Tim Towslee
Not unlike today’s twenty-first-century media consumers, the American readership that grew from the emergence of the penny press in the 1830s sought entertainment rather than information. In efforts to feed that desire, publishers of the New York penny papers ran stories of railroad accidents, steamboat explosions, human oddities, and most of all, sensational stories of rape, murder, and incest. In July of 1841, the body of the “Beautiful Cigar Girl” Mary Rogers washed up on the banks of the Hudson River, and a frenzy in the headlines of these penny papers ensued. Recognizing the urban public’s desires for voyeurism and modernity, Edgar Allan Poe saw the inflated attention Mary Rogers’s case received in the media as an opportunity to exploit this phenomenon in what he hoped would profitably combine the media spectacle with high-art literature in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” By providing his readership with a window into the “horrible details” and “further particulars” of the Mary Rogers case, Poe hoped to demonstrate his ratiocinative and literary skills by having his fictional detective Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin solve the real mystery behind Rogers’s case before the police, through careful examination of the newspaper articles about her.
Although Poe sandwiches the story between “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter,” the tales for which he is credited with defining the detective fiction genre, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is not a work of detective fiction in the sense that his other Dupin tales are. Unlike his other detective tales, in which Poe has his detective analyze the milieu of the crime scenes and then solve those crimes based on superior intellect and intuition (planting the seeds for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and thereby solidifying the genre’s position in popular literature[1]), in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” Dupin never leaves his apartment—not to find and scrutinize any clues, not to compile a list of suspects based on said scrutiny or at least anything more concrete than guesswork, not to do any detective work at all. Even though the tale does follow mystery fiction’s convention of offering information that allows the reader to attempt solutions to the crime along with the protagonist, the tale is better aligned with Poe’s earlier urban spectator tale and essay “The Man of the Crowd” and “The Philosophy of Furniture.” By extending the device of the latter, in which Poe reflects that the cultural phenomenon of Moving Day brought the private parlor into the public urban milieu, turning things inside out, one is able to read furniture like the former story’s unnamed narrator is able to read people by their appearance and actions.[2] Similarly to the ways Moving Day turns the urban environment inside out, through the penny papers of the day, Dupin brings the object of his gaze into his parlor. While “Marie Rogêt” was less successful than the other Dupin tales, we cannot dismiss it as a poor story; rather, by blending fact and fiction through newspaper voyeurism and armchair flânerie, Poe invents a new archetype altogether: detective fiction’s antisocial, sedentary cousin the armchair detective, whose stories are based in secondhand particulars of true crime, but written to entertain by allowing the media to do the detective’s legwork, and solved (or in Poe’s case, not solved) by pure intellect and intuition. Through this paradoxical variant of his detective established in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe anticipates the ugly nature of the mass media wherein the audience substitutes what he sees on the page for worldly experience and interactions with text for firsthand knowledge.
Before we can effectively analyze Poe’s tale as the emergence of the armchair detective, we must first look at a brief history of crime in the media in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because it is instrumental to crime fiction’s existence. In 1829, a federal copyright decision made a clear distinction between books and newspapers, deeming newspapers free from copyright restraints because of their ephemeral character.[3] This decision opened the floodgates of mass media, creating the first information age in America between 1830 and 1840 with the emergence of the penny press. Where eighteenth-century print culture “had been the providence of gentlemen and clergymen, new printed matter had now begun to appeal to the masses, men and women.”[4] The deluge of newly available, inexpensive print matter led to increased literacy rates in American cities and further served as a democratizing agent. With an increasing readership, penny papers like the New York Sun and the New York Herald sought to provide the people with “stories about ordinary working people doing ordinary and sometimes embarrassing things.”[5] Unfortunately, this approach didn’t sell papers, but the spectacle—primarily gruesome accounts of murder and the occasional train wreck—did.
The stories that filled the pages of the Sun and the Herald were certainly not the first appearances of crime in print. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, execution sermons, tales of public hangings, and lurid criminal confessions were very popular, but their purposes were more didactic—morality lessons for church folk, urging them to keep on the right side of the law and the Lord. By the mid-1830s, a different breed of crime story had replaced these tales of the pillory. These criminal accounts in the penny papers often mocked the inefficient police force of the day, creating a pointed journalism that appealed to a working-class audience that fancied itself as an alternative, and potentially more effective, police force. This is the same convention that Poe would adopt in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.”
