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Tag: literature

Illumination Series Featuring: Dr. Addie Tsai

June 14, 2023 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

Title: The World To Me Was a Secret, which I Desired to Discover 

In collaboration with Shelf Life Books, we are excited to celebrate Pride Month with Addie Tsai as they read from their queer Asian nonbinary Frankenstein retelling, Unwieldy Creatures. Addie will also be signing books, so please join us for a wonderful after hours evening at the Poe Museum!

Tickets ($10.00-$12.00) on sale now!

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Refreshments will be available for purchase as well.

Unwieldy Creatures: a biracial, queer, nonbinary retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a tale of doom, ambition, loss, revenge, and murder. 

Unwieldy Creatures, a biracial, queer, nonbinary retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, follows the story of three beings who all navigate life from the margins: Plum, a queer biracial Chinese intern at one of the world’s top embryology labs, who runs away from home to openly be with her girlfriend only to be left on her own; Dr. Frank, a queer biracial Indonesian scientist who compromises everything she claims to love in the name of science and ambition when she sets out to procreate without sperm or egg; and Dr. Frank’s nonbinary creation, who, painstakingly brought into the world, is abandoned due to complications at birth that result from a cruel twist of revenge. Plum struggles to determine the limits of her own ambition when Dr. Frank offers her a chance to assist with her next project. How far will Plum go in the name of scientific advancement and what is she willing to risk? 

About the author:

Addie Tsai (any/all) is a queer nonbinary artist and writer of color who teaches creative writing at the College of William & Mary. Addie collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. They earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a Ph.D. in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. Addie is the author of Dear Twin and Unwieldy Creatures. She is the Fiction co-Editor and Editor of Features & Reviews at Anomaly, contributing writer at Spectrum South, and Founding Editor & Editor in Chief at just femme & dandy. 

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Illumination Series Featuring: Dr. Gary Richards

May 17, 2023 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

Join us for an evening with Dr. Gary Richards, Chair of the University of Mary Washington English Department! Dr. Richards will speak on the the life, work, and dialogue between two fixtures of Southern literature: Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams.

This is a ticketed event. Tickets can be purchased online or at the gate. Wine will be for sale.

$10.00 – $12.00
Purchase Tickets

The Poe Museum

1914 E Main Street
Richmond, Virginia 23059 United States + Google Map
804.648.5523
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Murders in the Rue Morgue: Dupin Solves a Gruesome Murder

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), is the first detective story written by Edgar Allan Poe and is considered to be the first-ever story of the detective genre, In this fictional short-story, the Paris Police Chief (the Prefect) asks Poe’s Detective C. Auguste Dupin to solve the violent murder of a mother and daughter. Dupin first explains ratiocination and how he might apply it to solving crimes. The tale opens with Dupin proclaiming, “The mental features discoursed as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis.” He regards the unraveling of mysteries as one of the most rewarding challenges of life, stating:

As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as calling his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity that disentangles. He derives pleasures from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension præternatural. His results have…the whole air of intuition.

In the passage above and throughout his narrative, Poe speaks through an authoritative narrator’s voice. He employs his investigative skills to perform a civic or moral duty. He shows readers that a non-professional observer can be successful in untangling even the most puzzling mystery. Dupin does not believe in the traditional analytical methods of professional scientist’s or the police. He compares solving a crime to solving a cipher or gambling with cards or chess. He introduces a playful analysis to solving a crime—no matter how gruesome the act may have been.  To solve difficult puzzles, he suggests that an analyst must use a combination of tools including physical action, intellectual analysis, and intuition. He elaborates: “Analytical power should not be confused with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis.”

His approach incorporates the ingenious, the fanciful, and the truly imaginative. However, it is also profoundly analytic. Dupin believes that a “disentangler” needs to balance the “Romantic” and “Mechanical” approaches to arrive at the precise solution in either a crime or a scientific investigation.  Dupin states that the Parisian Police often fail because they only analyze cases using circumstantial evidence. The “necessary knowledge” to solve a crime, he counters, is to know “what to observe.” He considers his methods as ingenious; he eliminates all preconceived notions and derives entirely new approaches. Poe’s stories imply that his methods of solving crimes may also be useful to nineteenth-century scientists—who are stuck in useless and outdated theories. The narrator says that he is a “fancy of a double of Dupin—the creative and the resolvent.” One-half detects the problem and his other half (the narrator) explains the solution. He believes that to know what to observe, he must form a strategy before seeking to understand the clues and solution. However, it is possible that in this relationship the narrator may distort what Dupin is thinking or doing by introducing his own subjective point of view of what he observes. 

To illustrate his superior powers of observations, Dupin observes fifteen minutes of the movements of his un-named partner, in “Rue Morgue,” to establish the connections between his actions and thoughts. However, with such demonstrations, Dupin brings more attention to his personal idiosyncrasies than to the relevant case details. The narrator, whose inner thoughts are observed, is amazed. “Tell me, for Heaven’s sake, the method… you have been enabled to fathom my soul.”  Dupin responds, “There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.” The detective suggests that his skills are not abnormal, but based on his ability to focus on his observations. The narrator reinforces his confidence in Dupin’s skills, when he states that, “He could not help acknowledging that he [Dupin] had spoken the truth.” 

Dupin’s problem-solving goes far beyond creative resolution. He employs many sophisticated skills, including tracking thoughts and actions back to their origins, making visual and auditory inferences, and reading body and facial signs (phrenology). Carlson observes that Dupin analyzes all, “masters all [including] the associative patterns of his partner’s most private thoughts” (240). Richard Wilbur contends that Poe portrays Dupin as a “godlike genius,” who “possesses the highest and most comprehensive order of mind. He includes in himself all possible lesser minds, and can, therefore, fathom any man—indeed any primate—by mere introspection” (qtd.in Carlson 62). 

