Edgar Allen Poe is well known for his stories of fiction and horror, as well as going against the grain of the common text. This may be a misconception however as he also creates a character that accurately demonstrates the American scholar that Emerson calls for in his speech “The American Scholar”. Specifically, he explores the concepts of nature, though not nature in the sense of an organic nature, which is seen outside every day, but nature in reference to the nature of the human mind, and the minds of those around him. As H. W. Garrod puts it in his article “Emerson”, “whatever a man is, thinks, or says, the shock of it is felt through the totality of nature”1. We see Poe taking the concept of the mind into great account with many of his short stories, but specifically in his short story “The Purloined Letter”.

We see both the “man thinking” and the “mere thinker” that Emerson discusses personified in both the character C. Auguste Dupin, and in the Paris police force, represented by the prefect. Dupin is a man of great intellect, engaging in the process of “transmuting life into truth” by using ratiocination, or exact reasoning, coincides with Emerson’s belief that “the office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances”2, as he manages to do all three of these things before the story ends. The police are the mere thinkers throughout the story, using their own expectations of where they would hide the letter, checking in obscure places such as under the floorboards or inside of the walls. The difficulty, however, regards the one who hid it, the Minister, for he had taken the expectations of the police force into account when he hid it. He had rightly understood the police forces assumptions regarding where the letter would be, as the police were unsuccessful in finding it throughout months of searching. The minister manages to turn the police force into the “parrot of other men’s thinking”1, as Emerson states in his speech. Dupin, however, uses the information he gained from the prefects visit to determine that the letter must be hidden in plain sight, using only his powers of deduction, and assuming that they would have checked every non visible spot. He manages to display himself as the man thinking as opposed to the mere thinker when he ultimately finds the letter disguised as seedy and unimportant while hidden in plain view. This directly ties in with Emerson’s ideals for true scholars, which is to investigate and understand the nature of the scholar’s own mind, and specifically in this particular story, the minds of others. The issues in “The Purloined Letter” was not a simple game of hide and seek, but a battle of two great scholarly minds each thinking one step ahead, each seeing the deceivingly simple task of hiding a letter as something more difficult. It also shows Emerson’s belief that the scholar should investigate nature in order to understand the scholars own mind and the minds of others.

Dupin set up as a very scholarly and thoughtful character at the beginning of the story, as the narrator states, “For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence” (1014). Directly following this passage when the prefect enters the room, Dupin is about to light a lamp, but stops upon hearing that the prefect has a question to ask of him. This shows the thought that Dupin is about to put into something requires the utmost attention of his mind, depriving himself of his other senses to better think, again demonstrating qualities of a scholar. We also see Dupin and the prefect exemplify the “one man” theory that Emerson touched upon in his speech. The prefect comes to Dupin asking for help in order to recover the stolen letter, after months of his own failure, which shows Emerson’s ideal regarding the “unity of society working together to help each other, with one body part being no more important than the next.” The prefect has at this point done much of the legwork for Dupin, all Dupin needed to do after their meeting was to thoughtfully engage his foe, the Minister. Dupin is working together with the prefect, becoming parts of the whole, to recover the letter for the better of the royal family, and as implied by the story, society. While the prefect may have been entirely wrong with his assumptions regarding the hiding place of the letter, the information he gathered as to where the letter could not be still proved helpful to Dupin, that is to say that without the prefect Dupin would not have been able to retrieve the letter, thus they are two parts working together as a whole. According to Merton M. Sealts, Jr, “Emerson’s emerging definition of the scholar’s role already involved a sense of obligation to society in terms of some unspecified form of action “upon the public””4. We also see Emerson’s third tenet superficially demonstrated by Dupin, for when he realizes that the letter must have been hidden in plain sight, he takes action, wearing dark glasses in order to take stock of the Ministers house, where he could have easily just instructed the prefect where he should be looking.

Poe uses many of the tenets that Emerson outlines in his speech and attributes them to the main character of his story “The Purloined Letter”. We can clearly see that Poe had answered Emereson’s call for the American scholar.

Bibliography

Sealts, Jr., Merton M. “Emerson on the Scholar.” PMLA Mar. 1970: 185-95.

Garrod, H. W. “Emerson.” The New England Quarterly Jan. 1930: 3-24.

Bryer, Jackson R., ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature : Volume A: Colonial Period To 1800. Boston: Houghton Mifflin College Division, 2004.

1 Garrod, H. W. “Emerson.” The New England Quarterly Jan. 1930: 3-24.

2 Emerson, “The American Scholar”

4 Sealts, Jr., Merton M. “Emerson on the Scholar.” PMLA Mar. 1970: 185-95.