A Critique of Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter - Research Paper Example

? A Critique of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter Number Number Teacher’s Due A Critique of Edgar Allan Poe’sThe Purloined Letter Any analysis of one of the short stories of one of America’s greatest writers, Edgar Allan Poe needs to look at the economic, social and cultural aspects of the work. The confluence of Romantic and realist influences and social issues in the United States of America of the nineteenth century, The Purloined Letter has also been analyzed from a psychoanalyst perspective. The fact that the story revolves around a crime and the solving of it is also a factor that has to be taken into account while looking at the complexities of the tale. In a world where the police was becoming the custodian of the law and order of a particular state and the government’s most important tool, the emergence of the crime mystery as a genre is an important development. This paper shall look at how the course of events in the short story, The Purloined Letter enables the reader to take a look at the way the society functioned in nineteenth century America for the section of society that is shown in it. Despite the setting of the story being France, the story has implications for the society of the United States of America as well. The causes and effects of these social factors shall be sought to be analyzed in this paper. The story plays on the greed that is engendered in every level of the society as a result of the corruption in the political culture of a state. From this moral and social corruption, Poe does not spare even the armchair detective, Dupin. While talking of this detective, comfortably ensconced in his house in Paris, Poe is also making references to the conditions that prevail in his own country, America. The America of the nineteenth century was in many ways, steeped in political corruption. The ideals of the ‘American Dream’ were still a part of the cultural landscape of the United States of America; however, the country also faced the threats of corruption that had come to be accepted as a part of the everyday life of a country that was growing at an incredible pace. The moral and ethical lethargies that had crept into the American lifestyle are succinctly captured as “the curling eddies of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of the chamber” (Poe). This points to the concern that Poe has in most of the short stories that he wrote, the mental and moral state of man and its well-being. In many of his stories, as in The Purloined Letter, he talks of the tendency of the human mind to wander and falter from its true course when faced with the temptations of wealth and positions of power. The characters in the story- the minister, the chief of police and even the detective fall prey to one temptation or the other. Both of these are caused directly or indirectly due to wealth and power. Dan Shen comments on this aspect of Poe’s works and terms it a part of Poe’s aesthetic conceptions of fiction in prose (Shen). Poe’s focus on the social and the economic as the concerns of his tale relate specifically to the divide that he effects between his own prose and poetry, as Shen notes (Shen). For instance, the supernatural and gothic elements that one sees in a poem like The Raven is almost entirely absent in a work of prose fiction like The Purloined Letter. The story does, however, have elements of the gothic and the Romantic. The ideas that are propounded by Dupin at the end of the story regarding the role of mathematics and art in society are explicitly Romantic. The opinions argue for an increase in the relative importance of art in a society where art had been relegated to the sidelines in previous ages. The Puritan ideas that had been prevalent in America since it started getting populated by the British and people of various other ethnicities did not consider art to be of any value in the society. Dupin’s conversation with the narrator at the end of the story tries to repudiate these ideas and also the utilitarian ideas that were in circulation in Europe at that point of time. I dispute the availability, and thus the value, of that reason which is cultivated in any especial form other than the abstractly logical. I dispute, in particular, the reason educed by mathematical study. The mathematics are the science of form and quantity; mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity. The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra, are abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious that I am confounded at the universality with which it has been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth. What is true of relation --of form and quantity --is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example (Poe). Poe’s protagonist, the detective Dupin solves the case for money and for the satisfaction of having done so. Poe’s intentions in having written the story, however, are not confined to providing his readers with the pleasure of reading a murder mystery. The story makes clear the philosophical ideas that the Romantic movement of America was rooted in. This can be seen even in other works of this age where the idea of the romance was prevalent. This can be seen in the novel, The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is the story of a woman named Hester Prynne, who commits adultery and is punished by the Puritan settlement that she is a part of. The conceptions of Romance as it were understood by the writers of America at that point of time is spelt out in the first chapter of this book. Hawthorne talks of the transcendental nature of art whereby it could help people understand a meaning of life which was not informed exclusively by concerns of rationality. The text critiques strictly rational and bookish understandings of life that were held by the puritans of early American settlements (Hawthorne). Poe however, does not ask for an inversion of present ideas. He wishes for an order where science and arts may exist together and in collaboration with the other. Darlene Harbour Unrue talks of this in her essay, “Edgar Allan Poe: The Romanticist as Classicist”. She places Poe in the middle of both these influences and analyses how the fantastical elements of the Romantics and the rational elements of the classics merge in the works of Poe (Unrue). This can be seen even in The Purloined Letter. There is no rejection of the rational analysis that the chief of police conducts in the story. The rejection is of the exclusivity that such methods are provided in the investigation that is conducted by the chief. Dupin repeatedly stresses on the importance to be given to the mathematical and poetical aspects of the minister, which would enable a solution to the case. The cultural and the social coalesce in this analysis of Poe’s work. The social importance that is attached to cultural politics is what is analyzed in Poe’s work. How this affects the society even in fields like the investigation of crimes is seen in the works of Poe. The Purloined Letter displays a society where the importance attached to cultural stereotypes have become so entrenched in the consciousnesses of people that the methods employed to enforce those have also become a part of the collective consciousness of people. This can be seen in the exaggeration of the methods that are employed by the chief of police in attempting to find the location of the lost letter. …we had absolutely completed every particle of the furniture in this way, then we examined the house itself. We divided its entire surface into compartments, which we numbered, so that none might be missed; then we scrutinized each individual square inch throughout the premises, including the two houses immediately adjoining, with the microscope… (Poe) These descriptions are obviously intended to poke fun at the state of affairs that would result from placing too much importance upon a very strictly rational worldview. According to the author, this blinds people, as it does the Parisian chief of police, to the obvious realities of life. These are the problems that result from an excessive reliance on established forms of reality. Poe’s protagonist questions these views and proposes alternate realities. These realities are also open to be questioned. The entire essence of the tale that Poe writes is to explain the multiplicity of perspectives that may prevail in society. There may be poets, mathematicians and also people who combine the two in themselves; however, for both to assume an equal importance in the eyes of the society would be the important thing to do. This would be essential in a society where such worldviews stand the risk of being rejected as a result of the materialistic pursuits of a few. Works Cited Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. London: Wordsworth, 2007. Print. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Purloined Letter. Web. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/purloine.html. Accessed on 8th March, 2012. Shen, Dan. “Edgar Allan Poe's Aesthetic Theory, the Insanity Debate, and the Ethically Oriented Dynamics of “The Tell-Tale Heart””. Nineteenth Century Literature, 63 (3), 2008. Web. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncl.2008.63.3.321 Accessed on 8th March, 2012. Unrue, Darlene Harbour. “Edgar Allan Poe: The Romantic as Classicist”. International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 1 (4), 1995. Web. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30221867 Accessed on 8th March, 2012 Read More