Edgar Allan Poe: Master of Gothic Horror and Detective Fiction
Poe and the Gothic Tradition
Few would challenge the long-standing opinion that Poe was a master of the Gothic horror tale. However, many might not readily be aware that he did not invent Gothic fiction. When Poe began to attract widespread attention by publishing several macabre tales in the Southern Literary Messenger in early 1835, critics sounded negative notes concerning his “Germanism,” a synonym for Gothicism. They deplored his wasting talents on what they deemed an outmoded type of fiction. Despite these caveats, and many offered over the century succeeding his death, Poe’s Gothic tales have typically attracted the greatest numbers of readers, and that allure is wholly understandable.
A descent from British milestones in literary Gothicism, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), W. H. Ireland’s The Abbess (1798), or Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), is evident in Poe’s writings. In his own day, the brief tale of terror, familiarly known to the Anglo-American readership as the signature for fiction in the popular Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, served as Poe’s, and other Americans’, model. Poe’s accomplishments in the short story far surpassed what now often reads like dross in the pages of the celebrated Scottish and other contemporaneous literary magazines from the first half of the nineteenth century.
Well into his literary career, in his second review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, Poe alluded to the fine “tales of effect [to be found] in the earlier numbers of Blackwood [which were] relished by every man of genius” (E&R, 573). In his mind, such effect, or unity of impression, was inevitably coupled with “terror, or passion, or horror.”
The Detective Story
Edgar Allan Poe is commonly regarded as the father of detective fiction. In the three stories that feature his amateur investigator C. Auguste Dupin – “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842–43), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844) – Poe invented the detective story. As A. Murch writes, this narrative’s “primary interest lies in the methodical discovery, by rational means, of the exact circumstances of a mysterious event or series of events.”
Chronicling a search for explanation and solution, such fiction typically unfolds as a puzzle or game, a place of play and pleasure for both detective and reader. The popularity of Poe’s stories and those of his successors partly derives from this intense engagement with the text. In scrutinizing evidence and interpreting clues, the reader becomes a detective, and the detective becomes a reader. Moreover, a detective like Dupin also becomes an author, figuratively writing the hidden story of the crime. As a story that dramatizes the construction of a story, replacing the unintelligibility of mystery with explanation, detective fiction emphasizes the potential comforts of narrative: the apparent provision of order, of meaning, and of a metaphoric map in time (with beginning, middle, and end) that tells us where we are.
Gothic Romance
The Gothic romance emerged in England when the novel form itself was only a few decades old. When Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764, it was partly a reaction against limitations that early novelists seemed to have accepted with equanimity. The novel of manners and the novel of didactic sensibility are exposed to the sub-world of the unconscious. Sensibility is shown under pressure. Sexuality, elemental passions, and fear moved to the center of the novelist’s stage.
The word ‘gothic’ initially conjured up visions of a medieval world, of dark passions enacted against the massive and sinister architecture of the gothic castle. By the end of the century, it implied the paraphernalia of evil forces and ghostly apparitions. The gothic is characterized by settings that consist of castles, monasteries, ruined houses, or suitably picturesque surroundings, and by characters who are, or seem to be,