Selected Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (61 page)

grisette
: French term for a seamstress, identified by her grey
(gris)
smock. By assuming the sexual immorality of such a class of women, the term can also mean, more colloquially, ‘prostitute’.

n. 1 Nassau Street
: Poe’s Paris is not geographically accurate. Although his notes provide the real names for most of the characters, they do not do so for Madame Delue, the guilty innkeeper who actually arranged for the disposal of Mary’s body after the failed abortion.

émeutes
: French for tumults or uprisings, in particular the revolutionary activity of 1830.

sequitur
: Latin for ‘it follows’, most commonly in the phrase
non sequitur
.

de lunatico inquirendo
: the Latin name for the legal writ calling for a jury inquiry into the defendant’s sanity.

n. 1 Landor
: William Landor, pseudonym of Horace Binney Wallace. The quotation is from Wallace’s anonymous novel
Stanley
(1838).

El hinc illæ iræ?
: Latin for ‘And hence this anger?’

fatal accident
: the reference to the possibility of death at Deluc’s inn is one of Poe’s late additions, trying to adjust his original solution to the real-life fact of the fatal abortion. On Poe and abortion, see Van Leer, ‘Detecting Truth’.

The tale first appeared in January 1843 in James Russell Lowell’s
The Pioneer
. It was frequently reprinted, but not collected by Poe himself.

Poe’s tale won a contest sponsored by the Philadelphia
Dollar Newspaper
, in which it first appeared in two instalments on 21 and 28 June 1843. It was frequently reprinted and collected in
Tales
(1845).

All in the Wrong
: the motto is Poe’s own, and not, as claimed, from Arthur Murphy’s eighteenth-century comedy.

scarabæus
: Latin for scarab, a family of beetles, whose sacred image ancient Egyptians frequently used as ornaments.

scarabæus capul hominis
: scarab with a human head.

connected with it
: end of first newspaper instalment.

Captain Kidd
: the buried treasure of the Scottish pirate William Kidd (
c
. 1645–1701) was a popular legend in mid-nineteenth-century America. It is alluded to as well in works by Irving, Thoreau, and Melville.

a table
: although Poe’s tabulations are not correct, his cryptography is fundamentally sound.

The tale first appeared in August 1843 in the Philadelphia magazine
The United States Saturday Post
, later renamed
The Saturday Evening Post
. It was collected in
Tales
(1845).

The tale first appeared in
Godey’s Magazine and Lady
’s
Book
for April 1844.

serious fact
: the Swiss-German physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1733–1815) popularized the therapeutic potential of hypnotism, which he called ‘animal magnetism’. Part of a more general spiritualist revival in mid-nineteenth-century America, the fascination with mesmerism was also treated in novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry James. On Poe and mesmerism, see Sidney Lind, ‘Poe and Mesmerism’,
PMLA
62 (1947), 1077–94.

dream
: Novalis, ‘Fragmente, Paralipomen zum Blütenstaub’, no. 121.

Warren Hastings
: the British governor charged with putting down the Benares insurrection. Poe drew many of his details from T. B. Macaulay’s review of G. R. Gleig’s biography of Hastings.

The riots … his life
: Poe’s fundamentally accurate account of Cheyte Sing’s insurrection of 1781 derives from Macaulay’s essay. On orientalism in Poe, see Malini Johar Schueller, ‘Harems, Orientalist Subversions, and the Crisis of Nationalism: The Case of Edgar Allan Poe and “Ligeia”’,
Criticism
, 37 (1995), 601–23, and more generally John T. Irwin,
American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

sangsues
: French for leeches; the poisonous variety is Poe’s invention.

This third and final Dupin tale first appeared in
The Gift: A Christmas, New Year, and Birthday Present
, dated 1845 but issued in September 1844. It was collected in
Tales
(1845)

Nil sapientiae…
: Latin for ‘Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than cleverness.’ The source of the passage, ascribed to the Roman philosopher Seneca, has not been identified.

au troisième
: on the third, or what Americans today call the fourth, floor.

the Minister D
—: the similarity between the minister’s name and Dupin’s own has led some critics to posit a symbolic and even a biological relation between the two characters.

hotel
: used in the French sense, where
hôtel
can mean ‘private mansion’ as well as ‘public hostelry’.

