“Seeking Truth in Detail”: “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and Its Structure of Revision

Author(s): Nathanael Thomas Booth

Source: The Edgar Allan Poe Review , Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 2016), pp. 41-56
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/edgallpoerev.17.1.0041

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“Seeking Truth in Detail”
“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” and Its Structure of Revision

Nathanael Thomas Booth, University of Alabama

Abstract
“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” has, since William Wimsatt’s 1941 article “Poe and
the Mystery of Mary Rogers,” enjoyed careful critical attention, most of it focusing
on the ways the tale corresponds to or diverges from the historical events on which
it is based. Poe revised the story in 1845. Most often, Poe’s revisions are seen as
an attempt to correct errors in his earlier version. This article will argue that, far
from concealing Poe’s earlier mistakes, Poe’s revisions introduce discrepancies that
cause the story to turn in on itself and to turn outward toward the reader. “Rogêt”
is successful precisely because it is designed to call attention to its own falsity. Poe’s
alterations—and especially his initial footnote—invite the reader to apply Dupin’s
method and interrogate the text itself.

Keywords
Dupin, detective, newspapers, revision

“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is a difficult story to approach, since it has none
of the striking events of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” or “The Purloined
Letter.” Dupin himself acknowledges as much when he says that “[t]here is
nothing particularly outré about [the story].”1 Accordingly, most criticism has
been focused around the ways in which “Rogêt” corresponds to or diverges
from the events surrounding the historical murder of Mary Rogers, on which
the story is based, while comparatively little attention has been paid to the tale
itself.2 Critics here follow the lead of Poe, who presents the story as an attempt
to solve the crime and whose subsequent revisions seem calculated to make
the story more consistent with the Mary Rogers case. However, such a focus
moves attention from the tale as it exists in its final form and onto questions of
real-world referents. As a result, the story itself has typically been considered

the edgar allan poe review, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2016

Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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less interesting than what it tells us about Poe’s historical moment. This article is
offered as a pushback against that general critical tendency. Here I focus on the
text as it exists in its final form in the 1845 Wiley & Putnam edition of Tales. Poe
altered the story substantially in its final form, producing a work that functions
independently of its historical inspiration. That is, by adding (and eliminating)
various details, Poe produces a self-reflexive story, one which demands the
reader’s own combative attention. John Walsh considers Poe’s alterations to be
his greatest literary hoax, on par with “The Balloon Hoax.”3 My assertion is that,
if the story is a hoax, it is a hoax designed to be seen through. “Marie Rogêt”
may present itself as an attempt to solve a real-world crime, but its effect is to
force the reader to question Poe’s conclusions. Contrary to the general critical
view, which reads the final version of the tale as a failed experiment in engaging
with the Mary Rogers case, I argue that “Rogêt” is successful precisely because
it is designed to call attention to its own falsity. My argument is consistent with
Poe’s other tales of ratiocination, particularly “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,”
which opens with a long discussion of the process of analysis. The reader takes
the place of Dupin in this scenario, carefully examining Poe’s none-too-subtle
alterations in order to discern their falsity.
Each alteration Poe makes inserts more information, more detail, rather
than less (even if he is deleting lines). As a result, the text becomes susceptible
to more interpretation, rather than less—precisely the opposite effect Poe
would be seeking if he wanted to fool the reader. The story thus follows a kind
of double-helix pattern: parallel to the detective’s investigation (which should,
in theory, lead to the identity of the killer) there lies a constant accumulation
of detail which serves to obscure rather than elucidate the secret of the murder.
The reader becomes a detective, examining the story for contradictions. Far
from being a one-sided exchange, in which Poe cajoles the reader into thinking
that he has, all along, held the secret of the murder of Rogêt (and therefore
of Mary Rogers), the story works as a hermeneutical spoof. By resituating the
story as an elaborate shell game, we can see that it fits comfortably beside Poe’s
playfulness elsewhere—in his other detective stories, for instance, or his love
of hoaxes. Though Poe presented “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” as a logical
exercise, that presentation is only half the story; the other half is discernable
in the way the tale undercuts and ultimately mocks its own epistemological
pretentions. My reading is, thus, a continuation of the observations of such
scholars as Richard Kopley and Richard Fusco; I differ in my insistence that the
changes Poe makes in his final version on the tale—as well as the discrepancies
they introduce—are central to the tale itself specifically in the way they guide
the reader to doubt Poe’s own stated ends.