Dupin’s character suggests that he calculates as automatically as Maelzel’s “automated” chess machine. Perhaps, though, Poe may also be “duping” the public into believing that a fictional character like Dupin could help to relieve them of their real fears about crime. This argument relates back to Poe’s lack of faith that the advancements of nineteenth-century science could solve the major problems of society.

In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), the police assume that the murders have been committed by some person associated with the victim. Dupin discards this unproven assumption and embarks on finding a different solution. Dupin concludes, after questioning all the witnesses, that the murder could not have been committed by the prime suspect, or by any human. After getting the idea from a newspaper story about an escaped orangutan, Dupin makes the imaginative connection that an orangutan may have committed the heinous deed. Kenneth Silverman writes that Poe picked the solution from several articles in American newspapers written in the 1840s that featured stories “concerning razor-wielding apes” (172). Poe’s solution also played to the public’s fears about the many unexpected dangers lurking in the streets of Paris. Mabbott notes that Walter Scott’s, “Count Robert of Paris” (Tales and Sketches 1831) involved murdering orangutans, and that, “Orangs were popular in America, having been occasionally exhibited since 1831” (523-24).

In identifying an ape as a murderer, Poe also enters the popular nineteenth-century discussion of evolution. The ape can also be seen as a metaphor about the barbaric and primitive tendencies of humanity. Perhaps Poe imagined that, if the evolutionary process could connect men and apes, then apes might have the same tendencies to commit murders of humans. Dupin demonstrated in his first case that he could unravel almost any mystery. In my next Poe and Science column, I will explore one spectacular attempt that Poe made to simultaneously solve a real and fictional crime.

Selected Sources

Carlson, Eric W. Ed. A Companion to Poe Studies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Hoffman, Daniel. Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe. New York: Paragon House, 1972.

Merriman, John M. Police Stories: Building the French State, 1815-1851. New York, Oxford University Press, 2006. Web. 15, January 2015.

Edgar Allan Poe:. Tales and Sketches, 1831-1849. Ed. Thomas O. Mabbott. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1978.

—. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe Volume XIV: Essays and Miscellaneous. Ed. Harrison, James A. New York: T. Crowell, 1902.

Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar Allan Poe: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

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Poe’s Tales of Detective Fiction

XIR236810 Portrait of a Police Officer in Douai in 1848 (oil on canvas); by French School, (19th century); Musee de la Chartreuse, Douai, France; Giraudon; French, out of copyright

MURRAY ELLISON–Urban crime was an area of acute interest in the nineteenth century in America and Europe because the public feared that it was rampant and out of the control of the police. To respond to this concern, Poe demonstrates increasingly complex aspects of ratiocination in each of his three Auguste C. Dupin detective-based tales. He chose Paris, France for these tales because it had one of the first professional police forces. See photo of a French police officer above (myartprints.co.uk).

The term, ratiocination, is not listed in most dictionaries; however, it may be defined by deconstructing its syllables and associating it with other related words. A ratio compares the relationships between two quantities. Poe develops a new system for establishing relationships between unknown events and the motives or solutions to complex problems. Dupin expands the use of accepted nineteenth-century classical investigation techniques and adds hyper-observation and intuitive leaps of imagination to arrive at new solutions. He understands that clues and events are not always understood simply by the way that they appear. He approaches crime solving in the same way as he solves puzzles. With the same understanding of the evidence that the police hold, he provides new metaphoric solutions. His methods of unraveling crimes are unorthodox and appear to the police as irrational. Dupin presents the details of these cases directly or through an unnamed narrator to give readers a glimpse into his ratiocinative thinking. The narrator’s job is to be amazed at and inform the reader about the skills of the detective. Dupin separates the relevant from the irrelevant. He focuses on unexplained deviations from the normal, anticipates the actions and thoughts of his associates and opponents, and embraces information that, at first, appears to be external to the case. Each Dupin story is a self-contained armchair mystery, in that he seldom needs to leave his home to solve the crime.

Matthew Pearl, in his “Introduction” to the Dupin Mysteries, notes that Poe introduced Detective C. Auguste Dupin, of Paris, France to literature more than five years before Boston had established the country’s first professional police department. As a result, Poe chose Paris to be the setting of all three of his Dupin mysteries. Perhaps, he also made this choice because many French scientists and philosophers epitomized Poe’s criticisms of these intellectual ideas of the nineteenth-century Age of Reason. They rejected dogma and sought ways to find objective knowledge. They believed that truth could be best be verified by observation and scientific investigation. Among the ideas that Poe attacked in his detective stories was the irrational belief that man could ultimately attain near stages of perfection, and that he could control his environment by scientific methods. Because of these contradictory views, it is hard to determine if Poe proposed ratiocination to address crime, or if he was mocking the irrational faith that the Age of Reason thinkers had in science. Perhaps he may also have been “duping” his readers by presenting both possibilities simultaneously.

As a non-professional detective, Dupin mocks the inferior crime-solving techniques of the paid Parisian police officials. The prefect appears in each of the Dupin stories and serves as a symbol of the incompetence of police officials. A “prefect” is the French representative of a department or Region. In 1800, Napoleon reorganized the Paris police to fall under the jurisdictions of the Prefecture of Police for security. The Paris police, right after Boston’s department, became one of the earliest professional police departments in the modern western world. The prefect thinks he has the perfect solution to the crime. However, Dupin is always skeptical of his approach and solutions.

In his three tales of ratiocination, Poe demonstrates that Dupin’s methods of scientific reasoning are superior to those of the police. He is critical of the established authorities and power structures. The police are symbols for his criticisms of the professional scientists and the nineteenth century. He believes that scientists are limited in arriving at new solutions in the same ways that the police are limited in solving crimes. Poe’s crime-solving detective is officially titled Chevalier, Auguste Dupin. Chevalier is the rank equivalent to a master detective in France. “Auguste” means the most revered, and Dupin may be associated with the English verb “to dupe.” Thus, his name and title have ambiguous meanings. These stories then can be interpreted that Dupin is the most revered trickster to criminals; he is questioning the public’s irrational beliefs that scientists can solve modern complex crimes. The next Poe and Science column, I will discuss Poe’s first, and perhaps best-known tale of ratiocination, The Murders of the Rue Morgue.

