The secret of Marie Rogêt

Illustration to The Secret of Marie Rogêt from 1852

The mystery of Marie Rogêt (English original title The Mystery of Marie Rogêt ) is a short story by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe , which was published in 1842. It is one of Poe's three detective stories about C. Auguste Dupin , which also include The Double Murder on Rue Morgue and The Stolen Letter .

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Marie Rogêt, an employee in a perfume shop in Paris , disappears without a trace. After four days, her body is found in the Seine . Your relatives, like the police, feel in the dark. That is why the Prefect Dupin asks for help after his successes in the investigation into the double murder in the Rue Morgue. Together with his partner, the nameless narrator, Dupin analyzes newspaper articles, police reports and testimony about the murder. Just by uncovering misconceptions and misinterpretations in the reports, Dupin comes to the conclusion that it must be a single perpetrator and not a group as previously assumed. The murderer must have dragged the girl to the bank on a cloth sling and thrown it into the river with the help of a boat. Finding this boat will lead the police to the killer.

Real historical background and intention of Poe

The story is based on the actual murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers in New York City . Rogers was a very pretty, popular young woman, known for her job in a cigar shop in town. A few days after her disappearance in July 1841, her body was found in the Hudson River . The external circumstances, such as her torn clothes and numerous injuries, suggested a murder. The police investigations dragged on for months and ultimately remained without result. The case attracted national attention as one of the first murder cases and was featured in numerous newspapers.

Poe used this event as a basis for "The Secret of Marie Rogêt", as in a key novel. He moved the plot to Paris and changed the victim's name slightly. He took over essential details of the murder true to the original in order to give the story authenticity. Through Dupin's comments he tried to give the impression that he could help solve the real murder.

After Poe had already made the claim in other stories that every cryptogram and every riddle could be solved by perfecting the mental cognitive abilities of humans and the procedure he called ratiocination , he possibly fell into part of his own narrative suggestion, the elements of fiction on the To be able to transfer reality and, after the failure of the police investigation, felt called or challenged to provide clues to clarify the then current murder case. On the other hand, however, he also tried to exploit the sensationalism of the contemporary reading public at a time when he was in chronic financial difficulties.

Work history context and variation of the narrative model

With his first story about the figure of the outstanding analyst C. Auguste Dupin in Der Doppelmord in the Rue Morgue , Poe archepytically established the basic pattern of the classic detective story, which in his successor was successfully used as a narrative model for a long time and until it was trivialized again and again with new ones Content has been filled or decorated. Mediated by Dupin's friend, who acts as the narrator, the two violent deaths in the Rue Morgue are initially presented as an apparently unsolvable riddle in order to demonstrate the efficiency of the ratiocination and analytical detection methods in the subsequent investigation of the crime . The process of resolving the case is presented by the narrator in such a way that the improbable becomes increasingly probable and ultimately appears as the real in a framework of circumstantial evidence from newspaper reports, witness statements and other investigative details. A paradoxical phenomenon in terms of its recognizability triggers the detection ; the truth comes to light in the sense of a verisimilitude and is therefore guaranteed as reality.

In The Secret of Marie Rogêt , this narrative model of the first Dupin story is copied in central structural moments on the one hand, in order to tie in with what is known for the reader, but on the other hand is at the same time critically questioned through variation.

The protagonist of the ratiocination and the figure of the nameless narrator friend, who mediates his analyzes, are retained. As in The Double Murder in Rue Morgue , the problem of detection is given by a preceding quote as the motto of the actual story; here Poe Novalis quotes : “There are a number of ideal occurrences that run parallel to reality. They seldom collapse. People and accidents usually modify the ideal event so that it appears imperfect, and its consequences are likewise imperfect. So with the Reformation; instead of Protestantism, Lutheranism emerged. Novalis, morals. Views " .

The quote indicates a parallelism of cases that Poe consciously constructs for this narrative. As the detective's chronicler, the narrator presents an attempt to solve another Dupin's case, the murder of Marie Rogêt, and reports on a parallel case that actually occurred some time later as the case of Mary Cecilia Rogers in New York. This case is simulated in the narrative by repeated references to footnotes and consistently used for comparison. The narrator draws the following conclusion in a footnote at the beginning of his report on the Marie Rogêt case, which he wrote down from a distance far from the scene of the crime and which is based solely on newspaper reports: "This is how every conclusion that is based on the fiction is based, at the same time applicable to the truth. "

This suggests to the reader from the outset that the truth of the fictional story can be checked in historical reality using the parallel case in New York, which is reproduced in the narrative as a simulation of the real case. At the same time, several intertextual references are made to the case of Rue Morgue , on which the narrator reported in an "article" a year earlier. The text of the previous story thus becomes an apparently realistic reference document, which is now used in turn to create the illusion of a documentary report from the beginning in the new story. The detection that has now been presented appears credible and authentic because Dupin's methods have already proven themselves in solving a difficult case. In this way, Dupin appears as a real figure in the new story.

