LITERATURE AND THE CITY

contains domesticating elements that naturalise, reassure, and confirm the reader’s beliefs and expectations’ (8). However, sometimes detective fiction instead ‘explores what it means to be caught up in the maelstrom of modernity’ (Thompson 8). This essay will focus on the endings of Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and Doyle’s ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’. I will argue that Doyle’s story reworks Poe’s genre by being more escapist and reassuring, whereas Poe’s story is more unsettling as it is more morally ambiguous. Doyle recovers a lost sense of surety and justice for nineteenth century readers, who were ‘becoming aware of injustice in a variety of different areas’ (Punter 111) due to the ‘unprecedented boom in mass circulation newspapers’ (Brake et al. 503). Poe, on the other hand, uses moral ambiguity to prompt readers to rethink the ethics of pure reason, so they may be more aware of its social costs.

             First of all, Doyle revises Poe’s genre of detective fiction to make ‘Twisted Lip’ more escapist. This is achieved by incorporating a greater sense of moral certainty at the ending. At the ending, the reader is relieved to find that no murder has been committed, and the allegedly murdered has simply disappeared for he has been impersonating a beggar. At the end of ‘Twisted Lip’, Neville St. Clair exclaims, ‘God bless you!… I would have endured imprisonment, aye, even execution, rather than have left my miserable secret as a family blot.’ (Doyle 110) He would rather be punished or die than impact his family honour for being caught impersonating a beggar. The fact that no tragedy happened brings a lasting sense of comic relief to readers. As Douglas Kerr remarks, Holmes is a ‘clever detective [that] show[s] that wrong doing may exist, but is manageable; it can be identified, contained, righted, or at least punished’ (137-138). Great moral certainty lies in the fact that there is ultimately, a ‘culprit’ caught by Holmes. Inspector Bradstreet says to St. Clair ‘In that case I think that it is probable that no further steps may be taken. But if you are found again, then all must come out.’ (Doyle 112) The quotation here emphasises that Neville will not be exposed for what he has been doing, unless he continues impersonating a beggar. Here St. Clair’s tendency to live outside the middle class lifestyle is contained with the Inspector’s threat. The reader’s expectations for somebody to be caught, and for some form of justice to be served are fulfilled, making the classical narrative structure complete with an exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement. Furthermore, the portrayal of an enigmatic and yet powerful detective is essential in making ‘Twisted Lip’ more escapist. An awe-struck Inspector Bradstreet remarks, ‘I wish I knew how you [Holmes] reach your results.’ (Doyle 112) Holmes says coolly ‘I reached this one… by sitting upon five pillows and consuming an ounce of shag.’ (Doyle 112) The image of Holmes as being all-powerful and on top of everything brings comfort and reassurance to readers who like Inspector Bradstreet, have to face complex issues in daily life.

             However, ‘Twisted Lip’ is only to a large extent, but not fully, escapist. This is because its ending is somewhat open, defying readers’ original expectations. The unprecedented twist in the ending urges people to reflect on the ethics of performance and journalism. For example, ‘Twisted Lip’ readers have been led to think that Neville St. Clair was dead, but then they are surprised to find St. Clair ‘arrested as his [own] murderer’ (Doyle 112) in the end. After beggar Hugh Boone is exposed as Neville St. Clair in disguise, St. Clair explains-- ‘Well you can imagine how hard it was to settle down to arduous work at two pounds a week, when I knew that I could earn as much in a day by smearing my face with a little paint.’ (111) Here the ‘murder’ is solved, as Holmes reveals that St. Clair is not killed, only taking on the persona of Hugh Boone the beggar. St. Clair defends his own impersonation by saying it is more profitable to do so than continue working as a journalist. This begs readers to reflect on whether impersonation is a crime. They may also wonder how journalism is not as criminal as pretending to be a beggar. Like beggars, journalists often went slumming, which was the act of pretending to be a member of the lower class to gain first-hand information about their living conditions. Since journalists do so for money, just as St. Clair pretends to be a beggar for money, do journalists help society or merely self-profit? Due to these socially-related questions implied by the ending of ‘Twisted Lip’, the story could not be said to be entirely escapist.