*This article is an extract from Murray Ellison M.A Thesis on Poe and 19th-Century Science from Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015©

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Mellonta Tauta: An Imaginary Journey

Description of an artificial hand, by Sir George Cayley, published by Tyler and Reed, 1845, London.

Extracted from Dr. Murray Ellison’s MA Thesis on Poe and 19th-Century Science from Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015©

In Poe’s Imaginary Journey, “Mellonta Tauta” (1849), the narrator, Pundit, embarks on a balloon trip to outer space in the year of 2848 and writes a letter narrating the details of his journey.

The name that Poe gives his narrator suggests that he is a pundit, a knower of sublime truth. However, Poe may have selected his character’s name because he delivers puns or a satiric presentation of science fiction. Pundit records his adventures in a journal that is presumed to have originated from the nineteenth century, as he is traveling to the distant future.  From these accounts, we may conclude that Poe’s “Mellonta Tauta” is one of the earliest fictional works to explore time travel. The narrator outlines his view of the history of science and of his objections to nineteenth-century science, and he also describes the technologies he sees in the future. The narrator’s opinion also likely represents Poe’s views on the topics he discusses in this story.

Pundit begins his talk: “In all the ages the great obstacles to advancement in Art have been opposed by the so-called men of science.” He says that our men of science are not quite as “bigoted as those of old.” He refers to the wise “Hindoo” philosopher, “Aries Tottle” [Aristotle], and continues his monologue: During the dark ages, “metaphysicians” tried to dispel the “singular fancy that there existed but two possible roads for the attainment of Truth!” He lectures that Aristotle relieved them of this misconception by introducing “the deductive or a priori mode of investigation.” He started with what he called “self-evident truths, and then proceeded ‘logically’ to results.” His disciples and their system of thinking, “flourished supreme” until the “advent” of Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century, who “preached… the a-posteriori or inductive [system].”  Bacon “proceeded by observing, analyzing and classifying facts…into general laws.” Pundit concludes that Bacon “operated to retard the progress of all true knowledge—which makes its advances almost invariably by intuitive bounds.” For hundreds of years, he states: “a virtual end was put to all thinking.” Pundit proposes that the only valuable knowledge gained in the history of science was by men who combined the methods of science and intuition to solve scientific problems. He notes that Newton “owed the truth of gravitation” to Kepler. Kepler “guessed—that is to say, imagined” [gravity].  Kepler, Pundit states, unraveled gravity like a “cryptographist unriddles a cryptograph,” in a process that is similar to conducting hermeneutic literary interpretation.

Pundit reports that the passengers on his futuristic space exploration see a “magnetic cutter in charge of the middle section of floating telegraph wires.” He comments it was once “impossible to convey the wires over the sea, but now we are at a loss to comprehend where the difficulty lay.” In this passage, Poe anticipates electronic communications. Near the floating electric wires, he wryly comments that a man has been knocked overboard “from one of the small magnetic propellers that swarm in [the] ocean below us.” The narrator comments, stoically, that the detached man was “soon out of sight.” He continues: “I rejoice, my dear friend that we live in an age so enlightened that no such thing as an individual is supposed to exist. It is the mass for which the true Humanity cares.”  Pundit may be either observing a period in the remote future when society had formed into a unified collective. In 1848, Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto. Articles about Communism had also been reported in American newspapers in the 1840s. Perhaps by bringing up this observation, Poe may have also been expressing his opposition to the contributions of the individual creator in a collective society. However, his opposition to individualism seems contrary to the fact that Poe was a lone creator in a society that, he believed, did not fully appreciate his individual contributions. Pundit may also have been observing a period in the future of the Universe when all souls had been assimilated into a Supreme Being. These themes carry into Poe’s final treatise called Eureka, which I shall explore in future columns.

Pundit speaks about the Milky Way, which he observes through telescopes that, he notes, are vastly improved over the ones used in the nineteenth century. He challenges the thinkers of his age, to “attempt to take a single step towards the comprehension of a circuit” so utterly incomprehensible. He marvels that: “A flash of lightning itself, traveling forever upon the circumference of this inconceivable circle, would still forever be traveling in a straight line. The flight ends when the balloon collapses and tumbles into space. Pundit remarks: “Whether you get this letter or not is of little importance, as I write altogether for my own amusement. I shall cork the MS. up in a bottle, however, and throw it into the sea.”(a line he had used in his earliest published story, “MS Found in a Bottle.” Despite this statement, Poe likely wished that his story would be discovered by enlightened individuals in the future. “Mellonta Tauta” further demonstrates that Poe was critical of nineteenth-century science but optimistic about distant future civilizations.

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Poe Has “Some Words With A Mummy”

Close up view of young mummy wrapped in gauze and displayed on table in the darkness

An excerpt from Murray Ellison’s 2015 MA Thesis from Virginia Commonwealth University on Poe and 19th-Century Science ©

Poe’s tale, “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845) provides one of the most revealing views about the low value he places in nineteenth-century science. Although the unnamed narrator of this short story, who also speaks in the voice of Mr. Poe, does not go anywhere special, he imagines that an ancient Egyptian Mummy is revived by an electro-voltaic shock to reflect on the relative values of ancient and nineteenth-century technologies, and is brought to his house in New York. This literary device allows the mummy to provide a view of nineteenth-century science that was significantly different from the one that was widely understood by professional scientists. Mabbott notes that the public, at that time, was fascinated with “Modern Egyptology.” The 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone revealed much previously unknown information about Egyptian civilizations and several major museums in Poe’s lifetime offered exhibits of Egyptian artifacts and entombed mummies (1175).

