81 Edgar Allan Poe, Gothic Horror, and the Early Detective Story

The following video offers a helpful visual introduction to the significance of Edgar Allan Poe for modern readers.

Here are some key points from the video:

• Poe left a mark in part because of his attention to form
• He emphasized shortness and intense experience, a “unity of effect”
• He uses horror to explore deeper human emotions
• Pioneered the unreliable narrator
• He was highly versatile–inventing the detective story
• He wrote satires and hoaxes (a balloon voyage to the moon, etc.)
• He worked as an editor where he published literary theory and reviews
• Poe lived in poverty and had a dark personal life
• He struggled with alcoholism

Edgar Allan Poe’s “dark” Romanticism and the American tale

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s network of literary and intellectual partnerships, often called the “Transcendentalists,” adopted a mostly optimistic, mystical embrace of human potential and a belief that humans and nature remain intimately united. In fact Emerson’s Nature manifesto suggests returning to a simpler, more solitary encounter with non-urban environments will help individuals get in touch with something deeper in themselves.

During the same period (later termed the “American Renaissance”), another group of writers explored less optimistic views of human nature. This “dark” Romanticism, as it’s sometimes called, includes Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. If Emerson urges his readers to rediscover the spiritual emblems and hieroglyphics scattered throughout nature, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville tend to question whether humans can return to that kind of Swedenborgian ecstasy (Swedenborg believed the apocalypse occurred in 1757, followed by a new kingdom that could be experienced by all).

In short stories like “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne depicts characters who are broken by cynicism and doubt. Hawthorne stories are often allegorical and can be read morally, as though each one preaches some deep truth about human nature, as he casts a backward glance at his Puritan ancestors. In “Young Goodman Brown,” the wilderness becomes a site of horror, the opposite of Emersonian redemption.

Poe admired Hawthorne’s craft. In his 1842 work of literary criticism, “Review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales,” Poe editorializes Hawthorne’s short stories in a way that’s become highly useful for making sense of what Poe himself seems to be doing.

Were we called upon, however, to designate that class of composition which, next to such a poem as we have suggested, should best fulfil the demands of high genius—should offer it the most advantageous field of exertion—we should unhesitatingly speak of the prose tale, as Mr. Hawthorne has here exemplified it. We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal. The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length, for reasons already stated in substance. As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality. …

A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect.

In remarks like this, Poe underscores the massive shift taking place in 19th-century literature. The emphasis of the passage above is on the rhetorical effect of the reading experience, not the message, moral, or deeper meaning. A good story should have a “single effect,” and that effect should be conveyed to the reader—through a combination of events—in the period of between thirty minutes and two hours. It’s highly compositional understanding of what makes a good story work. And it also argues that the short story (the “tale”), had become, for Poe, the preeminent prose medium.

Poe’s gothic horror

In the same critical essay Poe refers briefly to the many traces of “terror, or passion, or horror” that can be found in “many fine examples of which were found in the earlier numbers of Blackwood.” This reference is to Blackwood’s Magazine, a British miscellany that began publishing in 1817 and included the works of Percy Pysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and other key British Romantics.

The magazine was best known for its horror. William Maginn’s stories, such as “The Man in the Bell” (1821), heavily influenced some of Poe’s most famous gothic horror (including “The Pit and the Pendulum”). The magazine and this type of fiction appealed primarily to an emerging consumer that resulted from urbanization in London as well as the United States—a “commuter (stereotypically a white-collar city worker)” who expected quick thrills during a brief part of the day. “Mass-market horror, therefore, can be understood as one indirect product of a culture which was urban, industrial, mercantile, technological, and scientific.”^[1] This association between mass-marketed literature and gothic horror would later drive the popularity of horror magazines in the 20th-century, such as Weird Tales.