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 The story’s structure demands examination. As an early example of the
detective story, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” calls into question some basic
assumptions regarding the mechanics of the genre. Most typically, the detective
story is thought of in terms outlined by Tzvetan Todorov, who applies the
principles of Russian formalism to the genre. Todorov views the detective
story as a combination of two elements: the story of the murder, which is over
before the text begins, and the story of the investigation.4 The first story is,
thus, tied to events, while the second is tied to epistemology. The first story is
thought of as “absent but real,” while the second—the narrative of the detective
discovering the facts of the case, during which nothing happens in the pure-
plot sense—is “present but insignificant.”5 “Rogêt” follows this pattern on one
level: it is the story of an investigation in which nothing happens because all the
main events occupy the chronologically first story, that of the murder of Marie
Rogêt. However, there is more going on in the story’s narrative than Todorov’s
formulation would imply.
I propose to think about the story in terms of a double helix. The first strand,
the account of detection, moves inward. As Dupin continues to investigate
and to draw conclusions, he closes in on the identity of the killer. Paralleling
this strand is another whose direction is outward rather than inward. As the
detective moves steadily toward the center of the mystery, he is inevitably
confronted not with fewer details but with an excess of detail. The detective
returns constantly to the events surrounding the crime, and each return gives
the detective more detail about the crime. The inward moving strand and the
outward moving strand move in relation to each other—as the detective closes
in on the killer he is confronted with more details through which he must sift
in order to discover the truth. The movement is, thus, constant. The story of
the grisette’s disappearance is told no fewer than six times. Each time the story
is revisited, it is told in greater detail. These details (ostensibly) aid Dupin
in his conclusions. But the danger of this double-helix pattern is always that
the amount of detail will overwhelm the detective’s work, and “Marie Rogêt”
illustrates that danger particularly well.
This framework of the double helix fits particularly well with the
methodology outlined by Richard Kopley, who seeks to apply “Dupin’s blended
critical approach” to the Dupin stories themselves.6 Kopley points out that in
the Dupin stories “Poe [. . .] conveys a sense of mirroring halves—a sense that
proves relevant to the structure” of the stories.7 That is to say, each of the Dupin
stories sets up a number of correspondences that find their precise reflection
elsewhere in the story. Regarding “Rogêt,” Kopley identifies “eight pairs of
corresponding passages [which] frame the significant midpoint of ‘The Mystery

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of Marie Rogêt’—that midpoint being a passage in which Dupin speaks of the
parallel implicitly contended for by a newspaper writer between his own pattern
of walking in the city and that of Marie Rogêt.”8 Thus, for Kopley, “Rogêt” is a
highly structured tale that betrays careful work on Poe’s part.9 Another way of
expressing this concept is to view the tale as essentially circular. In concluding
his discussion of the structure of the Dupin stories, Kopley argues that these
tales betray the sort of structure observed by Mary Douglas in Thinking in
Circles.10 But, importantly, these circles follow the pattern outlined above: each
time the story of Marie Rogêt is recounted, more details are added. These new
details in turn force Dupin to tell the story again.
If the double-helix pattern were confined to the story there might not
be anything more to say; however, critics have consistently shown that this
organizing principle extends outside the text and into its textual history.
To revise is to re-vision, and therefore to return and attempt to see the
circumstances of the tale with new eyes. Just as Dupin returns to the story of
Marie Rogêt, Poe returns to his text. Poe’s revisions work en masse rather than
in detail; the accumulation of changes gives the illusion of coherence where
none exists. These revisions probably started before the tale was even fully
published. John Walsh argues convincingly that Poe revised the final part of the
story as it was being published, when the likelihood emerged that Mary Rogers
had died as the result of a botched abortion. As evidence, Walsh cites both the
sudden acceptance of the clearing as the scene of the crime and the fact that
“Poe laboriously warns the reader against any detailed comparison” between
the story and the real-life events.11 When the time came in 1845 for Poe to revise
his stories for collection in Tales, he altered the narrative substantially, though
the number of changes introduced is actually small. The primary alteration was
the introduction of footnotes detailing the parallels between the story and the
real-life murder of Mary Rogers. More than that, Poe’s explanatory notes claim
to demonstrate his mastery over the true facts of the case. In reality, these notes
push the story further into the realm of ambiguity and uncertainty, and this
is (I argue) the true point of the alterations. These insertions, deletions, and
footnotes change the story in substantial ways. It is on this final version that
I will concentrate the remainder of my discussion. These changes have been
systematically treated as examples of Poe’s desire to prove that his methods
of ratiocination are accurate, but I wish to argue that these footnotes are in
fact key parts of the final structure of the story and represent the final twist of
the double helix. By incompletely revising the story—that is, by leaving places
where the solution does not hang together—Poe is creating a mystery in which
the reader and the detective are one and the same.