The narrator invites nineteenth-century “gentlemen” friends to his house to “unwrap” and examine a mummy that they have borrowed from the “Directors of the City Museum” in New York (1178). They invigorate “Count Allamistakeo” with a voltaic shock. His name is satiric because he begins to count many of the mistakes of nineteenth-century science. As soon as he wakes up, the gentlemen boast about nineteenth-century advances in phrenology, mesmerism, transportation, steam engines, and metaphysics.

After listening to their claims, the mummy is unconvinced that there has not been much scientific advancement in the nineteenth century when compared to the innovations of Egyptian civilizations. He informs the “gentlemen” that ancient Egyptians lived for thousands of years and could exist in a state of hibernation for as long as they wished. It is evident that he has accepted the idea of being awoken and discoursing with them. He boasts that his civilization practiced an extremely advanced system of Phrenology. He suggests that the “gentlemen” look at Egyptian architecture and notice that it is far superior to the best examples of the nineteenth century (1192). The nineteenth-century railroads, he adds, are “rather ill-conceived” in comparison to the “grooved causeways” built by the Egyptians.

The Count argues that the Egyptians determined that what the nineteenth-century gentlemen referred to as “Progress was quite a nuisance” (1193). He discounts the high value placed by the scientists regarding the developments of the nineteenth century and western civilization. In his criticisms, he is suggesting that culture and the quality of life are more important than scientific progress when attempting to determine whether a particular civilization is advanced.

It is ironic that the only triumph of the nineteenth century that the mummy concedes to the “gentlemen” is its development of blood-purifying laxatives and cough lozenges. This humorous observation of the sole progress obtained in his lifetime demonstrates that Poe lacked faith that science could cure the ailments of humanity, and that he wanted to get as far away from the assumptions of the nineteenth century as he could imagine.

The narrator is profoundly congested by the mummy’s revelations, commenting, “The truth is I am heartily sick of this life and the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that everything is going wrong.” He despairs that he would like to “get embalmed for a couple of hundred years” (1195). Perhaps he also wished that he could hibernate for two thousand years and wake up to enjoy the glorious future he imagined. We can only wonder if Poe would have been even more dismayed about the progress of twenty-first-century science if he woke up today.

Sources

Poe, Edgar Allan. Tales and Sketches, 1831-1849. Ed. Thomas O. Mabbott. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1978.

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A Look at Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle”

Excerpt from Murray Ellison’s 2015 VCU M.A.Thesis on Poe and 19th-Century Science ©

“The captain’s gray hairs are records of the past, and his grayer eyes are Sybils of the future. The cabin floor was thickly strewn with strange, iron clasped folios, moldering instruments of science and obsolete long-forgotten charts”

– “MS. Found in a Bottle” by Edgar Allan Poe (1833)

 

Several researchers have proposed that late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Gothic writers (a sub-genre of the “Romantic” writers) inform Poe’s views of the horrors and uncertainties of science (Gewirtz, Tresch, Willis). German and English writers were among the first who attempted to examine the ways that new technologies impacted society. Although they were well-schooled in Enlightenment Age science, they also were notable for introducing elements of uncertainty and chilling reactions to nineteenth-century readers. The “Enlightenment’s assumption that truth is the product of an unmediated encounter between the eye and its subject got sidelined when the novel acquired atmosphere, mood-creating tone and texts” (47). The Gothic writers blurred lines between reality and illusion. They illustrated that the most compelling tales may be derived with believable scenarios from ordinary life, that then spin out of control into fantastic imaginative tales.

The earliest examples of these influential German Gothic writers are Frederich Schiller and E.T.A. Hoffman, whose works were translated from German into English, and the British writer, Mary Shelley. The 1795 English translation of Frederich von Schiller’s “The Ghost-Seer” inaugurated British reader’s interest for German tales of terror. Readers of these types of narratives are never quite certain how to distinguish what is real from what is illusion. Martin Willis writes that Hoffman is important because his stories generated “heated debates on the relationship between the new empirical science and the older methods of natural philosophy” (28). Perhaps Hoffman’s most notable work is “The Nutcracker and the Mouse” (1816) because it confounds the lines between illusion and reality without explaining to his readers when those lines are crossed. Hoffman’s “The Sandman” offers connections between science, magic, and mesmerism.” Willis argues, “Hoffman’s balancing of these previously considered distinct categories “reflect the difficulty in categorizing scientific knowledge in the nineteenth century” (29). Gothic writers made significant contributions to our present-day understanding of how the public learned about science in the early nineteenth century. They also defined the relationships between magic and science, and between illusion and reality. Martin Willis asserts that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in France in 1824 is important because it is a “condemnation of the overreaching scientist.” He describes it as a “cautionary tale of scientific hubris,” and argues that the novel “critiques the role of science in the early nineteenth century” (63). It is also important because it is one of the first important Gothic book widely published in English, and thus accessible to Poe when he started writing fiction in the 1830s.

The Gothic writers also were important because they incorporated the public’s uncertain reactions against the dehumanizing effects of the expansion of nineteenth-century industrialization and the rise of the power of machines and mechanistic processes. Poe and the “Romantic” period writers felt this mechanistic view detracted from natural human tendencies, such as emotion, reason, and creativity. These writers criticized rational and empirical scientists as being detached from emotion and artistic creativity. They also blurred the boundaries between scientific disciplines; and between science and pseudo-science. Poe was inspired by several of their approaches and established Gothic tones of uncertainty and terror in several of his science fiction narratives. He also extended Gothic themes and created new forms of fiction that he based on his reactions to the themes of Industrial Age science. The next series of columns will explore Poe’s Gothic and other styles of fiction which expressed his interest and views of nineteenth-century science.

Selected Sources

Gewirtz, Isaac. Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul, Ed. New York: New York Public Library, 2013.

Tresch, John. “The Potent Magic of Verisimilitude: Edgar Allan Poe and the Mechanical Age.” The British Journal of Science 3.3 (1997): 275-90. Web. 15 Mar. 2014

Willis, Martin. Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006.

Thomas, Dwight and David Jackson, Ed. The Poe Log- A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849. Boston: G.B. Hall and Company, 1987.