Perhaps the most well-known of these criminal accounts are those of the bloody murder of Helen Jewett. In April of 1836, the well-to-do Richard P. Robinson of a prosperous Connecticut family brutally murdered the pretty young prostitute by bashing in her skull with a hatchet and then lit her room on fire in an attempt to destroy the evidence of his crime. Immediately, the penny press editors battled for scoops and new information to run about what Andie Tucher calls the “hot local story loaded with moral meaning, full of sex, gore, intrigue, and sin.”[6] The Jewett murder generated news stories for months with coverage of the investigation, eyewitness accounts, public scandals, and condemnations of prostitutes (not so much of murderers)—before Robinson’s trial had even begun. If the news wasn’t quite sensational enough, editors took it upon themselves to embellish the story or to invent one, so that it sold. Tucher, again:
The “horrible and melancholy affair,” the “cold-blooded, atrocious” way in which the young woman was “horribly butchered,” inspired page after page of baroque prose, lurid melodramatic scenes, dark innuendoes, blatant partisanship, obvious inconsistencies, vicious personal attacks on other editors as well as suspects in the crime, and accusations of blackmail against virtually everyone involved. . . . Day to day, the “facts” varied wildly, and the whole story was fraught with exaggeration, inconsistency, illogic, speculation and bias. Any attempt to discover, from the penny papers alone, exactly what happened on Thomas Street snarls into an insoluble knot of contradictions and confusion.[7]
This confusion sold more and more papers, as readers not so patiently read each day in hopes of making sense of this and other “lively human interest stories [that] center on sex, crime, and above all, sex crime.”[8] Five years after the Jewett spectacle, Mary Rogers’s death filled the pages of the dailies in a way that would outlive Jewett’s story through its inspiration of Poe’s second Dupin tale. Just as the penny press had been a product of the city, for the city, so had Mary Rogers. The new modernity of the urban milieu gave Mary the opportunity to leave the home and the true cult of womanhood and enter the marketplace. Mary was well known to the newsmen of the penny press, since she lived with her mother in a house located at 126 Nassau Street, among the buildings where the Tribune and the Herald kept their offices. Surely she became the object of their gaze as she walked to and from work at Anderson’s cigar shop each day. She was popular among other city dwellers as well, having gained notoriety behind the counter. The shop’s clientele included the likes of Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper, and possibly Poe himself.
In the early nineteenth century, a beautiful young woman certainly did not have a proper place among the businessmen and gamblers of the tobacco shop; the implication that she might have been a prostitute, or at the very least promiscuous, was not missed by the locals or those who read about her in the papers. The image of a young woman handling phallus-shaped cigars for the men of New York on a daily basis surely further supported this implication. However, if Mary’s moral character and chastity was questionable when she was living, it was even more so after her body was found floating in the Hudson River on that Wednesday in July of 1841.
Rogers was last seen alive in the company of a dark-complexioned man on Sunday, July 25, at Nick Moore’s House, an inn and tavern run by Mrs. Frederika Loss. The newspapers ran varying descriptions of the state of Mary’s body when it was pulled from the river, and scores of scenarios that could have led to her death, all of them verging on pornographic. Some papers had Mary raped and murdered by her gentleman companion, others had her raped multiple times and murdered by one of New York’s many street gangs, still others had her the victim of a botched abortion. Any of these speculative scenarios challenged Mary’s chastity and virtue, and therefore meant profits for the penny papers. Accounts of these brutal events were paired with descriptions indicating signs of struggle in the thicket near the river where Mary’s clothing and personal effects were found. The descriptions of these effects were no less lurid than the accounts of her rape and murder, with vivid descriptions of her petticoats and garters, all eye candy for the voyeuristic reader. Perhaps most sensational, and also inconsistent, were the reports from various medical examiners, either factual or embellished, that treated Mary’s body as though she had presented it to the readers for their scrutiny. Engravings of Mary’s body, scantily clad and bosomy, often accompanied and contrasted with the violent descriptions of her corpse; in woodcuts, she appears, as Amy Srebnick describes, “a poetic, sleeping beauty, ready to be awakened.”[9]
By “sensationalizing the more or less taboo subjects of sex and violence and selling them as ‘news,’ the penny press caught and held the eye, as well as the purse, of the public.”[10] The accounts of Mary Rogers’s death varied in so many ways that it was next to impossible to discern anything credible or consistent from the majority of the accounts. Nevertheless, Poe saw these stories as a convergence of three tropes of nineteenth-century culture: the taboo of femininity in the marketplace, the mystery of death, and the enigma of the urban milieu. Furthermore, since Mary Rogers was beautiful, and dead, she fit the mold of Poe’s perfect heroine.