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 The reader’s method in approaching the story explicitly parallels the work
Dupin does within the story as well as Poe’s own method of revision. Dupin
looks for extraneous details, for elements that do not fit the received narrative.
So, too, “Rogêt” is constructed in such a way as to maneuver the reader to
question its own validity. In another example of mirroring, Dupin’s method of
ratiocination is precisely that of Poe in creating the story, a fact that highlights
the extent to which creator and creation are collapsed in this narrative. As John
T. Irwin observes in The Mystery to a Solution, reading is a major theme of all
of the Dupin tales. Indeed, “Dupin’s vaunted powers of detection amount in the
first two stories to little more than a highly developed form of close reading.”12
Richard Kopley has demonstrated that Poe’s account of the boat illustrates
this collapse particularly well; late in the story, Dupin assembles a number
of clippings that do not seem to fit anywhere in the account of Rogêt’s death.
Among them is an extract detailing the discovery of an empty boat floating
in the Seine.13 For many years, critics assumed that Poe invented the story of
the discovered boat. Even Stashower accepts this much.14 Richard Kopley has
shown that even this account is based on true events.15 There are differences
between the original account and the one found in “Rogêt,” but Kopley insists
that “Poe’s version is [. . .] exceptionally close to the newspaper piece.”16 Poe does
not invent the boat. Rather, he takes an already-existing account and forces it
into juxtaposition with other newspaper stories, allowing an interpretation to
emerge from the collage. Its explicit connection to the murder case is voiced by
Dupin, but, in its original appearance as an unconnected trifle, its relevance is far
from obvious. Kopley regards this story as central to Poe’s method in composing
the tale, saying that it “highlights the cohesiveness of the newspaper stories that
led Dupin to his solution.”17 Moving outward, however, it should be clear that the
reader’s engagement with the text is expected to be no less concerned with trifles;
those details that do not fit, like Poe’s revisions, must be taken into account.
Ultimately, “Marie Rogêt” is deliberately self-destructive. Poe’s revisions,
his attempts to force his text into line with the accepted “truth” of the Mary
Rogers case, create a text that demands to be read against the grain. Indeed,
Poe’s alterations seem to be designed for precisely that purpose. As David
Van Leer observes, all of Poe’s tales of detection make a similar demand, since
“Dupin wishes merely to assert his authority over reality, but Poe encourages us
as well to examine the undetectable truths suppressed by Dupin’s detection.”18
Leer observes that, even at the birth of the detective story, “Poe questions its
epistemological limitations.”19 “Marie Rogêt”—precisely because it is based
on a known historical event—enacts this questioning even more fully than
its companion pieces. The footnotes Poe inserted into the late version are not

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merely halfhearted attempts to prop up a discounted theory; rather, they are
invitations to look for contradictions, for places where Dupin’s claims do not
match up with the reality. Again, Dupin’s treatment of the newspaper accounts
parallels the required activity of the reader of “Marie Rogêt.” Dupin’s arguments
with the newspaper accounts suggest how the reader should approach the story.
For instance, Dupin spends a great deal of space arguing that L’Etoile (Brother
Jonathan) is incorrect in suggesting that Marie Rogêt is still alive, charging that
the editor of that paper is carried away with a taste for melodrama.20 He further
suggests that the newspaper’s hostility toward Beauvais is nothing more than
personal pique since Beauvais has disagreed with the paper’s suggestion that
Rogêt is still alive.21Neither of these suggestions is (necessarily) borne out by
the accounts Dupin reads; he is deliberately reading the newspapers against
the grain in order to uncover their hidden truth. But Poe’s own revisions
depend on precisely this principle: stating facts as facts when they have no
real correspondence within the text itself. Poe is inviting the reader to question
him because he is modeling this questioning in Dupin’s interactions with the
newspaper. Read in this light, the fact that his revisions are incomplete becomes
part of the mechanism of the story itself. The changes introduced, contradictory
and oblique though they are, do not betray a lack of artistry. Rather, they hint
at a deeper purpose: Poe is teasing the reader, inviting (a certain sort of) reader
to call him out on his blatant hoax.
Poe’s revisions are contradictory and oblique, and this fact has bearing on
how the reader encounters the text. “Marie Rogêt” differs from “The Balloon
Hoax” in that it is a more sophisticated bit of legerdemain. Here there are not
two distinct readings but three (or more!). The surface reading leads toward
Poe’s original conclusion—that a swarthy sailor murdered Marie Rogêt, and that
therefore the same thing must have happened with Mary Rogers. Beneath this
surface, however, is the darker truth that Marie/Mary was killed by a botched
abortion. These are the two levels most often spoken of in the criticism. But
because Poe constantly calls attention to the factual basis of his story, through
the footnotes and the long digressions at beginning and end, we are forced to
consider the possibility that there is still another double-helix pattern on top of
the first two (i.e., on top of the story of Dupin and the fact of Poe’s revisions).
Dupin reads the newspapers; Poe rereads Dupin; and the reader reads Poe,
making a third circulation in the story of Marie Rogêt. In each case, the method
of reading is the same: close critical attention to the text, looking for gaps and
contradictions that can expose their essential truth or falsity. Poe’s revisions,
thus, in their very obviousness acknowledge that even the hidden conclusion
(the abortion, unspoken because of the period) is itself a con game.

