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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.