The Mystery of "The Cask of Amontillado"

Copyrigth 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In “The Purloined Letter,” a detective story, Edgar Allan Poe makes a big show of a stolen (“purloined”) letter’s having been hidden in plain sight by its thief, Minister D--. Although another of the horror maestro’s short stories, “The Cask of Amontillado,” is not generally considered a detective story, at least one critic, Kathyrn M. Harris, author of “Ironic Revenge in Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ which appeared in Studies in Short Fiction 6 (1969): 333-35, seems to think that the latter story is something of a mystery, complete with clues as to the murderer’s motive. For those who have forgotten the story’s plot, here is a brief recapitulation of the storyline:

A half century after having avenged his family’s name by killing his former “friend,” Fortunato, for allegedly insulting him, Montresor recounts his dastardly deed (some say on his deathbed), a crime which, apparently, still haunts him.

Having just acquired what he’d hoped was a cask of genuine amontillado, Montresor persuades the somewhat inebriated Fortunato, who has been attending Carnival dressed in motley (that is, in the costume of a fool), to accompany him to the family’s wine cellars to authenticate his purchase. On their way through the family’s catacombs, Montresor offers Fortunato wine and answers the expert’s question as to whether he is a mason, as Fortunato himself is, by showing Fortunato a hand trowel he had been hiding.

Pretending to be solicitous of Fortunato’s health, Montresor allays the wine expert’s fears. As they pass through the cold, clammy subterranean chambers, Montresor describes his family’s coat of arms to Fortunato. On a blue background, a foot stamps a serpent whose fangs are embedded in the foot’s heel. The accompanying motto reads Nemo me impune lacessit (“No one insults me with impunity”).

When they arrive at a niche, Montresor, telling Fortunato that the amontillado is inside, chains him to the wall. Using his trowel, Montresor then seals the niche, walling Fortunato up, alive, inside the alcove. Although his victim pleads for his life, Montresor mocks him. Just as Montresor sets the last of the bricks in place, Fortunato cries out, “For the love of God, Montresor!” The protagonist, replies, “Yes, for the love of God,” drops a lit torch into the niche, and finishes entombing his victim alive.

Fifty years have passed since, and Montresor’s deed, until now, as he confessed it, has gone undetected. As he ends his narrative, Montresor says, of Fortunato, In pace requiescat (“May he rest in peace”).

Often, this story is considered to be the confession of another of Poe’s madmen. Although Montresor claims that Fortunato has insulted him a “thousand” times, he never gives the reader (or his confessor) even one example to support his contention, and Fortunato, as he is described in the story, seems harmless, even genial. Indeed, he has agreed to interrupt his holiday to do Montresor the favor of authenticating the amontillado (or so, at any rate, Fortunato believes). If Fortunato’s query as to whether Montresor is a fellow mason smacks of arrogance, it is possible that it does so only in Montresor’s own too-easily-offended mind.

For James W. Gargano, author of “The Question of Poe’s Narrators,” which originally appeared in College English 25 (1963): 177-81, Poe is careful to show that Montresor is “a deluded rationalist who cannot glimpse the moral implications of his planned folly” and a “compulsive and pursued man’ whose murder of his victim has resulted in his suffering the pangs of guilt for half a century.

For Harris, however, as the authors of Short Fiction: A Critical Companion point out, Poe’s story is really a mystery of sorts in which Poe provides all the clues necessary for the reader to figure out what led Montresor to kill Fortunato. In doing so, Poe hides his clues, as it were, in plain sight:

Montresor’s trowel is both an ironic “symbol of brotherhood and instrument of death,” thus unifying the story and offering a motive for the murder of Fortunato. . . . Fortunato is a freemason; Montressor is a Catholic. . . . Several references in the story further link Montresor to religion, especially Catholicism: the confessional beginning, the image on his coat of arms alluding to the church’s triumph over evil cited in Genesis, the pre-Lenten carnival setting of the story in catacombs reminiscent of the early church, and references to wine, an element of the Eucharist. . . . Montresor refers to “masonry” and “mason-work” again several times, most significantly and suggestively (noting the preposition) in “Against the new masonry I re-erected the rampart of old bones,” and ends his tale with In pace requiescat,” the close of the requiem mass. . . thus suggesting that his motive has been to conduct his own personal inquisition against Fortunato.

Certainly, Harris’ reading of the story is not far-fetched and, indeed, the story provides much evidence, as she points out, in support of such an interpretation. It seems to me, in fact, that her understanding of Poe’s masterpiece of horror and suspense complements the narrative’s own subtlety and sophistication, and Poe’s fondness for hiding clues to crimes in plain sight also supports Harris’ interpretation, the trowel that Montresor produces serving as the story’s equivalent to the missive in “The Purloined Letter,” only, in “The Cask,” it is you and I--or Kathryn M. Harris, at any rate--and not Auguste Dupin, who must be the detectives who spot the clues to Montresor’s motive and deduce their significance.

Note: Short Fiction: A Critical Companion by Robert C. Evans, Anne C. Little, and Barbara Wiedemann (Locust Hill Press, West Cornwall, CT, 1997) provides excerpts of critical texts that summarize much of the more important criticism concerning “The Cask of Amontillado,” including those of both Harris and Gargano (and others).