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 I use the phrase “con game” deliberately, since all the evidence indicates
that Poe either thought he had solved the mystery or (which is more certain)
wanted other people to think he had. Poe certainly sets up “The Mystery of
Marie Rogêt” to be read as an attempt to solve the murder of Mary Rogers. The
first lines of the story argue in favor of a direct parallel between his story and
the events in New York, using as an epigraph a passage from Novalis which
reads, in part, “There are ideal series of events that run parallel with the real
ones.”22 As with the multiple mirrors Kopley observes within the story, Poe here
is suggesting that the story itself is a mirror to the real world. The implication is
that Poe’s tale, as the ideal (in that it is a fantasy), parallels the real case of Mary
Rogers. The further implication would be that Dupin’s method of reasoning
should apply to the Rogers case. This introductory quotation, it should be noted,
is not one of Poe’s many revisions, introduced after the case had cooled in the
public’s memory. He is, from the outset, arguing that Dupin’s methodology can
and should be applied to the murder of Mary Rogers. Poe’s stated intent is for
Dupin’s analysis to reveal the truth behind the Mary Rogers case. The footnotes
introduced to the second version of the story make the argument more explicit.
Dupin is a veil, like the French names given to Rogers and those around her. He
is a thin mask for Edgar Allan Poe.
Dupin’s method of reading is not confined to the historical events
surrounding the death of Mary Rogers, however; it is clear that readers are
meant to apply those same methods to the story itself. It is here that (much)
criticism goes astray in leaping too readily to the historical reading of the text.
Though they may be part of a con game, Poe’s alterations do not cover over
the fact that he was wrong. Rather, they introduce noticeable discrepancies into
the story. A helpful record of Poe’s alterations is found in John Walsh’s study Poe
the Detective. A few of these changes may be briefly noted. The analysis of the
crime scene becomes more tentative, Mme Deluc loses many of her agreeable
traits, and Dupin speaks in guarded tones of a possible accident.23 Reference
to an individual assassin being apprehended is cut out entirely.24 A glance at
these changes suggests that Poe is working to make his detective’s conclusions
more ambiguous, leaving him free to suggest in the footnotes that the true
solution is present in the original story. Thus, in the sentence reading “But in
consenting so to accompany this individual, she [Marie] must have thought”
et cetera, Poe inserts the phrase “to her mother known or unknown” after “this
individual.”25 The insertion is suggestive. It has a concrete result: doubt is placed
in the reader’s mind. It becomes thinkable, where it was not before, that Marie
left with her mother’s full knowledge and consent. Here most of the criticism
stops. However, “known or unknown” are not simply two alternative ideas; they

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are two opposite ideas. And the comparison, “known or unknown” functions as
a mirror of the sort Kopley observes. More accurately, it functions as a perfect
mirror, since what occurs on one side of the word “or” is the precise reverse of
what occurs on the other side. However, these opposites, as in mathematics,
cancel each other out. Dupin is, in a real sense, saying nothing at all here.
The theory obliterates itself just as, ultimately, the story does; by positing two
opposite possibilities, Dupin actually posits all possible solutions.
In other places Poe makes the same move, positing contradictory opposites
in such a way that they cancel each other out. To take one example, when Marie
is presented as thinking over her plan to elope, the original text reads “But it is
my design never to return—the gaining of time is the only point about which
I need give myself any concern.” Within that dash, Poe inserts a qualification:
“or not for some weeks—or not until certain concealments are effected.”26 What
concealments? And why the sudden shift from never to not for some weeks?
The simplest answer is likely the correct one: Poe is carefully laying grounds
for the reader to form the conclusion that Marie Rogêt is not eloping—that
she has, unexpectedly, discovered herself to be pregnant and that, in order to
save her reputation, she must go into concealment for a certain period of time.
That period of time would presumably cover either a euphemistic visit to an
aunt (during which she will deliver the child) or the time needed to recover
from her abortion. The “certain concealments” would probably be read in this
connection by readers familiar with the Mary Rogers case: she is concealing
her pregnancy. But Poe does not say so much; he leaves the nature of these
concealments ambiguous, allowing the reader to endow them with whatever
meaning seems most sensible. Nor can it be missed that between “never”
and “some weeks” there exists a contradiction; the difference between never
returning and not returning for a while is vast. The contrast is not so great as
between “known or unknown,” but it is nevertheless present. Thus “never” and
“some weeks” constitute another pair that, ultimately, cancel each other out.
Poe’s deletions are no less telling. In the paragraph beginning “Let us sum
up now the meagre yet certain fruits of our long analysis,” he not only adds a
line suggesting that the death took place “under the roof of Madam Deluc,” but
he removes a sentence that seems to suggest that Rogêt’s sailor friend raped
and murdered her: “We are not forced to suppose a premeditated design of
murder or of violation. But there was the friendly shelter of the thicket, and
the approach of rain—there was the opportunity and strong temptation—and
then a sudden and violent wrong, to be concealed only by one of darker dye.”27
This was the end toward which Dupin’s initial deductions tended: the removal
of the possibility of robbery and murder by a gang and the suggestion that

