nomadic lifestyle, makes him dangerous. While
Dupin’s ‘aesthetic of fear’ is most obviously portrayed
though his derelict house, the lack of physical
description is suspicious. This suggests that Dupin
could be anonymous but also indistinguishable. The
reader has no idea what Dupin actually looks like. This
allows him to creep around society even more. This is
just one example of why Dupin can be considered a
Gothic figure.
The setting in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
works in a different way to that of Frankenstein, a
classic Gothic novel. While the city of Paris is still
placed away from the American readership that Poe
is writing for, the city is also a location that can be
geographically transferable. While Poe sets Dupin’s
life in Paris, the city does not change the plot in
any way meaning the city could in fact be any city,
one in America or not. The city is also a place which
is distinguishably different from non-metropolitan
areas yet in some senses all cities are the same.
While Paris is Dupin’s prowling ground it would be
easy to imagine him living in New York, for example.
The ‘long dirty street’ (Poe, 1967, 194) and the
houses that are “tottering to [their] fall in a retired
and desolate portion” (Poe, 1967, 193) of the city
are not aspects that are individual to Paris. Whereas
Frankenstein is concretely set within Geneva and the
Alps – there is no real English equivalent in which to
transfer the action. The city is not placed, as Wright
suggests Otranto is, away from the readership but in a
replica of their own locale. What helps to distinguish
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” as urban Gothic,
however, is the mixture of a traditional Gothic setting
placed within these metropolitan surroundings. It is
worth noting that both Shelley and Poe describe their
surroundings as ‘desolate’ despite referring to very
different settings which suggests that if not the image
of a Gothic landscape can be transposed into the city,
the feeling of one can. Dupin and the narrator live in
“a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted
through superstitions” (Poe, 1967, 193). This house
is a stereotypically Gothic residence that does not
seem as though it should belong in a metropolitan
area. However, Cassuto states that “the urban Gothic
readily produces anxiety, a sense of danger whose
location can’t be pinpointed” (Cassuto, 2017, 157).
The very inclusion of a classic Gothic house within a
city adds to the sense of anxiety that already exists
within a city. His anxiety discussed by Cassuto can
be seen most prominently in a text that predates the
publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”.
Many critics view Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” to
be the predecessor to his Dupin tales mainly due
to the urban setting but also due to the creation of
anxiety. Cassuto argues that “The anonymous man
of the crowd is indistinguishable from the city, and
from the criminal doings within it” (Cassuto, 2017,
158). The anxiety that surrounds anonymity within
an urban setting is a common feeling that has been
explored in fiction both before and after “The Man
of the Crowd”. Consider Hawthorne’s “Wakefield”
(1837) or Irving’s “The Adventure of the German
Student” (1824). Both texts explore the possibility
of isolation within populous regions and create the
same sense of fear as if one were stood on top of
the Alps with Frankenstein’s creature. Having said
that, these texts create a complex issue of isolation.
Not only does the thought of a man being able to
exist in complete isolation within a city produce
a sense of anxiety and suspicion, as suggested by
Cassuto, but also the notion that these figures are
watching others but also being watched creates an
uncomfortable contradiction. The narrator of “The
Man in the Crowd” has a “deepened... interest of the
scene” (Poe, 1967, 183), he is “scrutinizing the mob”
(Poe, 1967, 183) in an ardent manner. He is acting as
a flaneur, but this produces a contradictory feeling of
anxiety. We become suspicious towards the old man
for being alone and isolated, but we are also anxious
of the narrator for stalking him. One critic argues that
“Whether or not the old man is literally a criminal,
his behaviour resembles that of an urban criminal
because it involves isolation in the midst of an urban
crowd” (Brand, 1991, 87). This idea is significant as
it infers that the old man is dubbed as “the type and
genius of deep crime” (Poe, 1967, 188) based purely
on the narrator’s surveillance on him. The narrator
sees him acting in a similar manner to a criminal, so he
must be one – his behaviour only ‘resembles’ that of a
criminal. There is something inherently uncomfortable
about being dubbed so just because of an, also very
uncomfortable, sense of unescapable surveillance.
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