Urban commuters expected thrills—sensational lit. What resulted was a mass-marketed version of the 18th-century gothic. Whereas Horace Walpole, Charles Brockden Brown, and other gothic novelists worked with a much longer form (the novel) and still belonged to the sentimental tradition of portraying strong emotion as a warning intended to educate and reform the reader, the gothic horror of Blackwood’s began to focus more on the strong emotions of terror, fear, and dread as desirable effects. A work shouldn’t be judged based on whether it reforms the reader but on whether it achieves the desired effect—in gothic horror, this meant a feeling of terror, fear, or dread.

Poe’s literary criticism and short stories from the 1830-1840s helped crystallize this popular genre. In the 20th-century, masters of horror such as H.P. Lovecraft would revive Poe’s legacy.

Poe’s ratiocinative tales and the detective story

Between 1839 and 1845, Poe experimented with a short story method in which the main character used a “ratiocinative method” to solve crimes by means other than normal police methods. These detective stories revolved around the character Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, who would eventually become Sherlock Holmes in the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

One of his early works of this period, “Mellonta Tauta” (1839), helps understand how Poe’s “ratiocinative method” serves as a correction—or supplement—to Enlightenment rationalism.

In “Mellonta Tauta,” Poe makes direct reference to the debates concerning scientific method and reasoning and what he perceived to be as oversights of the scientific philosophers who had weighed in on scientific reasoning. Dissatisfied with the idea that the sole possible avenues to knowledge were based on the assertions of either Aristotle or Francis Bacon (read: the rationalism of Enlightenment humanism), the fictional author of the letters refers to the repression of imagination. The narrator proposes that the imagination is superior because it can (in the words of the 19th-century philosopher John Tyndall) “magnify, diminish, qualify, and combine experiences, so as to render them fit for purposes entirely new.”

In Poe’s view, scientists are blinded by minute details, often thinking that they see better by holding an object closely to the eyes. With the proper use of the imagination, however, it’s possible to proceed with intuitive hunches, descend into the mass of details, and then come back to the surface. The imagination is more “holistic,” we might say today.

Poe visualizes this detail-oriented-yet-holistic method in “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (1841). In the climax to the story, the narrator describes a most powerful and violent whirlpool, from which his escape was an exercise in ratiocination. Observation and experience were key factors in his survival; by observing the objects trapped in the whirlpool and correlating their behavior within the whirlpool (speed of descent, absorption) with their physical characteristics (size and shape), the narrator was able to grab onto something of ideal size and shape to avoid being sucked into the vortex of the whirlpool (Fig. 1).

What’s key about Poe’s “ratiocinative method” is how enmeshed it portrays the character. According to Poe, the problem with the Enlightenment’s scientific method isn’t that it’s too focused on the details; rather, the problem is that it doesn’t include enough details.

A more poetic sensibility takes into account facts that scientific rationalism tends to discard. In his masterful short story, “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), the narrator of Poe’s tale acknowledges the power of observation to establish the causal links that lend themselves to identification:

At first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn, I looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations. Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.

The narrator lays out his ability to detect a class of people (for example, clerks, gamblers and clergymen) based on a series of physical traits and behaviors. But to the narrator, the man of the crowd (Fig. 2) is the one that blends in no matter where he ends up; eventually determining that this man is “the type and genius of deep crime.”

Here’s what’s key about the narrator’s observations in “The Man of the Crowd”: not only does the narrator “descend into the details” of aggregates and individuals that make up the crowd, but he also marks the man of the crowd who manages to blend in. That is, the narrator observes the details of his environment, while also observing the fact that others are making similar calculations and adjusting themselves accordingly. Some of the most important details often overlooked by scientists, Poe is suggesting, include human psychology.

This more sophisticated form of observation (his “raciocinative method”) is what allows the detective Dupin to unearth the secret about the letter in “The Purloined Letter.”

In emphasizing this raciocinative method, Poe portrays his character’s choices to chess moves. The metaphysical dilemmas facing Hawthorne’s allegorical characters are, in Poe’s tales, replaced by strategic calculations based on the circumstances. The moral code of “good and evil” that permeates Hawthorne’s stories is replaced by pure strategy.

If you’re a fan of game theory, you might suggest Poe anticipates the 21st-century emphasis on the “prisoner’s dilemma.”