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Marie Rogêt’s sailor friend raped and murdered her. But with that passage
removed, and the suggestion above that the crime took place under the roof of
Madam Deluc inserted, Poe subtly shifts the narrative so that it accommodates
the popular theory that Mary Rogers was the victim of a botched abortion—
all without mentioning the abortion itself, as he hardly could have given the
period. For the rest of his life, Poe insisted that his deductions had been correct,
even claiming to have a confession from the “swarthy man” implicated in the
story.28 Because of this insistence, it is easy to assume that Poe’s deletion here is
a simple matter of saving face. It is possible that Poe genuinely believed that he
had solved the case. But the changes also perform an important function in the
story itself. The conclusions suggested by the footnotes and the revisions are
not identical to the original solution. They constitute a second set of conclusions
inserted into Poe’s tale, conclusions that cut against and even contradict the
already-existing solution. The pattern of contradiction, seen in the insertions
regarding Rogêt’s mother or her plans, is now manifest on the level of the story’s
own structure. The helix takes another twist: the tale turns back onto itself and
obliterates itself in an excess of detail.
So far, the insertions and deletions serve to introduce doubt about Dupin’s
conclusions and lead the reader to the unspoken fact of the abortion. So far, that
is, my reading has aligned with critical consensus. But the insertion of footnotes
in the final version of the story seems to carry the pretense a bit too far. Poe, in
what has been considered a desire to prove himself correct, fatally overexplains
the story. Footnotes typically serve a single purpose: to give the reader essential
information which does not fit in the body of the main argument or text.29
Footnotes are asides, suggesting further thought or providing evidence for
claims made. At first glance, this latter purpose seems to be motivating Poe’s
footnotes here. Most of the notes are in the way of clarifying to whom or what
the various characters or newspapers correspond in the real-life case of Mary
Rogers. However, Poe goes further in the initial footnote when he audaciously
claims that two confessions, “one of them the Madame Deluc of the narrative,”
had verified not only the general conclusions suggested by Dupin, but all
the major facts of the case.30 This claim of Poe’s is dubious at best. Certainly
Mrs. Loss, the hotelkeeper on whom Mme Deluc is based, did give a deathbed
confession. But if Poe had two confessions at his disposal, only that of Mrs. Loss
has come to light.31 The significance, then, of there being two confessions is not
because these confessions are evidence. Rather, they constitute another pair,
one real and one phantasmal (though this, admittedly, could not be known to
readers at the time). As to Mrs. Loss’s words, they not only did not confirm Poe’s
conclusions; they absolutely contradicted them. In its original form, “Marie

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Rogêt” was built to reach one solution: that the titular victim (and, therefore,
Mary Rogers) had been killed by a high-ranking naval officer. If Poe introduced
hurried changes in the last installment, these alterations did little to mitigate his
original conclusion; indeed, they seem in some ways to carry through with it.
Dupin continues to insist that the crime was the work of a single person.32 In
the revised version found in Tales, Poe relies on footnotes to bear the weight of
his Rogers-Rogêt connection. But these footnotes are themselves contradictory
to the main text. That is, while the text—revised as it is—still tends to point
toward Poe’s original solution, the footnotes push toward a second solution.
Following on Kopley’s observation of mirrored halves in the story, can it not
be said that the footnotes themselves constitute a mirror to the original text,
reflecting it upside-down and backward? They serve, thus, a curious double
purpose, as David Van Leer has recognized.33 These footnotes are suspended
“between clarification and apologetics.”34 I would go a step further and add
a third purpose: the footnotes clarify, apologize, and expose Dupin’s basically
false conclusions.
The footnotes added by Poe create a tension within the tale that does not
exist in other Dupin stories. The title alone merits a note, which quickly begins
the fiction that the fiction is fact:

On the original publication of “Marie Rogêt,” the foot-notes now

appended were considered unnecessary; but the lapse of several years
since the tragedy upon which the tale is based, renders it expedient to
give them, and also to say a few words in explanation of the general
design. A young girl, Mary Cecilia Rogers, was murdered in the vicinity
of New York; and, although her death occasioned an intense and long-
enduring excitement, the mystery attending it had remained unsolved at
the period when the present paper was written and published (November,
1842). Herein, under pretence of relating the fate of a Parisian grisette,
the author has followed, in minute detail, the essential, while merely
paralleling the inessential facts of the real murder of Mary Rogers. Thus
all argument founded upon the fiction is applicable to the truth: and the
investigation of the truth was the object.35

Knowing that the events of the Mary Rogers crime have faded from public
consciousness, Poe takes it on himself to repeat the claim implied in his
introductory quote. In one sense, Poe is simply reminding readers of the events
that inspired his tale. However, this footnote and the ones that follow also help