In the further course of the story, Dupin himself comments on the problem of detection in the case of Mary Rogêt: “I hardly need to explain to you [...] that this is a far more difficult case than the murder on Rue Morgue, from which it differs in one essential point. This is a common, if gruesome, crime that has nothing excessive about it. You will see that for this very reason it was believed that the mystery could be solved easily instead of seeing its difficulty. "

In this way Poe constructs a problem of detection which is in contrast to that of the first Dupin case: the possibility of solving the case by the procedure of ratiocination is different from the previous story, in which the narrator does not have the slightest doubt the clarification of the case had presented here as fundamentally problematic.

The parallelism with the real simulated case of Mary Rogers is supposed to increase the authenticity of the narrator's portrayal, but is undermined by Poe in the end when Dupin's friend addresses the reader as a reporter as follows: “I repeat again: I speak in the face of these events of only chance coincidence. Furthermore, it will be seen from my report that there is a correspondence between the fate of the unfortunate Mary Cecilia Rogers - as far as is known - and that of a certain Marie Rogêt - up to a certain period of her life - the wonderful accuracy of which the thinking mind is in Embarrassing. But beware of the assumption [...] that the means used in Paris to find the murderer of a grisette, or those based on a similar logical procedure, would have to produce similar results. "

This exposes the subliminal doubt expressed in the entire story about the possibility of a solution to the case as a fundamental problem of the method of ratiocination . The parallel case is conceded as a mere construction in order to increase Dupin's credibility. The ratiocination reaches its limits here, since the analytical ability of detection is called into question by the category of chance. At the end of the story it says: “ Nevertheless, there is an error. [...] Suffice it to say here that he is to blame for one of those infinite series of errors with which thought blocks its way - and only because of his tendency to seek the truth in the details. "

The ratiocination is able, as the narrator admits to misleading if it seeks the truth in detail, and turns at the end against itself: With this option, the analytical capabilities of the method of detection skeptical to doubt designed, Poe developed a model of variation on the model of ratiocination that he created in The Murders in the Rue Morgue . At the end of the second Dupin story, the mystery remains , which ultimately eludes the optimism of discovery of the ratiocination from the beginning story , who believes in the complete solution of the problem .

In the last of his three detective stories, too, Poe varies the main narrative model once more by ironically questioning the possibilities of ratiocination ; The problem solving in The Stolen Letter is only possible through the intuition- based identification of the detective with his opponent.

History of appearance

The story first appeared in three parts. The first two were reprinted in Snowden's Ladies' Companion in late 1842; the third part appeared in the February 1843 issue. Shortly before the third part was due to appear in January, a new testimony was published stating that Mary Rogers had had an abortion perished. Poe himself delayed the publication of the third part, which allowed him to make small changes to the story to include this possibility. For a later publication in his Tales Collection from 1845, Poe made other minor adjustments to take into account death by abortion from the outset.

In the Tales edition, the references and parallels to the actual events in Poe's preliminary remarks are expressly emphasized and, as in other editions, are also made clear for later readers by explaining the encrypted names in the story by means of corresponding footnotes.

German translations (selection)

• 1861: unknown translator: Marie Roger's mysterious end. Scheible, Stuttgart.
• 1890: Alfred Mürenberg : The Marie Rogêt case. Spemann, Stuttgart.
• 1896: unknown translator: Marie Roget's mysterious end. Hendel, Halle / S.
• 1901: Hedda Moeller and Hedwig Lachmann : The secret of Marie Roget's death. JCC Bruns, Minden.
• 1922: Gisela Etzel : The secret of Marie Rogêt. Propylaea, Munich
• 1922: Hans Kauders : The secret of Marie Rogêt. Rösl & Cie., Munich.
• 1948: Ruth Haemmerling and Konrad Haemmerling : The Marie Roget Case. Schlösser Verlag, Braunschweig.
• 1966: Hans Wollschläger : The secret of Marie Rogêts. Walter Verlag, Freiburg i. Br.