With his story already laid out for him by the press, Poe seized the opportunity to bring the conflicting reports of Mary’s death into his closet via the newspaper and to use his own brand of pseudoscience to attempt to solve the real mystery of the beautiful cigar girl, through his fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin. Given the popularity of the penny press among the urban masses, Poe was able to recreate the mystery of Mary Rogers as “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” by changing the names—to protect himself, though, not the innocent—and the setting in order to juxtapose it with his previous Dupin tale, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The then unsolved case gave Poe a backdrop for his story, in which he aimed to answer the question he and his critics posed about his previous tale: “Where is the ingenuity of unraveling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?”[11]
Through Dupin, Poe addresses the contradictory press accounts of the girl’s death to emphasize that “it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation—to make a point—than to further the cause of truth.”[12] This rings similar to Poe’s satires of sensational journalism in “The Folio Club” and “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and alludes to the uncritical masses and their gullibility. Poe doesn’t hide his distrust and distaste for the masses or the mass media, particularly because of their sensationalism, but he also acknowledges that “to be appreciated you must be read, and these things are invariably sought after with avidity.”[13] So, he gives in to the masses with “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt;” however, throughout the story, Poe makes it clear that he is writing with the pointed aim of repudiating the erratic, indulgent reportage of crime in the popular press. He follows through by having Dupin “solve” the case without leaving his house, making a mockery of the police and the press. Whereas Marie Rogêt’s undoing is a result of her venturing out into the city, Dupin extracts the particulars of her undoing by choosing to remain inside.
Unfortunately, the story falls short of Poe’s intended financial mark, because he gets caught in the same trap in which he criticizes the penny press writers of ensnaring themselves—that of the influence of popular opinion. He makes assumptions about the particulars of his case for the sake of writing a better story by focusing on the more romantic—the rape and murder of a beautiful woman—thereby missing the solution all together. He believes the “facts” that he chooses to read into the story, ignoring the allegations that Mary died as the result of a botched abortion, which would eventually come out as the actual cause of her death through the deathbed confession of Mrs. Frederika Loss: that Mary Rogers had died from complications of a “premature delivery” that took place at her tavern, where Rogers was last seen. The results of this manipulation of the press are several inconsistencies between the first two parts of Poe’s tale and the conclusion, which had to be delayed a month so he could make the changes that would prevent disaster and personal failure.[14]
Poe supports his analysis of the Rogers case, saves his own reputation, and establishes his armchair detective through his use of the reenactment. His reenactments appear in the form of eyewitness accounts in fictional newspapers that he inserts in the story. This eyewitness account appears in his fabricated Morning Paper and provides details of a family’s encounter with a gang of young men in a boat who followed them and then gagged and “brutally treated” the daughter when she returned to her own boat to retrieve her parasol. By having this family, who are obviously more trustworthy than a tavern owner, witness the presence of gangs on the Seine the day of Marie’s disappearance, he corroborates the “evidence” alluding to gangs of undesirables in the vicinity and the inability of the police to catch them. Dupin points out that he includes these extracts in his analysis “chiefly to show you the extreme remissness of the police, who, as far as [he] can understand from the Prefect, have not troubled themselves, in any respect, with the examination of [Dupin’s primary suspect] the naval officer” (754).
More concretely supporting Dupin’s analysis, and diverting attention from the actual solution of the Rogers case, are the footnote on the first page and the infamous bracketed omission near the end, which together obscure and remove evidence from the story, respectively. Later collected publications of Poe’s serial open with a footnote in which he discounts his own methods:
The “Mystery of Marie Rogêt” was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity, and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded. Thus much escaped the writer of which he could have availed himself had he been on the spot, and visited the localities. It may not be improper to record, nevertheless, that the confessions of two persons, (one of them the Madame Deluc [Frederika Loss] of the narrative) made, at different periods, long subsequent to the publication, confirmed, in full not only the general conclusion, but absolutely all the chief hypothetical details by which the conclusion was attained. (723)
As previously mentioned, this is the exact opposite of the truth: Loss’s confession completely discredits Poe’s conclusion. The other “confession,” although entirely fabricated, is presumably from the naval officer. Finally, the story concludes with an omission, credited to the editors “of the magazine in which the article was originally published” but obviously carried out by Poe to cover up the errors in his solution:
For reasons which we shall not specify, but which to many readers will appear obvious, we have taken the liberty of here omitting, from the MSS. placed in our hands, such portion as details the following up of the apparently slight clew obtained by Dupin. We feel it advisable only to state, in brief, that the result desired was brought to pass; and that the Prefect fulfilled punctually although with reluctance, the terms of his compact with the Chevalier. (772)
The importance of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is not Poe’s ability to solve crimes (or not solve them, as was the case) by reading the newspapers, but his understanding of crime as an essential element of the urban environment through the city’s representation as “a place of violence and overcrowding, a polluted haven for criminal gangs which offers few gratifications to Dupin’s refined taste,”[15] and then bring that environment into the parlor. The city is more than a mere backdrop for these tales; it is these very horrors of the urban events and situations that have kept Dupin and his unnamed American partner indoors, hiding from the metropolis under the cover of their research. The pages of the penny papers provide Dupin a window through which to peer out onto the seedy underbelly of Parisian society without having to leave his library. The papers bring the urban environment and all of its unpleasantry to Dupin, allowing him to conduct all of his ratiocination and flânerie from the comfort of his armchair. Since Dupin does not leave his house during the course of the tale, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” cannot be considered a detective story in the traditional sense, because Dupin does not conduct any ratiocinative work, any detecting, at the scene of the crime; he merely voyeuristically observes the work of others and analyzes his own reenactments of these accounts using his intellectual, purely mathematical “Calculus of Probabilities” (724) to “solve” the case of Mary Rogers.