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to craft the tale Poe is telling. Richard Fusco goes so far as to argue that these
footnotes serve the artistic purpose of unifying the work.36 Fusco is correct,
but the unity of the work is, at best, of a curious sort. If Poe’s plan for the
short story is to create a dream state, he has irrevocably broken the necessary
suspension here by overexplaining the story.37 He feels the need to share the
“general design” while maintaining that the mystery “remained unsolved” at
the time of publication. Far from creating a dreamlike suspension, Poe here
insists that the story is a “pretense.” Leer is, thus, correct in asserting that the
footnotes Poe added militate against the author’s stated purposes. Indeed, the
footnotes serve precisely the opposite end, since “[t]hese names of forgotten
people and places do not add to the tale’s reality, though the tale may add to
theirs,” and the footnotes themselves break the aesthetic unity Poe claimed
to seek in his fiction.38 However, the question of “aesthetic unity” is far from
clear; the footnotes may disrupt one sort of aesthetic unity, but they enforce
another. The problem is that the kind of unity they enforce is one that has been
under-remarked on in the criticism. Far from proving Poe’s assertions, these
footnotes create the possibility that Poe is and has always been wrong in his
deductions. Put another way, the reader is forced into a hostile position by
these footnotes. Suspicion enters in and the reader must question how, if at all,
the story supports the claim made in the footnote. In other words, the reader
becomes the detective. Poe’s alterations—regardless of his intentions in making
them—transform “Marie Rogêt” from a would-be work of true crime and into
something far stranger.
The second paragraph of the footnote provides still more evidence for this
underlying unity. Poe confesses that the narrative was “composed at a distance
from the scene of the atrocity” and that he relied entirely on newspapers—just
as Dupin does within the story. If Poe is seeking to collapse his identity into
that of his detective, there can hardly be a more convenient method. Here Poe
inserts his audacious claim that he has two confessions to back up his claims.
All of this is given out before the reader has begun the story; it is clear that Poe
is instructing the reader on how to engage with the forthcoming narrative. The
reader is primed—as critics have been since—to read “Marie Rogêt” back onto
the historical murder from which it derives inspiration. But Poe cannot—or
does not—provide this instruction without disrupting the surface unity of his
text. Moreover, this late-inserted footnote puts the story at war with itself, since
it is in flat contradiction to later (though, in terms of composition, earlier)
statements in the story. As the tale winds to its close, Poe has the narrator
intrusively insist that the story is not about Mary Rogers at all:

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 [I]n what I relate it will be seen that between the fate of the unhappy Mary
Cecilia Rogers, so far as that fate is known, and the fate of one Marie
Rogêt up to a certain epoch in her history, there has existed a parallel in
the contemplation of whose wonderful exactitude the reason becomes
embarrassed. I say all this will be seen. But let it not for a moment be
supposed that, in proceeding with the sad narrative of Marie from the
epoch just mentioned, and in tracing to its dénouement the mystery
which enshrouded her, it is my covert design to hint at an extension of
the parallel, or even to suggest that the measures adopted in Paris for the
discovery of the assassin of a grisette, or measures founded in any similar
ratiocination, would produce any similar result.39

It could be that Poe inserted this paragraph once the falsity of his deductions
was made known, as Walsh suggests.40 In any event, the fact that Poe allowed
the paragraph to stand in the final version of the story, in conjunction with
other, contradictory, statements—the footnote, the epigraph—suggests that
some other game is afoot. John T. Irwin argues that these additions and
subtractions do not in fact contradict Poe’s original plan, because “Poe’s tale
could accommodate both the actual cause of death and most of the reasoning
associated with his original theory of the crime.”41 Even in this case, however,
Irwin is forced to concede that a trick has been pulled.42 Irwin is quite right, of
course, but his argument should be pushed to its furthest extent: Poe’s tale can
accommodate both Mary Rogers’s and Dupin’s exploded reasoning because it
has been revised to encompass more or less any possible solution. The ending
in no way bears out Poe’s audacious claims at the beginning. Poe’s revisions do
not conceal his authorial hand; they call attention to themselves. The entire
story, in short, becomes self-negating precisely because of Poe’s revisions. The
changes that would seem to constitute an attempt to solidify Poe’s claims are
instead the means by which those claims are undermined.
This self-negation is, in fact, the point. The reader—primed to look for
discrepancies in the text—is now given the joy of out-Dupining Dupin. I have
argued above—and other critics have argued—that Dupin’s method is an analogy
for the act of reading. If Dupin is Poe’s mask, he is also a mask for the reader. But
the most obvious parallel has not been touched on: Poe claims to have composed
the story through the aid of newspaper stories, with no firsthand knowledge of
the case. He puts himself, thus, precisely in the same position of the reader of
“Marie Rogêt.” The strange construction of the story is thus explained. “Marie
Rogêt” has all the structure of an investigation but none of the payoff. Crucially,
the portion in which the killer is apprehended is entirely absent, even in the first