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Poe’s Balloon Hoax – Part II

Written by Murray Ellison, 2015

As noted in Part I of this column, J. Harris was one of the many researchers who connected Locke’s “Moon Hoax” with Poe’s April 1844 New York Sun columns on the “Balloon Hoax.” As Eric Carlson comments, “In the considerable rush for copies” for the “Balloon Hoax,” they “were sold for as much as fifty cents each” (260). This would be equal to at least $15 a newspaper today-even more than charged at most airports!  Poe’s anonymous story “was written in the style of a journalistic flash, since the Sun extra edition gave all of the signs of being a real newspaper scoop,”  as he used details provided by Mason Monck’s actual 1843 balloon trip. Poe added “realism to his description of the construction of the Victoria,” by providing details of the landscapes that the passengers viewed while they were transported in the balloon (261).

The Victoria Balloon – “New York Sun”

However, it was not until January 20, 1845 (about nine months after its publication and the public had lost interest in that topic), that Poe was first publicly credited with writing the story. James Lowell inserted this revelation near the end of a review of Poe’s literary career, simply concluding that Poe is “the author of the anonymously published Balloon Hoax” (Poe Log 490).  

In a preview copy of Naomi Miyazawa’s Doctor of Philosophy dissertation, she noted that Poe first conceded that he was the author when wrote a follow-up story about his hoax in his column, “Doings in Gotham.” His article was first published in the Columbia Spy (Pennsylvania) on April 25, 1844. In that columns, Poe even bragged that the “Balloon Hoax” was his story. He comments, “The crowd outside of the Sun was lined up and chaotic in hopes to purchase the Extra article on the balloon voyage,” marveling that that “the whole square surrounding the Sun was literally besieged. I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper” (3). Miyazawa contends that Poe’s account “was another fraud,” arguing that “The story was not as sensational as Poe believed it was, and his hoax probably fooled fewer people than he thought it did” (4).

Poe’s reporting of the balloon hoax story in The Columbia Spy re-confirms that he planted the original Sun article anonymously in the news section of the newspaper in an attempt to build credibility for his hoax. He may not have expected that he could have ever published a fictional story about a trans-Atlantic balloon crossing that would have received anything close to the notoriety of his anonymously written news story. Although his “Balloon Hoax” sold many newspapers, it also significantly reduced his credibility as a technical report writer, and thus limited his ability to write additional serious science journalism reports. His final journalistic style report also began to take on a more skeptical tone than his previous works.

Gerald Kennedy concludes: “Finally, when neither fact nor fiction would do, Poe exploited “the art—or perhaps the science of the literary hoax” (64).  Thus he casts the hoax as more of a success than a setback for Poe. As Kennedy considers Poe’s long-term reputation as an artist, he contends that his “desire to exploit or control the mass market” is one of his greatest literary innovations.” He adds that “An attentiveness to the emerging mass market informs Poe’s aesthetic writings, for he is perpetually investigating the possibility of creating a single literary text capable of satisfying both the popular and the critical taste” (67).

Perhaps, though, Poe also realized that the emerging popular topics of science also offered him the opportunity to engage in a journalistic career and to find the “jewels of the sky” that he first considered in his 1829 poem, “Sonnet—to Science.”

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,

And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Poe’s interest in science was sparked by the public’s excitement about the emerging popular technological trends of the nineteenth century. Though his non-fiction science narratives demonstrated that though he was lacking in professional science credentials, they also revealed that he had a keen interest in science and a highly focused ability to investigate complex scientific questions. Those stories also reveal that he had the insight to ask the important questions about the possible future direction of science: What will the future be like if machines could think? How will the public be affected if machines could record visual images of their every activity?

Writing about Poe’s science through journalism, as I have focused on in my last several columns on the automated chess machine, seashells, and the Daguerreotype required Poe to explore several of the important scientific issues of the nineteenth century and to write about them in a relatively objective style. As we have seen, though, in the “Balloon Hoax,” he was also having a hard time sticking with that restrictive format. Perhaps, he considered that writing about these topics through the lens of fiction relieved him of the need to be objective.

Writing through fiction allowed him to be more imaginative in the topics, themes, characters, and time periods he selected than would be possible in journalism. It also permitted him to introduce some of his metaphysical thinking and unique theories about the Universe. Poe’s fiction stories focusing on nineteenth-century science themes will be discussed in future columns.

Selected Sources

Carlson, Eric W. Ed. A Companion to Poe Studies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Harris, Neil. Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Kennedy, Gerald. A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Miyazawa, Naomi. Edgar Allan Poe and Popular Culture in the Age of Journalism: Balloon Hoaxes, Mesmerism, and Phrenology.  Preview copy of Doctoral Dissertation. State University of New Work-Buffalo, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2010.

Poe, Edgar A. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe Volume VII: Poetry. Ed. Harrison, James A. New York: T. Crowell, 1902.

Thomas, Dwight and David Jackson, Ed. The Poe Log- A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849. Boston: G.B. Hall and Company, 1987.

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The Poe Museum Blog

Poe’s Great Balloon Hoax – Part 1

This article is an excerpt from Murray Ellison’s VCU MA Thesis on Poe and Nineteenth-Century Science, ©2015

Near the end of his journalistic career, Poe was likely running out of actual science reports to write about that would excite the public’s interest in science as spectacularly as his fictional stories did. Perhaps, by that time, his imagination far exceeded science’s ability to create new inventions. His 1843 “Balloon Hoax” story demonstrated that sensational quasi-scientific newspaper reports could command the public’s attention in ways that even he could have never imagined. By presenting a fictional narrative as if it was an actual front-page news story, Poe captured the attention of a larger segment of nineteenth-century readers than he did in any of his previous journalistic reports. However, this move also seriously damaged his credibility as a serious science reporter. Poe, in this account, also introduced a more skeptical attitude concerning nineteenth-century science than he displayed in his previous journalistic outputs. Therefore, his “Hoax” is a transitional story linking his earlier journalistic writing to his later fictional science narratives.

