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Newspapers

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” contains long excerpts of newspaper articles as the means with which Dupin first gathers the details of the crime. Dupin and the narrator learn about the murders in an evening edition of Le Tribunal, which describes the crime in detail and how it has sent the neighborhood into a panic. The next morning’s edition of the paper goes into further detail, interviewing every witness the paper’s journalists could find, including the physician who examined the bodies postmortem. Finally, that evening’s Le Tribunal has yet another update, which initially only spoke of how baffled the police were. Only the postscript, likely added just before publication, reveals any progress in the case in the form of Le Bon’s arrest. These persistent updates in each subsequent paper imply great public interest in the murders. Le Tribunal’s coverage is so thorough that the narrator can find almost no new details in examining the physical crime scene. The persistent, detailed, and perhaps voyeuristic coverage of the crime in newspapers is a realistic 19th century detail that plays into the story’s theme of urban crime.  The public fascination with horrific events at the time was great and is still prevalent today.

Violence

The murder of Madame L’Espanaye and Mademoiselle Camille is not merely violent, but grotesquely so. The newspaper’s description of the crime covers all the gory details: the slit throat, the bloodied and torn hair, the bruises and scratches, the strangle marks. The bodies of both women are scattered in strange positions as if they’ve been discarded, Mademoiselle Camille shoved up a chimney, and Madame L’Espanaye thrown into the back garden.  Poe uses the shocking amount of violence as almost a red herring. Within the context of the story, Dupin notes that the sheer brutality of the case is part of what confuses the police. They are distracted by the blood and ignore the facts. The graphic violence serves as a foil to Dupin’s analysis, enhancing the story’s theme of the power of logical thought. The worse the violence that Dupin is able to make sense of, the more remarkable he appears in making sense of it.

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