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version. The story is not only unsatisfactory, then. It is antisatisfactory. It denies
the climax in favor of an extended lecture on the “Calculus of Probabilities”—a
frankly bizarre sort of calculus, which proposes that past events like the throw
of a die can influence future, unrelated events.43 As mathematics, Poe’s argument
is rubbish. However, in its strange anti-mathematics there is a certain amount
of winking humor. Poe asserts that it is difficult to convince ordinary persons
of a counterfactual statement—and, indeed, it is because it is a counterfactual
statement. Moreover, this passage continues the theme of paralleling events, a
theme that inevitably opens up to include not only the Mary Rogers case but the
reader engaging with Poe’s engagement with the Mary Rogers case. Poe begins
with an epigram asserting the existence of ideal parallel events and ends with
a rejection of purely scientific thought. Between these two statements lies the
story of Marie Rogêt, a story littered with inconsistencies and outright lies. And
if the reader is inclined to judge Poe too harshly, having seen through his hoax,
Poe manages to get in the final word:

The chance for throwing sixes seems to be precisely as it was at any

ordinary time—that is to say, subject only to the influence of the various
other throws which may be made by the dice. And this is a reflection
which appears so exceedingly obvious that attempts to controvert it are
received more frequently with a derisive smile than with anything like
respectful attention. The error here involved—a gross error redolent
of mischief—I cannot pretend to expose within the limits assigned me
at present; and with the philosophical it needs no exposure. It may be
sufficient here to say that it forms one of an infinite series of mistakes
which arise in the path of Reason through her propensity for seeking
truth in detail.44

The italicization of the phrase “in detail” suggests a number of different

readings. The first is that Poe is dismissing objections to his story on the basis
of fact—that he wants to claim, as the introductory footnote does claim (and
as Irwin argues), that the broad generalizations of his deductions are correct,
even if the individual details are incorrect. Precise correspondence is not to be
desired; all that matters is that the general outline of both murders is similar,
and so can be expected to run to similar conclusions.
Such a reading is acceptable, as far as it goes, but it cannot make sense of the
position of the reader in this story. I would propose that the phrase is italicized
as a clue. Poe is tacitly acknowledging that the details of his deductions are
incorrect and is inviting the reader to go back over the story and discover the

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places where the author has fudged facts. Poe is, in short, inviting the reader to
read “Marie Rogêt” in precisely the way that Dupin reads the newspapers. He is
asking the reader to become the detective and seek out his lies and half-truths.
Such an interpretation is, admittedly, speculative—but it does suggestively
recenter the tale. As a series of detective stories, the Dupin cycle is intimately
concerned with applying rational thought to the material—and particularly
the written—world. David Ketterer observes in The Rationale of Deception
in Poe that “the best demonstration of Poe’s thesis that the reasoning faculty
and imaginative faculty work most effectively in conjunction is provided  [.  .  .]
in his poorest tale of ratiocination, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.’”45 For
Ketterer, “Rogêt” gives Poe room to shine in his feats of deduction, but not
in imagination.46 And it is certainly true that “Rogêt” offers fewer striking
incidents of the kind found in the other two Dupin stories. All the same,
the story offers a more fully developed game with the reader than either of
its companion pieces. Poe’s revisions amass detail to such an extent that the
possibility of arriving at a true solution—again, despite Poe’s own private words
on the matter—is eliminated. Even Dupin’s conclusions are called into question
by the fact that what he says in the text is subtly contradicted by what Poe says,
implicitly in the revisions and explicitly in the footnotes. The changes made to
the text demand of the reader something approaching Dupin’s own method of
reading newspaper accounts with suspicion.47
In this article, I have argued that the most prevalent critical approach
to “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is flawed because it assumes that Poe does
not expect the reader to see through his hoax. I have demonstrated that, far
from constricting the possible solutions, each alteration Poe made—additive,
subtractive, or in the form of a footnote—radically opens up the possible
interpretations given to the text. Thus the reader is put in the place of Dupin
himself, closely reading Poe (as Dupin reads newspapers) for contradictions. This
reading has a profound impact on how the story of Marie Rogêt is approached,
since it resituates the story as a self-consciously dynamic correspondence—a
double helix—between the reader and the text. Most important, this reading
gives full weight to the playfulness evident in Poe’s other detective stories as
well as to his love of hoaxes. “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” should not be read,
as Poe presented it, as a logical exercise. Rather, it should be understood as a
story that spoofs its own epistemological pretentions.

nathanael thomas booth is a Ph.D. student at the University of Alabama.

His interests include genre fiction (particularly detective stories) and depictions
of small towns in American literature.

