Unspeakable Horror!

I'm sure many of you out there have encountered The Closet in Literature classes.  One of my professors said in a lecture that the sentiments expressed for the young man in Shakespeare's sonnets represented how men expressed friendship for each other at that point in history -- friendship and nothing more.  Have you read the part of Moby-Dick when Ishmael sleeps with Queequeg and they wake up entwined together like a married couple?  The text never states explicitly that they are lovers, but queer reader response quickly connects the dots.  In one of my classes as an undergrad, we read The Picture of Dorian Gray and never discussed the queer subtext -- I look back and think: how is this possible?  The mental gymnastics required for the denial of The Closet are quite extraordinary. 

I'm teaching Poe this fall, and I was re-reading "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and I encountered one of those strange "Closet" moments when I thought to myself: did I just read that?  

It's always interesting to read intense descriptions of devotion between men in Literature before the clinical invention of the "homosexual" (around 1890) -- the same period of time when the Wilde trial served as a public polarizing of sexuality and The Closet (as we know it today) was born (at least that's one theory).  As a young teenager, I absolutely loved Sherlock Holmes stories.  My favorite aspect of these stories -- Holmes and Watson lived together.  As a queer reader, I completely imagined them as a gay couple living together in The Closet of Victorian culture.  I vividly remembering my disappointment (shared by Holmes himself) when Watson decides to get married.  

Later I discovered that Holmes was actually created by Edgar Allan Poe in his Dupin tales.  Of course, Holmes evolved away from Poe's handful of Dupin tales and became his own full-blown cultural icon, but the seeds of Holmes are all there in the Dupin stories, including the intimate relationship between detective and narrator.   

In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the narrator begins with a little essay on analysis and deduction.  Next, he tells how he became acquainted with Dupin -- they are both searching for the same rare book.  Like a lot of Poe's characters, Dupin has an illustrious and undefined ancestry and background.  After Dupin and the narrator become friends, they decide to move in together, in part because Dupin has money problems.  The narrator writes: "Our first meeting was at an obscure library in the Rue Montmartre, where the accident of our both being in search of the same very rare and very remarkable volume, brought us into closer communion. We saw each other again and again."   

As they spend time together, the narrator begins to develop strong feelings for Dupin: "I was deeply interested in the little family history which he detailed to me with all that candor which a Frenchman indulges whenever mere self is the theme. I was astonished, too, at the vast extent of his reading; and, above all, I felt my soul enkindled within me by the wild fervor, and the vivid freshness of his imagination."  The phrase "my soul enkindled" paired with "wild fervor" (referring to Dupin's imagination) seems suggestive of a very passionate bond.  Then the narrator says, "I felt that the society of such a man would be to me a treasure beyond price; and this feeling I frankly confided to him. It was at length arranged that we should live together during my stay in the city."  Obviously, "a treasure beyond price," is an overly-passionate phrase for the narrator to use to describe his feelings for Dupin, and he confides his feelings.  I love this -- even if there is no explicit sexual connection.  As a queer reader, I completely identify with these profound feelings for another man and it is easy for me to imagine beyond the text.  

The two rent a gloomy haunted mansion together.  "Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen --although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature. Our seclusion was perfect. We admitted no visitors. Indeed the locality of our retirement had been carefully kept a secret from my own former associates; and it had been many years since Dupin had ceased to know or be known in Paris. We existed within ourselves alone."  Here they live together in secret -- why do they choose to live in secret?  Why would they be regarded as "madmen of a harmless nature"?  

Here the narrator describes their activities together: "It was a freak of fancy in my friend (for what else shall I call it?) to be enamored of the Night for her own sake; and into this bizarrerie, as into all his others, I quietly fell; giving myself up to his wild whims with a perfect abandon. The sable divinity would not herself dwell with us always; but we could counterfeit her presence. At the first dawn of the morning we closed all the massy shutters of our old building; lighted a couple of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays. By the aid of these we then busied our souls in dreams --reading, writing, or conversing, until warned by the clock of the advent of the true Darkness. Then we sallied forth into the streets, arm and arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford."  As a queer reader, this reads like a beautiful little fairy tale of life in the shadow world of The Closet as they travel arm-in-arm in love with the night -- and the narrator gives himself up to Dupin's wild whims with perfect abandon.  The homoerotic subtext of this story is very powerful -- or is it all within my subjective mind?  It sounds like a beautiful and macabre romance to me.  

Of course, it is easy for biography to intrude into this kind of analysis.  We know Poe was straight, right?  After all, he married his 13-year-old cousin and he wrote numerous poems and stories that idealize a melancholy, waif-like girl who wastes away and dies -- leaving her beloved to pine away indefinitely.  But analysis doesn't necessarily depend upon biography.  In fact, we can consciously choose to exclude biography from literary analysis.  So, excluding biography, this sure does read like a queer love story, but the passionate love between Dupin and the narrator remains isolated in the beginning of the story.  Next, it turns to the murder.  

I'll explore a queer reading of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" further in my next entry.  In the meantime, read the complete text of the story:  Click Here!