Rochefoucault… Campanella
: La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère were French moral philosophers, famous for their ‘maxims’. Machiavelli and Campanella were Italian political philosophers, the former ruthlessly practical, the latter
dreamily Utopian. The famous discussion of ‘evens and odds’ has been of considerable interest to modern theorists, who compare it to the
fort/da
episode in Freud’s
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
. See Jacques Lacan, ‘Le Séminaire sur “La Lettre volée”’, in
Écrits I
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 7–75; Jacques Derrida, ‘Le Facteur de la Vérité’ in
The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond
, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 411–96; Barbara Johnson, ‘The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida’, in
The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhelorica of Reading
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 110–46; and especially Stanley Cavell,
In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

non distributio medii
: the fallacy of the undistributed middle mistakenly argues from a premiss—if
a
then
b
(all fools are poets)—to its converse—if
b
then
a
(all poets are fools). In so doing it fails to acknowledge the middle possibility—some
b
s are not
a
s (some poets are wise).

“Il y a à parier
…”: ‘One can bet that any popular idea, every accepted convention, is a foolishness, since it has convinced the majority of people’; from the
Maximes et Penseés
of the eighteenth-century French author Sebastien-Roch Nicolas, who wrote under the name of Chamfort.

ambitus … honesti
: despite the similarity to English terms, in Latin
ambitus
literally means ‘seeking office’ and
rehgio
‘superstition’, while
homines honesti
is Cicero’s term for men of his own party.

Bryant…
: Jacob Bryant,
A New System of Antient Mythology
(1807).

facilis descensus Averni
: ‘The descent to Hades is easy’; from Virgil,
Aeneid
, vi. 126.

as Catalan! said
: Angelica Catalani, nineteenth-century Italian opera star. The source of her comment is unidentified.

monstrum horrendum
: a terrifying monster, according to Virgil,
Aeneil
, iii. 658.

Un dessein si funeste
…: ‘So deadly a scheme, if not worth ν of Atreus [the avenger], is deserved by Thyestes [the criminal]’; from
Atrée et Thyeste
(1707) by Prosper-Jolyot de Crébillon. For Poe’s use of the passage, see Johnson, ‘The Frame of Reference’.

The tale was first published in
Graham’s Magazine
for November 1845.

the autumn of 18
—: the temporal setting refers to the widespread prison reforms after the great revolutions in both America and France. According to Foucault, the great symbolic act in this reconceptualization of punishment was Pinel’s removal in 1794 of the chains from inmates at Bicêtre.

Monsieur Maillard
: some of the characters’ names seem ironic. Stanislas-Marie Maillard led in the overthrow of the Bastille. Paul de Kock was a French novelist who sensationalized city life. Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace was the astronomer whose nebular theory Poe celebrated in his cosmology
Eureka
. ‘Petit Gaillard’ means a hearty little fellow. ‘Desoulières’ alludes to
souliers
or shoes,
which would not cook well into a pumpkin pie. Georges-Louis Leelere de Buffon was a famous naturalist; although ‘Bouffon le Grand’ means ‘the great idiot’.

Bellini
: the great opera composer Vincenzo Bellini represented his heroines’ descents into madness through a beautiful, but dramatically inappropriate lyricism. Finding the composer’s personal demeanour as tepid as his characters’ psychologies, the poet Heine dismissed Bellini as ‘a sigh in dancing-pumps’.

reductio ad absurdum
: a rhetorical strategy which disproves an argument by demonstrating the absurdity of its more extreme cases.

vieille cour
: literally ‘old court’; the phrase often refers to the aristocratic regime before the French Revolution.

the Anakim
: the giant sons of Anak; Numbers 13: 33.

nil admirari
: Latin for ‘to be astonished at nothing’; from Horace,
Epistles
, 1. vi. 1.

monstrum, horrendum, informe
…: ‘a horrible, malformed, huge monster, deprived of light’; from Virgil,
Aeneid
, iii. 658, where it refers to the Cyclops blinded by Ulysses. Poe quotes part of the passage near the end of ‘The Purloined Letter’.