The extraordinary story of a Transatlantic Balloon crossing was first written by Poe under the pseudonym of John Wise, and was first published in the June 15, 1843, issue of the newspaper, Spirit of the Times, which reported that a “well-known balloonist plans to take a trip across the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 1844” (Thomas and Jackson 414). A year after, The New York Sun ran a follow-up news report on the balloon trip without mentioning ‘Wise.’ The newspaper’s April 13, 1844 headline read:

The article further reported on this spectacular adventure:

“We stop the press at a late hour, to announce that, by a Private Express from Charleston, S.C., we are just put in possession of full details of the most extraordinary adventure ever accomplished by man.” The “Atlantic Ocean has been actually traversed in a balloon, and in the incredibly brief period of Three Days! Eight persons have crossed in the machine. (457).

The Sun also printed a special edition, the Extra Sun, adding that the crossing was a triumph of Mr. Monck’s flying machine. The Extra also included the names of the passengers along with an illustration (below) of the hot air balloon, the Victoria (458):

New York Times Illustration of the Victoria

On the same day as the Extra Sun’s report, the New York Herald countered that the hoax was “blunderously got up,” and “ridiculously put together” (Thomas and Jackson 460). It added: “About 50,000 of the Extras were sold…We think every intelligent reader will regard this attempt to hoax as not even possessing the character of pleasantry. They added that the celebrated ‘Moon Hoax,’ issued from the New York Sun, many years ago was an ingenious essay; but that is more than can be said of the “Balloon Hoax” (461). The Herald was the first newspaper to give this story the presently used title, but still did not connect it with Poe.

The Sun had previously published a presumed news story by Robert Locke 1835 about British astronomer, John Herschel, stating that he had gone to Cape Hope, South Africa to test his new powerful telescope. Neil Harris writes that the Sun reported that, “Herschel’s success had been beyond his wildest dreams, for the telescope had penetrated the secrets of the Moon, claiming that it had trees, oceans, pelicans, and winged men (69).  Locke’s story sold more than 20,000 copies. A newspaper commentator later boasted that many people “absolutely believed the story” (69). Harris is also one of the many researchers who connected Locke’s “Moon Hoax” with Poe’s “Balloon Hoax.”

The next Poe and Science Blog discusses how Poe and “The Balloon Hoax” were exposed and the effect it had on his writing and reputation.

Selected Sources

Harris, Neil. Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Thomas, Dwight and David Jackson, Ed. The Poe Log- A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849. Boston: G.B. Hall and Company, 1987.

Categories
The Poe Museum Blog

Poe’s Cryptographic Imagination – Part II

Taken from Baltimore Post-Examiner

Modern Computer Solves Poe’s Last Inscrutable Puzzle

Murray Ellison | April 13, 2018

Excerpts from Murray’s VCU Master of Arts Thesis on Poe and Science © 2015.

Poe published several columns on cryptography entitled “A Few Words on Secret Writing.” He explains that advanced puzzles, where the only secret to the code is “locked in the creator’s mind can be very difficult or nearly impossible to solve.” Poe mentions that the acclaimed sixteenth-century English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon “very properly defined three essentials in secret correspondence.” Bacon’s first essential is that the cipher should “elude suspicion of being a cipher.” Secondly, that its alphabet should be so simple “as to demand but little time in the construction of the epistle.” Thirdly, that it should be “absolutely insoluble without the key.” Poe adds the fourth essential: “With the key, it is promptly and certainly decipherable” (147), perhaps, because he felt that he needed to solve the submitted puzzles in time to have them published in the upcoming issues of his journal articles. He quotes from a letter from a reader who has never been authenticated, named “W.B. Tyler,” who praises Poe’s correct solution to Dr. Charles J. Frailey’s puzzles. This mysterious letter pronounces: “You have exhibited a power of analytical and synthetical reasoning I have never seen equaled… I crown you the king of secret readers” (141). “Tyler’s” letter also proposes two additional challenging ciphers—which, according to Rosenheim, were among the only “legitimate” ones submitted that Poe was never able to solve” (39).

Poe explained in his December 1841 Graham’s article that Tyler’s cipher was indecipherable because it was improperly constructed. Rosenheim supports Poe’s assertion by stating that it was difficult to solve because spaces and punctuation were omitted between the letters and that it was written backward (38). Poe also states that he did not work at Tyler’s second challenge because the many ciphers being submitted to him by his readers “were beginning to take too much of his time” (149). In other words, it did not meet Poe’s fourth condition for legitimate puzzles. Rosenheim initially commented that Tyler’s longer second cipher “remains unsolved—and is likely to stay so for some time.” He wrote that in order “to solve that cipher, one needs to identify up to 156 characters…using six alphabets” (39).

However, after publishing this statement, Rosenheim had reservations about his initial conclusions and decided to determine whether twentieth-century cryptographers could unlock the second and most difficult unsolved puzzle. Rosenheim’s subsequent contest in early 2000, which he called, “The Edgar Allan Poe Cryptographic Challenge, “was supported by a $2500 prize from Williams College for anyone who could solve Tyler’s ciphers. On October 31, 2000, Newswise, an academic science news service of Williams College reported that both ciphers had been solved by a software programmer living in Toronto, named Gil Bronza. According to Rosenheim, it turned out that the second cipher was a polyalphabetic substitution cipher and contained “over two dozen mistakes.” It is ironic that it took a modern computer analyst to decipher the only two unsolved ciphers of the hundreds that readers submitted to Poe. I have been informed by our present-day Curator, Chris Semtner, that Gil Bronza visited the Poe Museum after winning the prize money. Despite Poe’s inability to solve a puzzle proposed by Tyler, or possibly himself, Rosenheim concludes that Poe was one of the most skilled cryptologists in history (Cryptographic Imagination 24). He points out that Poe’s columns on secret codes were also the first ones to be featured in popular newspapers. They generated a continued interest in this topic in and after Poe’s lifetime. Poe’s cipher format has also been proliferated in the present era in newspaper columns like Poe’s called “The Puzzle of the Day.” Poe next demonstrates that his interests in science are diverse, ranging from technical topics about chess and computers and from discussions about pseudo-science to unlocking solutions to deeply hidden puzzles and mysteries.