Literary meaning

Poe's stories about C. Auguste Dupin are considered to be the forerunners of modern detective stories and crime novels . The combination between the logically thinking detective and a narrator assisting him became the model for many detective characters that followed, including Arthur Conan Doyle's famous Sherlock Holmes .

What is special about this story is Dupin's approach based solely on police and newspaper reports. In a mere thought process, he analyzes the information from the reports, reveals false assumptions and draws his conclusions from them. This type of investigation makes Dupin the first armchair detective.

In Poe's successor, however, the basic pattern of detective history that he had established was increasingly schematized in trivial literature and reduced to a fixed repertoire of template-like figures, plot elements or locations. Poe, on the other hand, tried to do justice to his own poetological or aesthetic demands within the possibilities of the genre he archetypically founded by varying and innovating the narrative model, as he did in various literary theoretical writings, for example in Fancy and Imagination , sometimes also in later ones Published position. By mutually critical questioning of the respective narrative model in the three Dupin stories, he tried to preserve the originality of the individual stories and to prevent them from sliding into banality. In terms of literary history, he thus set a prose tradition between detective and criminal history on the one hand and short story on the other.

The detailed description of Dupin's analytical approach gives the story a very factual or dry style in part. Some critics saw this as a flaw in the narrative; in some places the story seems more like an essay to the reader .

literature

• Howard Haycraft: Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story. D. Appleton-Century Company, New York 1941. (Online in Internet Archive at archive.org )
• Alexandra Krieg: In search of traces: the detective novel and its development from the beginning to the present. Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2002.
• Manfred Smuda: Variation and Innovation. Models of literary possibilities of prose in the successor of Edgar Allan Poe. In: Jochen Vogt (ed.): The crime novel: Poetics, theory, history. Fink Verlag, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-7705-3226-0 , pp. 121-142.
• Daniel Stashower: The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder. Dutton Adult, New York 2006.
• Kevin J. Hayes (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. University Press, Cambridge 2002.