Demosthenes’… Brougham
: Henry Lord Brougham was a nineteenth-century polemicist and Lord Chancellor of England. Although he quoted from the Athenian orator Demosthenes, he could not be said to look like a Greek from the fourth century
BC
, of whom no representations survive.

the Medicean Venus
: a statue notorious for its nude depiction of the goddess.

bulls of Phalaris
: a hollow brass statue of a bull in which the king Phalaris burned people to death. As they died, their screams sounded like the roarings of the bull.

Pandemonium in petto
: Pandemonium is the assembly hall of hell, where the devils noisily (and foolishly) debate in the opening books of Milton’s
Paradise Lost; in petto
means ‘in the breast’ or ‘private’.

Yankee Doodle
: though now degenerated into a children’s song, ‘Yankee Doodle’ originally embodied the impudence of the colonies, and is here linked with the antitraditionalism of post-revolutionary France.

This tale first appeared in
Graham’s Magazine
for July 1845.

Spurzheimites
: Poe casts his tale as a revision of phrenology, which associated personality traits with the shape of an individual’s skull. In addition to cranial lobes marking hunger (‘alimentiveness’) or self-defence (‘combativeness’), Poe’s narrator isolates a new organ of ‘perverseness’. Dr Johann Gaspar Spurzheim was one of the discoverers of phrenology and its chief advocate in the United States. The references to ‘moral sentiment’, ‘pure intellect’, and ‘the
principia
of human action’, however, connect the particular pseudo-science of phrenology to eighteenth-century faculty psychology in general, alluding to Isaac Newton, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant. On phrenology, see Edward
Hungerford, ‘Poe and Phrenology’,
American Literature
, 2 (1930), 209–31; on the philosophical implications of perverseness, see Cavell,
In Quest of the Ordinary
.

This tale first appeared in
Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book
for November 1846.

Amontillado
: a light-coloured Spanish sherry, not the finest of wines. Throughout the tale, Poe probably chooses specific wines for the sound of their names and not their alcoholic character.

‘Nemo me…’
: ‘No one provokes me with impunity.’

masons
: Freemasonry is a private fraternal organization that arose in the seventeenth century and continues to exist today. In the nineteenth century Americans feared its secret rituals, and the Masons were frequent victims of mob violence. Although many Masonic rituals refer back symbolically to the organization’s origins in stonemasonry, Montresor’s claim to be a Mason is purely ironic.

This tale, an expansion of ‘The Landscape Garden’ (1842), was published in the New York
Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman
’s
Magazine
for March 1847. It has as its sequel ‘Landor’s Cottage’ (1840).

Giles Fletcher
: from ‘Christ’s Victorie on Earth’ (1610).

perfectionists
: Poe here associates the doctrine of the perfectibility of man with numerous eighteenth-century thinkers: the French statesman Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot; the English common-sense philosopher Richard Price; the English empiricist Joseph Priestley; and the French mathematician Marie-Jean Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. Since Poe is elsewhere sceptical about man’s perfectibility, this reference (and many others in the story) may be ironic and mark Poe’s reservations about Ellison’s aestheticism. See Joan Dayan,
Fahles of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

n. 1 Muskau’s account
: the story of the inheritance exists largely as Poe describes it in Prince Hermann Pückler-Muskau, ‘
Four in England, Ireland, and France
(1833). Poe rightly notes that a similar inheritance, secretly invested for heirs a century and a half later, lies at the centre of Eugene Sue’s
The Wandering Jew
(1844–5).

mute and inglorious
: adapted from Gray, ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’.