Selected Sources

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe Volume XIV: Essays and Miscellaneous. Ed. Harrison, James A. New York: T. Crowell, 1902.

Rosenheim, Shawn. The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Allan Poe to the Internet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997.

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The Poe Museum Blog

Poe’s Cryptographic Imagination – Part I

Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription on wood, from the tomb of the general Horemheb. Saqqara, Egypt, c. 1300 BCE. Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

Poe’s Cryptographic Imagination – Part I

Murray Ellison | February 1, 2018

Excerpts from Murray’s VCU Master of Arts Thesis on Poe and Science © 2015.

Poe continued to demonstrate an interest in unlocking mysteries and secrets in several of the essays and newspaper columns he wrote on secret codes and cryptography. These popular weekly columns offered puzzles, in which readers were invited to propose solutions and suggest additional ones for use in subsequent editions. He then provided the solutions to the ciphers in subsequent issues. Once Poe introduced the topic, readers sent in hundreds of other ciphers. His columns on secret writing became a very popular component of Graham’s Magazine. According to Shawn Rosenheim’s The Cryptographic Imagination, Poe’s four articles in Graham’s on secret writing are among the first published texts on the subject of cryptography. Rosenheim, a scholarly authority on secret codes in science and literature, notes that Cryptology “is composed of two parts: cryptography, the art of making codes, and cryptanalysis, the art of breaking them down” (254).

Poe’s “A Few Words on Secret Writing” first appeared in the July 1841 issue of Graham’s Magazine. As Poe writes, “We can scarcely imagine a time when there did not exist a necessity of transmitting information from one individual to another, in such a manner as to elude general comprehension.” Therefore, “we may well suppose the practice of writing in cipher to be of great antiquity” (Complete Works XIV 114). Poe’s accounts range from how the ancients used hieroglyphics to how the early Greeks used scytala, or wooden blocks, to carry secret messages between officers and messengers. He notes that the modern uses of secret communications started with the invention of letters and printed communications. “Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite easy to invent a method of secret writing which shall baffle the investigation.” However, he acknowledges that people have different skill levels in solving secret codes. “It will be found that, while one cannot unriddle the commonest cipher, the other will scarcely be puzzled by the most abstruse” (116).

Demonstrating how secret codes may be formed and solved, Poe begins with simple substitution codes, where letters, numbers, and symbols stand for others. For example, he writes that in a systematic substitution code, “z” may stand for an “a,” and “x” for a “b.” In a random code, “a” may stand for “p,” and “b” for other variable letters. Harder to decipher codes, he suggests, may be constructed by using symbols for letters. He notes that there have been many attempts to construct such advanced codes, such as those that have perpetually shifting solutions. Many of them, he says “have about them an air of inscrutable secrecy. It appears almost an impossibility to unriddle what has been put together by so complex a method” (118). Poe’s suggestion that some ciphers have “an air of inscrutable secrecy” appears to be setting readers up for his explaining why he has been unable to perform a workable cryptanalysis on two inscrutable puzzles, which were apparently sent in by a reader named , “Tyler.”
In next month’s column, I will discuss Poe’s explanations on why he couldn’t solve these two puzzles, speculation about whether those puzzles might have been submitted by Poe, and how it took until the year of 2000, prize money by a famous research university, and a modern computer programmer named Gil Bronza to unravel “Tyler’s” almost inscrutable ciphers.

Selected Sources

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe Volume XIV: Essays and Miscellaneous. Ed. Harrison, James A. New York: T. Crowell, 1902.

Rosenheim, Shawn. The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Allan Poe to the Internet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997.

Categories
The Poe Museum Blog

Madwomen in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Nineteenth-Century Gothic Literature has often used themes of women held back or locked up in rooms and attics while attempting to make valiant stands and statements in support of their rights to artistic and intellectual expression, and social equality. These ideas are thoroughly supported and explored in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s book, The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale University P, 1979), as well as in many other literary discussions of fictional works written during this period. Mary Shelly’s, Frankenstein, was one of the first examples in literature expressing this theme. In 1818, she published her first book anonymously because she believed that society would not accept the idea that women could be important authors. It was widely assumed that her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelly, wrote the novel. It was first published under the real author’s name in 1823. In the novel, Viktor Frankenstein creates a monster in his laboratory but has no control over the terror it unleashes in the surrounding villages. In one interpretation of Frankenstein, the monster was the author’s representation of how society was threatened by the idea of a successful women writer.

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Madeline Kills Her Brother in “The Fall of the House of Usher: Photo credit by Horrortalk.com

Edgar Allan Poe’s 1829 short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” takes Frankenstein to the next level. Roderick Usher keeps his sister Madeline confined to a dark room upstairs where he reports that she is suffering from a strange mental illness. The sister’s name strongly suggests to readers that she is mad about something. The brother paints and plays music to his pleasure but the sister is not permitted to have the same privileges of self-expression. The brother is certain that restraining his sister in her best interest .The brother, who is afraid of sunlight and nature, won’t go outside the house and won’t allow his sister to go out or have any meaningful interaction or dialogue with the unnamed narrator, a friend who visits the house. During his stay as a house guest, the visitor views Madeline roaming through the house as if she is a ghostly spirit. In one way of looking at Madeline, her mental illness could be caused by her forced confinement and by being restricted artistically and socially by her brother. As Madeline’s madness gets more and more out of control, Roderick attempts to bury his sister while she is still alive, believing this is necessary to save her soul. Poe’s unnamed narrator graphically describes her terrifying screams and the rumblings of the House of Usher. As Madeline escapes from her premature burial, she kills her brother in an act of defiant anger and revenge. The narrator flees, saving his life as the ancient house crumbles to the ground. It can be argued that this story supports the view that Poe was sympathetic to the cause of lifting the artistic limitations imposed by society on women.

