve as they pass through nitre-encrusted catacombs.

  Alcohol

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write a short Dupin case of your own in which the decisive clue is something every witness saw but nobody thought important.

• Essay

  List every detail of setting in the first two paragraphs of The Fall of the House of Usher and explain how each contributes to Poe's single effect of gloom.

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation between the Prefect and his superiors after he hands over the recovered letter, in which he tries to explain how it was found.

• Classroom

  Read The Tell-Tale Heart aloud in turns, then hold a mock hearing in which students argue from the narrator's own words whether he should be judged sane.

• Poetry

  Write a poem of seven stanzas, one for each room of Prince Prospero's abbey, moving from the blue chamber to the black.

Further Reading

• The Philosophy of Composition, Edgar Allan Poe

  Poe's 1846 account of how he composed The Raven according to the principle of unity of effect.

• Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance, Kenneth Silverman

• Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, Arthur Hobson Quinn

• The Gold-Bug, Edgar Allan Poe

  Poe's 1843 tale of a cipher and buried treasure, a companion to the Dupin stories in its love of reasoning.