Web links

• German text at Projekt Gutenberg DE

Wikisource: The Mystery of Marie Rogêt  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stashower: The Beautiful Cigar Girl. 2006, p. 4.
2. ↑ Stashower: The Beautiful Cigar Girl. 2006, p. 5.
3. ^ Paul Gerhard Buchloh , Jens P. Becker: The detective novel. 2., revised. Edition. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1978, ISBN 3-534-05379-6 , p. 41f.
4. ↑ Smuda: Variation and Innovation. In: Vogt (Ed.): The crime novel: Poetics, theory, history. 1998, p. 126. Accordingly, Poe explained in the preliminary remarks to the story: “In the present narrative, pretending to report the tragic fate of a Parisian grisette, the essential facts of the real murder of Mary are followed down to the smallest detail Rogers, while he only paralleled the unessential. So every inference based on fiction is applicable to the true event, and the purpose of the story was to explore the truth. ” See the German text edition in the translation by Gisela Etzel, online at Projekt Gutenberg-DE projekt-gutenberg.org
5. ^ Paul G. Buchloh, Jens P. Becker: The detective novel. 2. revised Edition. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1978, ISBN 3-534-05379-6 , p. 41f.
6. ↑ Manfred Smuda: Variation and Innovation: Models of literary possibilities of prose in the successor of Edgar Allan Poe. In: Poetica. Vol. 3, 1970, pp. 165–187, here p. 172. The article is also printed in Jochen Vogt (Ed.): Der Kriminalroman: Poetik. Theory. History. Fink Verlag, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-7705-3226-0 , pp. 121-142.
7. ↑ See the text edition in the German translation by Christel and Helmut Wiemken . In Günter Blöckler (ed.): Edgar Allan Poe - master stories . German Book Association, Berlin / Darmstadt / Vienna 1960, p. 419. See also Manfred Smuda: Variation and Innovation: Models of literary possibilities of prose in the successor of Edgar Allan Poe. In: Poetica. Vol. 3, 1970, pp. 165-187, here p. 172 f.
8. ↑ See the text edition in the German translation by Christel and Helmut Wiemken . In Günter Blöckler (ed.): Edgar Allan Poe - master stories . Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, Berlin / Darmstadt / Wien 1960, p. 420. In the original the passage reads: "Thus all argument founded upon the fiction is applicable to the truth: and the investigation of the truth was the object". Quoted from the edition in: The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Penguin Books, London 1982, ISBN 0-14-010384-8 , pp. 169–207, here p. 169. See also Manfred Smuda: Variation and Innovation: Models of literary possibilities of prose in the successor of Edgar Allan Poe. In: Poetica. Vol. 3, 1970, pp. 165-187, here p. 173.
9. ↑ The subtitle of the story A Sequel to The Murders in the Rue Morgue alludes to the first Dupin story. In addition, the narrator explicitly refers in the opening part of his report to "an article entitled> The Murders in the Rue Morgue <" , in which he tried to portray the remarkable features and abilities ( "remarkable features" ) of his friend Dupin, and interprets the same to the successful investigation of the tragic deaths of Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter ( "the winding up of the tragedy involved in the deaths of Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter" ). See The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Penguin Books, London 1982, ISBN 0-14-010384-8 , pp. 169–207, here pp. 169 and 170.
10. ↑ See also Manfred Smuda: Variation and Innovation: Models of literary possibilities of prose in the successor of Edgar Allan Poe. In: Poetica. Vol. 3, 1970, pp. 165-187, here p. 173.
11. ↑ See the text edition in the German translation by Christel and Helmut Wiemken . In Günter Blöckler (ed.): Edgar Allan Poe - master stories . German Book Association, Berlin / Darmstadt / Vienna 1960, p. 437 f. The original passage reads: “I need scarcely tell you [...] that this is a far more intricate case than that of the Rue Morgue; from which it differs in one important respect. This is an ordinary, although an atrocious instance of crime. There is nothing peculiarly outré about it. You will observe that, for this reason, the mystery has been considered easy, when, for this reason, it should have been considered difficult, of solution. ” Quoted from the edition in: The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Penguin Books, London 1982, ISBN 0-14-010384-8 , pp. 169–207, here p. 180. See also the text edition on wikisource. P. 165.
12. ↑ See the text edition in the German translation by Christel and Helmut Wiemken . In Günter Blöckler (ed.): Edgar Allan Poe - master stories . German Book Association, Berlin / Darmstadt / Vienna 1960, p. 485. See also Manfred Smuda: Variation and Innovation: Models of literary possibilities of prose in the successor of Edgar Allan Poe. In: Poetica. Vol. 3, 1970, pp. 165-187, here p. 173 f. In the original the passage reads: “I repeat, then, that I speak of these things only as of coincidences. And further: in 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 denouement 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. " Quoted from the edition in: The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Penguin Books, London 1982, ISBN 0-14-010384-8 , pp. 169–207, here p. 206. See also the text edition on wikisource. P. 198.
13. ↑ See the text edition in the German translation by Christel and Helmut Wiemken . In Günter Blöckler (ed.): Edgar Allan Poe - master stories . Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, Berlin / Darmstadt / Wien 1960, p. 486. In the original the passage reads: “ 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. “Quoted from the edition in: The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Penguin Books, London 1982, ISBN 0-14-010384-8 , pp. 169–207, here p. 207. See also the text edition on wikisource. P. 199, which, however, contains a typo that disrupts the meaning (correct: the path of reason ). See Manfred Smuda: Variation and Innovation: Models of literary possibilities of prose in the successor of Edgar Allan Poe. In: Poetica. Vol. 3, 1970, pp. 165-187, here p. 174.
14. ↑ Manfred Smuda: Variation and Innovation: Models of literary possibilities of prose in the successor of Edgar Allan Poe. In: Poetica. Vol. 3, 1970, pp. 165-187, here p. 174.
15. ↑ Manfred Smuda: Variation and Innovation: Models of literary possibilities of prose in the successor of Edgar Allan Poe. In: Poetica. Vol. 3, 1970, pp. 165-187, here p. 175.
16. ↑ Thoms: Poe's Dupin and the Power of Detection. In: Hayes (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. 2002, p. Xviii
17. ↑ Thoms: Poe's Dupin and the Power of Detection. In: Hayes (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. 2002, p. 140.
18. ^ Paul G. Buchloh, Jens P. Becker: The detective novel. 2., revised. Edition. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1978, ISBN 3-534-05379-6 , p. 42.
19. ↑ War: Looking for Traces. 2002, p. 28.
20. ↑ See more detailed Manfred Smuda: Variation and Innovation: Models of literary possibilities of prose in the successor of Edgar Allan Poe. In: Poetica. Vol. 3, 1970, pp. 165-187, esp. Pp. 166-171 and 175-177.
21. ^ Haycraft: Murder for Pleasure. 1941, pp. 16-17.