             The ending of ‘Rue Morgue’, however, is more morally ambiguous than ‘Twisted Lip’-- it horrifies readers and denies them a comfortable solution. The ending scene is one of brutal killings described in vivid, sensational and bloody detail. ‘The gigantic animal [An Ourang-Outan]… nearly severed her [Madame L’Espanaye’s] head from her body… it flew upon… the girl… retaining its grasp until she expired.’ (Poe 167) Here the deaths remain terrible realities in the story rather than illusions-- very much unlike ‘Twisted Lip’’s ending where nobody dies. The denouement in ‘Rue Morgue’ is also more disquieting than that of ‘Twisted Lip’ because no one is punished for Madame and her daughter’s deaths. Readers are frustrated because even though they now know ‘whodunit’, the larger question of ‘so what?’ remains. Apart from moral ambiguity, the ending is Gothic as the imagery is gory and frightening. ‘The sight of blood inflamed its anger into phrensy. Gnashing its teeth, and flashing fire from its eyes, it flew upon the body of the girl, and imbedded its fearful talons in her throat, retaining its grasp until she expired.’ This scene has a lot of similarities with vampire fiction, where a monster figure is drawn to violence by blood, and where the victim is often a woman who is attacked at the throat. Indeed this scene fits the definition of Gothic fiction by David Punter, which is that it has ‘an emphasis on portraying the terrifying’ and is ‘the fiction of… heroines preyed on by unspeakable terrors’ (1). Hence, the above scene evokes fright rather than the comic relief brought by ‘Twisted Lip’’s ending. Apart from this, in ‘Rue Morgue’ there is the unjust reality where ‘The owner … obtained for it a very large sum at the Jardin des Plantes’ (Poe 167). Although the Frenchman accidentally lets his beast loose to kill people, he receives no punishment for the consequences of his carelessness, but profits. This development in the ending heightens the sense of moral ambiguity and further disturbs readers’ minds, leading them to rethink the injustice in their own society.

             In light of this, one may say the Gothic reality in ‘Rue Morgue’ grapples with the uncontrollable, sudden and fast-changing reality of the nineteenth century. According to Punter,

The rapid and drastic historical changes left people of the nineteenth century with fear, hopelessness and despair, a psychological state similarly evoked by the strange, sudden and ambiguous happenings in ‘Rue Morgue’. For instance, the closed home environment of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter is suddenly and randomly intruded upon by an outside force. Similarly, for the nineteenth century reader, their old ways of lives, such as country life, were disrupted by the abovementioned changes of the eighteenth, nineteenth centuries. Therefore, Poe ‘explores what it means to be caught up in the maelstrom of modernity’ (Thompson 8). His short story is a psychological one that reflects the psyche of people at his time.

             Furthermore, ‘Rue Morgue’ departs from the future-oriented progress narrative of the nineteenth century to show that a retrospective mind-set is also important, and that in any case the use of reason should be balanced by ethical concerns. According to Rzepka, Poe was an avid reader of geological and paleontological texts (3). What Poe seeks to ‘disentangle is pre-history, a series of events that is assumed to have taken place before the beginning of the ‘written record’ (Rzepka 3). Hence like geologists and palaeontologists, Poe delights in retrospective reasoning and analysis. Perhaps due to this, Poe’s Dupin also focuses on understanding past events to learn the facts of the murder. There may be no problem for geologists and palaeontologists to treat their researched objects as objects. However, there is clearly a problem when Dupin likewise treats his murder case as a case rather than as a human topic. As readers are horrified by the lack of justice for the two victims in ‘Rue Morgue’, Poe uses this emotional response to warn readers of the possible inhumanity of pure reason that neglects ethical concerns. Dupin is not interested in social responsibility and human values, but only concerned with gaining pleasure from solving the murder. ‘As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as calls his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles’ (Poe 141). Here Poe likens the analytical processes to physical exercises, emphasising that both give pleasure to the person who exercises or analyses. This is a foreshadowing of how Dupin mainly focuses on gaining pleasure from analysis without paying much attention to attaining any moral achievement through his analysis. Although the word ‘moral’ is used by Poe here, it is unclear how his story of Dupin’s investigation itself reaches a clear moral end. It is true that Dupin prevents an innocent man from being convicted for the murder of the two women, but no culprit is caught responsible then for the killings, which intensifies the unfairness of the situation. In short, ‘Rue Morgue’ shows that retrospective analytical methods could still be useful in the progress-oriented nineteenth century. The story also warns that human concerns should not be overlooked while focussing on reason. 

             In conclusion, through the ending of ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, Doyle reworks the detective fiction genre pioneered by Poe and provides a more escapist, less Gothic response to the nineteenth century city. Doyle creates the detective-god figure, Sherlock Holmes to console his anxious readers. Readers can read Doyle’s short story ending and find their wanted sense of surety, justice and containment of social ills in a modern world ‘dominated by… contradictory forces’ (Thompson 2). ‘Twisted Lip’ then serves as a coping strategy for readers and helps them face city life. The ending of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, however, is more unsettling. It is a gothic account that ‘explores what it means to be caught up in the maelstrom of modernity’ (Thompson 8). Readers read the ‘Rue Morgue’ to find the horror of pure reason, which does not necessarily improve human society in any moral way. Society is presented as unpredictable, criminal, and unfair, and there is no intervention by either the detective or any external source to restore law and order. Hence, ‘Twisted Lip’ is more escapist, departing from ‘Rue Morgue’’s gothic-style portrayal of society as a form of social critique. Ultimately, the above analyses of ‘Twisted Lip’ and ‘Rue Morgue’ may link back to our societies in the twenty-first century. As popular culture nowadays is saturated with remade versions of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, and Poe’s Dupin is nowhere to be found, this urges modern readers to rethink what our popular discourses are trying to make us think.