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The Triumph of Logic Over Violence

The sheer contrast of the senseless brutality of the murder and Dupin’s tidy logic and deduction emphasizes the ultimate triumph of logic and reason over criminal madness. Poe goes into great detail describing the horror of the murder scene, which is both gory and disarrayed. The sheer disorder in terms of physical chaos but also the brutality and destruction of the scene appears to defy logic, confusing the police. However, Dupin approaches the crime methodically. When he applies his logic, deduction, and analysis to the scene, what seemed an impossible riddle becomes clear. Dupin’s measured and logical approach further allows him to solve the mystery without any need for further violence. Although Dupin and the narrator do have pistols at the ready for their meeting with the sailor, peaceful conversation and an appeal to honor are all that are required to get a full explanation. The power of logic to tame and control violence is also showcased by the murderer being an orangutan, an animal, who can be tamed under the care of a zoo, which represents civilization, order, and reason. Dupin’s analysis and logic thus powerfully brings order to criminal chaos, unraveling its mystery and defeating it.

Xenophobia

Xenophobia undergirds the mystery and proves essential to its logic and Dupin’s deductions. In hearing the shrieks of the orangutan, all the witnesses imagine a foreigner, often of a nationality they have never interacted with. Although one witness imagines the voice could be speaking French, he is a Dutchman who can only be interviewed through an interpreter, highlighting that he is quite unfamiliar with French despite being in France. That all these people assume that languages they don’t know or understand sound like an animal shrieking reveals the xenophobia in how they imagine people different from themselves. The foreign, to them, sounds animalistic. The orangutan as murderer also plays into this theme. Even though the orangutan is an animal, it is specifically an animal brought over to France from Borneo, meaning it’s an exotic import. The orangutan even commits the murder by attempting to mimic human behavior. Even couched in the form of an orangutan, the implication is that exotic or otherwise foreign people and things are dangerous, even unwittingly so.

Urban Crime

As the establishing work of the genre of detective fiction, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” explores anxieties around growing crime in city life. The 19th century in the United States and Europe brought with it a new fascination with urban crime as industrialization shaped the modern city. The first newspaper article Dupin reads about the murders describes the inhabitants of Quartier St. Roche being awakened by screams. From this phrasing, the murders upend the sleepy peace of the entire neighborhood, plunging everyone into fear. This moment reflects how the close proximity of neighbors in a city inevitably raises fears that a victim’s neighbors are as vulnerable as the victim, allowing the screams to be heard by all neighboring households. Cities are also places with a wide variety of people, including people from abroad. The assumption that the shrill voice witnesses hear is a foreigner expresses the xenophobic fear that outsiders to the city bring crime with them. Finally, the ineptness of the police, who arrest an innocent man, mirrors fears that police departments were unequal to the rising tide of crime.

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