As the armchair spectator, Dupin is able to project himself anywhere he wants to in the newspaper stories. By merely observing and analyzing the pages of the penny press, he is able to imagine himself simultaneously as both the detective solving the case and the “murderer” himself. He reads the newspapers much as the narrator in “The Man of the Crowd” reads the crowd and Poe himself reads the contents of peoples’ houses on Moving Day in “The Philosophy of Furniture,” which “encouraged parlor flânerie because it served to break down the barriers between exterior and interior, public and private.”[16] He makes assumptions based on preconceived notions that exist nowhere outside of his own head. He sees what he wants to see. Since the narrator finds himself the flâneur in a dangerous, violent urban environment, it goes without saying that mystery and crime are afoot. Some critics, including Laura Saltz and David Reynolds, read “The Man of the Crowd” as a detective story, but it is a weak one at best, because there is no crime committed, no criminal, no motive, and so on. The element of mystery is created by the city itself, as it is in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” because the spectator and his target are individuals among the masses, they are both in danger of meeting violent fates, and they are both suspect of committing violent acts. Even if the old man “is the type and the genius of deep crime,”[17] unlike the newspapers in “Marie Rogêt,” he doesn’t allow himself to be read, so any such assumption is purely in the eyes and the mind of the voyeur for which the man is the object of his gaze.
Where Poe’s genius is clearly evident in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is in his anticipation that the masses would become so enraptured in the “horrible details” and “further particulars” of the penny press crime sensation for many years to come. The voyeurism in Poe’s flâneur tales predicts a similar voyeurism currently seen in reality crime television and social media. The scenes depicted in the penny press and exploited in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” foreshadow the popularity of true crime shows such as America’s Most Wanted, Cops, and the myriad of incriminating video files available on YouTube. What was true of mass culture in Poe’s day is true of mass culture in the twenty-first century: people don’t want to know the details of criminal activity or the social milieu so that they can protect themselves from harm, and we don’t need to hear confession sermons to have morality instilled upon us. Viewers, readers, and browsers today want the “horrible details” and “further particulars” for the sheer entertainment value. We want to experience the filth, the muck, and the scum of the earth without getting dirty. We want that window that looks out at the seedy underbelly of society, but we want the view from the safety and comfort of our homes.
Carl D. Malmgren, “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction,” Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 4 (1997): 120.
Kevin J. Hayes, “The Flâneur in the Parlor: Poe’s ‘Philosophy of Furniture,’” Prospects 27, no. 1 (2002): 103–19. Hayes’s article identifies the paradoxical variant of the stationary flâneur and makes connections between this variant and the detective, primarily through Walter Benjamin’s study of flânerie in his Arcades Project. Benjamin discusses the similarities between the flâneur and the detective at length.
Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 8.
Ibid., 15.
William David Sloan, The Media in America: A History, 5th ed. (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2002), 127.
Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 24.
Ibid., 25.
Mark Seltzer, “The Crime System,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004): 564.
Amy Gilman Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 62.
Laura Saltz, “‘(Horrible to Relate!)’: Recovering the Body of Marie Rogêt,” The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 243.
Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 226.
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” in Edgar A. Poe, The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Olive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1978), 3:738. Further references to Poe’s texts are from this edition and noted parenthetically in the text.
David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 226.
W. K. Wimsatt Jr., “Poe and the Mystery of Mary Rogers,” PMLA 56, no. 1 (1941): 245.
Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses, 230.
Hayes, “The Flâneur in the Parlor,” 105.
“The Man of the Crowd,” in Mabbott, Complete Tales, 2:515.