The Purloined Letter

Edgar Allan Poe is a key figure of American Romanticism, which began in the late 18th century, in part as a reaction to the Enlightenment. Authors from this period emphasize emotion and individualism over science and industrialization; Romantic works tend to idealize nature and glorify the past. More specifically, Poe’s work is often characterized as Dark Romanticism, which generally focuses on the supernatural and human psychology (particularly the human tendency toward sin and/or self-destruction) and has close ties to the Gothic.

In “The Purloined Letter,” one can see the emphasis on emotion over science in Dupin’s explanation of how he determined the location of the stolen letter. The police, he argues, used logic and “mathematical principles” in conducting their search, and this is precisely why they failed. According to Dupin, “The mathematics are the science of form and quantity; mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity […] What is true of relation—of form and quantity—is often grossly false in regard to morals” (18). Their search, he goes on to explain, would have indeed proved a success had Minister D—— been simply a mathematician because a mathematician would assume “abstract or general truths” (118). It would therefore not occur to him to try to assume another’s point of view—i.e., the police’s—because he would view perspective as irrelevant to ascertaining the “correct” answer of where to hide the letter. Dupin, however, knows the minister to be both a mathematician and a poet, and therefore he deduces that the minister would have considered the theft from the police’s perspective and adjusted accordingly. Like Romanticism generally, the story is thus skeptical that reason alone can uncover truth, prioritizing instead the subjective individual experience.

While this story does not contain any of the supernatural elements that Poe typically employs, it does exhibit other characteristics of Dark Romanticism. Dupin’s motives for solving the case are particularly significant here, as he does so (at least in part) to exact revenge. More broadly, the parallels between Dupin and the minister—they execute their thefts similarly, and they share an initial—suggest that the minister represents the dark side of Dupin’s own psychology. Dupin’s closing reference to the misdeeds of Atreus and Thyestes underscores this point, as the two were not only brothers but twins—doubles who found themselves at odds.