54 Nathanael Thomas Booth

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Notes

1. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” in The Collected Works of Edgar
Allan Poe: Vol. III, Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1978), 715–88.
2. See, for instance, Samuel Copp Worthen in “Poe and the Beautiful Cigar Girl,”
American Literature 20, no. 3 (1948): 305–12. The most systematic account of the events
surrounding the murder seems to be William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr.’s 1941 essay “Poe and
the Mystery of Mary Rogers,” PMLA 56, no. 1 (1941): 230–48. More recently, Daniel Sta-
shower—author of a well-received biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—gave a pop-
ular account of the case in The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and
the Invention of Murder (New York: Dutton, 2006). These accounts all focus on reading
“Rogêt” by way of Mary Rogers. Taking this method one step further is Amy Gilman
Srebnick’s The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995). Srebnick locates in Rogers an entire web of associations: the rise of urban culture,
anxieties about female sexuality, and the increasing importance of the penny press. Her
work offers a good deal of insight into the world Mary Rogers occupied, but Srebnick
spends little time on Poe’s story, choosing instead to focus on the ways Rogers was inter-
preted and reinterpreted by her contemporaries. Laura Saltz draws attention to this shift
(while enacting it herself) in the essay “(Horrible to Relate!): Recovering the Body of
Marie Rogêt,” in The American Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen
Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 237–67.
3. John Walsh, Poe the Detective: The Curious Circumstances behind The Mystery of
Marie Rogêt (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1968), 73.
4. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.: C
­ ornell
University Press, 1977), 45.
5. Ibid., 46.
6. Richard Kopley, Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), 5.
7. Ibid., 54, 56.
8. Ibid., 7.
9. Ibid., 15.
10. Ibid., 18; see also Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles: An Essay in Ring Composition
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007).
11. Walsh, Poe the Detective, 66. Amy Gilman Srebnick takes issue with Walsh’s
­contention; see Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers, 113.
12. John T. Irwin, The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective
Story (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 415.
13. Poe, “Rogêt,” 754.
14. Stashower, Beautiful Cigar Girl, 243.
15. Kopley, Edgar Allan Poe, 48.
16. Ibid., 49.
17. Ibid., 50.
18. David Van Leer, “Detecting Truth: The World of the Dupin Tales,” in New Essays
on Poe’s Major Tales, ed. Kenneth Silverman (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 65–88.
19. Ibid., 88.
20. Kopley, Edgar Allan Poe, 26.
21. Poe, “Roget,” 738.

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 22. Ibid., 723.
23. Walsh, Poe the Detective, 127.
24. William Kurtz Wimsatt, “Poe and the Mystery of Mary Rogers,” PMLA 56, no. 1
(1941): 243.
25. Walsh, Poe the Detective, 139; see also Mabbott’s footnote in Poe, “Rogêt,” 769.
26. Walsh, Poe the Detective, 128.
27. Ibid., 128.
28. Poe, “Rogêt,” 723, footnote; Stashower, Beautiful Cigar Girl, 298.
29. Unless, of course, the footnote is meant to serve as a postmodern play, which Poe
undoubtedly forecasts here.
30. Poe, “Rogêt,” 771.
31. Wimsatt, “Poe and the Mystery,” 246.
32. Poe, “Rogêt,” 771.
33. Leer, “Detecting Truth,” 81.
34. Ibid.
35. Poe, “Rogêt,” 723, footnote.
36. Richard Fusco, “Poe’s Revisions of ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’: A Hoax?” in Poe
at Work: Seven Textual Studies, ed. Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (Baltimore: Edgar Allan
Poe Society, 1978), 96.
37. The use of footnotes to at once emphasize a kind of realism and expose that real-
ism’s falsity has a respectable history in subsequent detective fiction. S. S. Van Dine uses
them to shore up the aesthetic judgments of Philo Vance, while Ellery Queen uses them
to highlight connections between books. In either case, the footnotes are added with
a wink; neither Van Dine nor Queen expects the reader to buy the pretense that their
preposterous fables are true. I hold that the same could be said of Poe.
38. Leer, “Detecting Truth,” 81.
39. Poe, “Rogêt,” 772–73.
40. Walsh, Poe the Detective, 66.
41. Irwin, Mystery to a Solution, 323.
42. Ibid., 324.
43. Wimsatt, “Poe and the Mystery,” 243; Poe, “Rogêt,” 755.
44. Poe, “Rogêt,” 773–74.
45. David Ketterer, The Rationale of Deception in Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1979), 245.
46. Ibid.
47. John T. Irwin discusses the detective story as one that “thematized the act of read-
ing,” (Mystery to a Solution, 414). Irwin’s analysis of reading-in-the-detective story can
hardly be improved upon here, particularly the way in which he argues that “The Pur-
loined Letter”—with its titular, symbolically empty, written communication—represents
a climax of Poe’s treatment of reading as a kind of detection (Mystery to a Solution, 415).

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