The Man Who Was Poe

Edgar Allan Poe is a well-known American writer with a pale face, dark mustache, “a broad forehead crowned by a shock of jet black hair,” and “deep, dark, and intense” eyes (13). This portrayal of Poe, including his back-story and certain events within the novel, are based on true events of the author’s life.

Poe introduces himself to Edmund as Auguste Dupin, a detective character from his own story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poe inhabits this personality for the duration of the novel, embodying Dupin’s reasoning and skills of deduction to help Edmund solve the mystery of the missing women. Nevertheless, Poe is motivated solely by the potential for a story, and he frequently threatens to stop helping Edmund if the boy hinders his ability to write the story in his own time and in his own way. He is impatient and demanding of Edmund, and his inability to distinguish between reality and the story Poe wishes to create is a source of great frustration for the boy. Poe discovers that his family life is remarkably parallel to Edmund’s, and because he has lost his own sister, he is convinced that Edmund’s Sis must also die—an idea that Poe fixates on and even tries to bring to fruition. 

Struggling to produce ideas for new stories, Poe comes to Providence for inspiration and to court Helen Whitman. Poe is obsessed with and fascinated by death, while simultaneously feeling haunted and terrified of it. Both his mother and wife are dead, and their deaths greatly affected him. Poe copes with his grief by drinking, explaining that he drinks to “quiet the pain of his emotions” (30) and ease the pain of his loss. His alcoholism was the reason he was discharged from the army, and his substance abuse is detrimental to his image, which may cost him his marriage to Helen. His drinking and mental health are used to characterize him as erratic, forgetful, and unreliable. This characterization calls into question his sanity when he sees what appears to be Aunty Pru’s ghost and the hallucinations at Mrs. Powers’ tea party; these struggles and the expressed reverence for his writing ability cast Poe as a “tortured artist” trope. He tells Mrs. Powers that “every image has two sides,” and he confirms this by reintroducing himself to Edmund as Edgar Allan Poe once his work as Dupin is complete. 

The villain of the novel, Rachett is Edmund’s stepfather who abandoned the family after stealing all his wife’s money. This motivates Edmund’s mother to leave for Providence in search of him, setting the rest of the novel’s events in motion.

Rachett, a “portly” man with “great whiskers” (56), aspires to establish an upper-class life for himself. His desire for wealth and status motivates everything he does, and he is willing to lie and even kill to achieve his goals—“anything to have the world think him a proper gentleman!” (165). Edmund’s mother describes him as someone always ready to blame or exploits others, which is why he partners with Mr. Peterson. The brains of the kidnapping and robbery, Rachett himself is too squeamish to commit any violence, so he delegates the murder to Peterson. As his plan unravels, however, Rachett becomes increasingly frantic and flustered. 

Rachett is only aware of one connection he has to Edgar Allan Poe: He schemes with Mrs. Powers to win her daughter Helen’s hand in marriage, despite her romantic interest in Poe. Unbeknownst to Rachett, Poe is in love with Helen. Moreover, he teams up with Edmund to find Rachett’s captive wife and stepdaughter. As the deplorable stepfather in Edmund’s life, Rachett serves as another parallel between Edmund’s and Poe’s lives. An avid lover of Poe’s work, he makes the mistake of writing a message to Peterson in Poe’s original code from The Gold Bug, which ultimately helps Edmund, Throck, and Poe thwart their escape plan.

Mr. Peterson is a young accountant at the Providence Bank with “pert, bright blue” eyes, “round and red” cheeks, and “hair so blond as if to be almost white” (75). He is energetic and eager when showing Dupin around the bank vault after the gold robbery, which masks his sinister, violent callousness. An aspiring investigator, he agrees to be Rachett’s sidekick in the plot to murder his wife and kidnap one of her children to rob the bank. Though not physically brawny, he is the metaphorical muscle of the operation, as Rachett is too squeamish to commit any violence himself. Peterson does not desire money or social status the way Rachett does—he is truly malicious and ruthless, making him the more dangerous one of the pair.

Peterson’s stark white hair is a critical clue that Dupin and Edmund both spot at various points in the novel, though it is easily confused with Fortnoy’s white hair. Where Rachett is unnerved and frazzled, Peterson remains calm and collected to the point of overconfidence: he is so certain of their plan that he shows Dupin Sis’s button she left behind in the vault, which helps Dupin solve the mystery. Another admirer of Poe’s, he unknowingly admits to Dupin that he found The Gold Bug “instructive.” 

The three women of Edmund’s family—his mother, Aunty Pru, and Sis—are all he has, and their disappearances are the catalysts for the story’s plot. They are all “women in distress,” a classic feature of Gothic writing. All three, however, are resourceful in their dire situations: Aunty Pru sacrifices herself for her sister, Edmund’s mother finds a way to deliver a message to London and escape her captors, and Sis leaves behind “breadcrumbs” to help Edmund and Dupin solve the mystery. 

As twins, the sisters use their similar appearances to undermine Rachett’s murderous plot. The fact that they are identical twins, which the reader only learns later in the book, adds dramatic suspense to the story. Dupin, spotting Edmund’s desperate mother, believes she is Aunty’s ghost and thus a sign of madness. All three women are parallel counterparts to women in Poe’s life; they were inspired by the real Edgar Allan Poe’s mother, aunt, and sister. In the story, Poe is haunted by their deaths—especially his sister’s—and is so determined to write a story about her death that he refuses to help Edmund rescue her. Edmund, who over the course of the novel realizes he must trust himself instead of the unreliable Dupin, bravely rescues both his mother and his sister.