A Hidden Murder in Edgar Allan Poe's "'Thou Art the Man'"

Abstract

A Hidden Murder in Edgar Allan Poe's "'Thou Art the Man'" Yasuhiro Takeuchi Despite its complicated narrative design, "'Thou Art the Man'" (1844) is generally known as a "comic detective story" (Thompson 6). Its "detective" attempts to convince people that another man is the culprit in a murder for which the "detective" himself is responsible. However, in the end he is exposed by another detective figure, the narrator of the story. Since "[t]here is no attempt to treat the murder seriously" (Quinn 422), it seems reasonable that John T. Irwin esteems it as "the first parody of [the analytic detective genre]" (202). But characterizing the story as primarily a parody or comedy does not seem to do it justice. I argue that this rather obscure story, published two months after "The Purloined Letter," is possibly an advanced form of a tale of ratiocination, Poe's experiment to push the genre a step forward from the famous Dupin story. As with the purloined letter, Poe seems to have hidden another murder in plain view in the text of "'Thou Art the Man,'" a story that is actually turned inside out to appear to be the story of a solved murder case. Consequently, the battle of wits is not simply fought between the two fictional characters—akin to the battle between the Minister, who hides the letter, and Dupin the finder in "The Purloined Letter"—but is also expanded into the realm of reality, into a developing "battle" between the narrator and the reader. In his annotations to the story, Stephen Peithman also points out the possibility that the narrator "hides or covers up any clues" (314), but expresses his preference for the Dupin stories, because in them "the evidence is always right there in front of us, awaiting only Dupin's explanation of what it all means" (323).1 In contrast, it is precisely because of the very possibility that the "narrator is playing games with us" (Peithman 323) that "'Thou Art the Man'" becomes more intriguing for a reader such as [End Page 527] Richard Kopley, who suggests in his study of the Dupin stories that "we may learn from Dupin to become our own Dupin. His detection may be taken as an allegory of our own potential reading," more specifically, that of "a close reading of the text, a formal analysis" (2). Kopley's approach—in which the reader assumes the role of literary detective—will be even more applicable to a crime story not already provided with a Dupin. In "'Thou Art the Man,'" Poe seems to have left room for us here to play the role of a Dupin, and to wait for us to read the story more closely. The murder that the narrator of "'Thou Art the Man'" claims to solve is that of Barnabas Shuttleworthy, a wealthy citizen of Rattleborough. His dissipated nephew, Pennifeather, is initially arrested (with no resistance in the process) for Shuttleworthy's death, as the result of an investigation led by Charles Goodfellow (the first detective-like character in the story). But the narrator (the second detective) in the end ingeniously compels Goodfellow to admit both his guilt for the murder and his scheme to frame Pennifeather. Knowing that Shuttleworthy once promised Goodfellow to send him a box of wine, the narrator puts Shuttleworthy's corpse in an empty box and sends it to Goodfellow on the pretext that it is a gift from Shuttleworthy; when the box is opened in the presence of Goodfellow and his guests, the victim's bloody body jumps out of it and accuses Goodfellow, saying "Thou art the man" (1057). The words are actually pronounced by the narrator, using his ventriloquial abilities; utterly stunned, Goodfellow makes "a detailed confession" (1057) of his crime and dies on the spot. This apparent plot, however, contains some incongruous elements to which the narrator himself deliberately draws our attention: Pennifeather's unreasonable willingness to admit his guilt, Goodfellow's curious silence about the sender of the wine, and Goodfellow's motive for the crime, which is characterized as the desire for vengeance upon Pennifeather. There seems to be another, less incongruous scenario...