In Jane Eyre, the narrator as a ten-year-old orphan girl is taken in, but not loved by the Reed family. She is denied the right to read a book by her teenage cousin. When she questions him about this denial, he punishes her by throwing the hard bound book at her and bloodied her head. When Aunt Reed, her caretaker, hears the commotion, she takes her son’s side and admonishes Jane for talking back to her son. When Jane, also questions her Aunt for always siding with her son and for not caring about her, she is locked upstairs in the Red Room. That room was last used as the dying setting for Jane’s uncle and Aunt Reed’s husband. The aunt justifies locking Jane up because she believes she is mad. However, Jane’s uncle’s dying wish, which Aunt Reed had said she would agree to, was that Jane would be adopted and loved in the Reed household. The uncle’s wish is never granted because the Aunt never loves or accepts her niece as part of her family. Instead, she and her children give Jane steady doses of cruelty and neglect. As if the spirit and anger of the dead are being channeled through her uncle, Jane becomes outraged by her confinement and maltreatment. In an uncontrollable fit, she informs her aunt that the spirits of the dead are planning to seek revenge on her for breaking her promise to her dying husband. The Aunt banishes Jane from her home, disowns her, and sends her to an orphan school for girls (see earlier Litchatte.com discussion). After Jane matures to a young woman, she is summoned by Aunt Reed to her deathbed. Although she informs her Aunt that she has forgiven her, Mrs. Reed dies in anger, saying she has never forgiven Jane for her impertinence.

However, the most important question and tension of the Jane Eyre novel is: Who is the woman being confined in the attic in Master Rochester’s House? Jane is first hired by Rochester as a governess to instruct his “charge.” During Jane’s employment at Thornfield, a mysterious woman, living in the attic, roams the house at night to look in on, and frighten Jane, and later to try to set Mr. Rochester’s room on fire and kill him. As the story develops, Rochester is willing to break through socio-economic and caste restrictions and marry Jane. But, before the wedding vows are exchanged, Mr. Mason, the brother of the mysterious women in the attic, reveals that there can’t be a marriage that day because Rochester is already married to that woman— his sister Bertha. Rochester tries to justify his deception by explaining that his wife appeared sane when they were first married in Jamaica, but gradually deteriorated when Rochester brought her back to England. After she had started going mad, he explains that he confined her to an attic room and hired a servant, Grace Poole, to be her caretaker. He then takes the clergymAN, wedding witnesses, and Jane up to the attic to see the madwoman. As soon as Bertha sees her husband, she tries to attack him violently. Her behavior and the descriptions by the narrator seem to support the idea that she is a mad woman. However, there are questions about whether Bertha has always been mad or whether she has become mad because she couldn’t be controlled by her husband. These unresolvable mysteries become even clearer after Rochester explains how Bertha defied his expectations and seemed so different from him after their marriage. However, readers are only told that Bertha is mad by Mr. Rochester and, perhaps, we are not entirely convinced that he is a reliable narrator. We are never able to hear Bertha’s point of view about why she has become so angry and vindictive. Could she have been justified to reacting so strongly against such confinement and for losing her rights as a wife? We may think back to Jane’s anger about her involuntary confinement in the Red Room and for wishing to stand up for her rights of intellectual pursuits and free expression. If we can accept the idea that Jane was falsely accused of being mad, perhaps, we can also consider Bertha’s point of view. Bertha had just as much reason to be angry and vindictive toward her husband as Jane had toward Aunt Reed. Since Rochester could not marry Jane while Bertha was still alive, he proposes that Jane overlook society’s requirement of marriage and become his mistress. She rejects this suggestion because it goes against her moral compass (see first Litchatte, Jane Eyre discussion) and because she is concerned that she might end up as another  victim in Rochester’s attic.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the female narrator, like Bertha Mason and Madeline Usher in Poe’s story, is confined to stay in an upstairs room, because her husband is a medical doctor,  and believes she is suffering from a temporary mental disorder. She, instead, is convinced that she needs to write to relieve her anxieties. However, her husband rejects such thinking. He prescribes a treatment of complete rest for her. As a doctor, he thinks he is prescribing the most proper treatment for her. But she is confused by the conflicting roles he plays between being a medical authority and a caring husband; consequently, she attempts to obey him. The woman, not having any other creative task to occupy her mind, identifies with the crawling woman. She perceives that the women she perceives is trying to escape from the restrictions of being confined in the wallpaper and of not being allowed to express herself. Her confinement causes her to become obsessed with what seems to be a woman living and moving about in patterns of the yellow wallpaper. In her mind, the patterns of the wallpaper and the woman she sees soothe her, and free her from the feeling of confinement. But when her husband returns from work, he observes his wife crawling madly around the room and trying to peel the wallpaper off. No doubt, he considers his wife as incurable at that point. However, she rebels against him, locks the door, and refuses to leave the room. Nineteenth-century readers often interpreted these stories of women going insane as unhealthy representations of their reactions against the expectations of society. However, many modern readers understand them as demonstrating that women, in that era, were just beginning their struggle for the freedom of artistic and intellectual expression.

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Murray Ellison received a Master’s in Education at Temple University (1973), a Master’s of Arts in English Literature at VCU (2015), and a Doctorate in Education at Virginia Tech in 1987. He is married and has three adult employed daughters. He retired as the Virginia Director of Community Corrections for the Department of Correctional Education in 2009. He is the founder and chief editor of the literary blog, www.LitChatte.com. He is an editor for the “Correctional Education Magazine,” and editing a book of poetry, soon to be published written by Indian mystic, Shambhuvasanda. He also serves as a board member, volunteer tour guide, poetry judge, and all-around helper at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond Virginia. He will be teaching literature classes at the Osher Program at the University of Richmond in the beginning of 2017.  You can write to Murray here or at ellisonms2@vcu.edu