The Schism Within

Copyright 201 by Gary L. Pullman

Charles Brockden Brown

In “Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810),” T. J. Lustig locates the central conflict in Brown’s Gothic fiction in a clash within Brown’s own mind concerning the limitations of the rationalism and ideal of progress that the Enlightenment represented and that he embraced:

The United States was uniquely founded on Enlightenment principles of reason and progress. It is, perhaps, the thoroughgoing demonstration of the fragility of optimistic rationalism that makes Brown’s American tales distinctly Gothic. For Brown the grounds of human decisions are inevitably imperfect, the effects of human actions are always unpredictable, and moral behavior usually conceals selfish motives. Brown is a rationalist with little faith in the power of reason, a follower of Locke without his predecessor’s belief in progress. Brown’s darkest insights spring from Lockean psychology. His is a world where sensory evidence is misleading and inferences from such evidence are frequently irrational. Brown’s novels show good producing evil and the rational giving rise to the irrational (The Handbook of the Gothic, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, 13).

Although Edgar Allan Poe did not write novels, his short stories and poems reflect much the same sense of ambiguity, if not outright pessimism, concerning the notion of human progress and reason. On the one hand, Poe obviously believed in science and its application in the form of technology and in the efficacy of reason in solving problems--often, it would seem, the selfsame problems that it had earlier created. “It may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma. . . which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve,” he wrote. Nevertheless, he also found it necessary to declare that “I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active--not more happy--or more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.”

Both Brown and Poe lived much closer to the founding of the nation than we live today. It is both heartening and disheartening to know that men of letters and philosophical and political acumen doubted the principles upon which the nation was founded then, as now, and to know that, so far, the United States has demonstrated the validity of Locke’s own faith. Of course, the country is still young in a world of ancient nations and the insights of writers such as Brown and Poe should give us pause. Poe doesn’t identify the cause of his misgivings concerning human perfectibility, but Brown does. There is a sense, in his thinking, that human behavior is dishonest, because, as Lustig points out, he regards there to be an egoistic self-interest at the base even of seemingly purely “moral behavior,” which suggests that men and women do what is right (or wrong) not so much because the act is right (or wrong) but because the deed benefits them personally in some way. However, it is likely that, in doing what is right, one is apt to lay claim to the good deed rather than to its motive, an act of hypocrisy if the deed is done for the good that it does oneself rather than the good itself that it accomplishes.

The rational uncertainty and moral ambiguity that Brown sees as characteristic of human behavior is demonstrated in his fiction in another way as well, Lustig argues: “Circuitries of physical resemblance link ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters so that any stable moral spectrum dissolves. Brown’s characters begin to look like the projections of each other’s fears, desires and possible identities” (13) (a statement that is often as much true of Poe’s characters as it is of Brown’s).

In every man or woman who writes, whether horror fiction or otherwise, there is one or more schisms of thought, belief, and sentiment that could become the wellspring of not one short story or novel but an entire corpus. In previous posts, I have written of how the experiences of such authors as Hans Christian Andersen, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and others seem to have shaped much of their mature work. Like it or not, we must write from our own experiences. Therefore, one could argue, it is helpful to know what conflicts exist within one’s own outlook on life, in one’s own personal point of view toward the self, the other, and the world. These conflicts may be few or many, ranging from the personal, or emotional, to the social and political; they may involve philosophical perspectives or religious faith. They may be sexual or aesthetic, vocational or familial, practical or speculative, maternal or paternal. There are as many possibilities as there are aspects of personality and human experience. From one or more of these great conflicts within the soul, a volume of literary work may arise that is worth reading and, indeed, writing about.

However, crises need not be the source of one’s inspiration as a writer; a powerful interest, bordering upon the obsessive, can also motivate a writer to write, and his or her treatment of such a theme, in popularizing a genre’s essential elements, or ingredients, as it were, can make such a writer‘s more-or-less narrow or even idiosyncratic concern interesting to a wider audience.. The interest need not even be mainstream or entirely respectable. Indeed, for readers of Gothic fiction (and horror literature in general), the more bizarre such interests are in themselves, the more intriguing thy are apt to be. For example, as Helen Small points out in her article concerning “Bulwer Lytton, Edward (1803-73),” which also appears in The Handbook of the Gothic, “all Bulwer Lytton’s writing about the occult is informed by his knowledge of Rosicrucian lore,” although “the primary interest of connoisseurs of the Gothic lies in its recasting of the traditional subject matter of the genre--Faustian hubris, predatory sexual desire, supernatural forces, madness, revenge--in terms which made them more immediately relevant to the concerns of early Victorian readers” (16-17).

The Handbook of the Gothic does such an outstanding job of identifying sources of authorial inspiration and the themes of their work that Chillers and Thrillers will offer more of the anthology’s authors insights, always with his own as well, of course, in future installments of this series.

Horror Fiction: The Pleasure of Pain, or Painful Pleasures

Just as some philosophers see morality as emerging from a hedonistic pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, some psychologists regard sadomasochism as a universal basis for human conduct. Human existence, such students of human behavior contend, teeters and totters between active and dominant conduct and passive and submissive behavior. Today’s active, dominant person may become the passive, submissive party tomorrow--and vice versa. In “Sado-Masochism,” Elisabeth Bronfen’s gloss on the topic in The Handbook of the Gothic, the author puts the matter in Freudian terms:

From the onset of his work on instincts and perversions, Sigmund Freud emphasized that sadism as an active and masochism as a passive posture enlacing pain with pleasure are the two faces of the same perversion, although the one aspect may be more strongly developed than the other. At the same time he also emphasized that while these two terms could not be studied in isolation, it was equally true that the underlying contrast between activity and passivity extended beyond the question of sexual perversion, proving itself to be among the universal characteristics of sexual life. As such, the polarity reappears in psychoanalytic theory in the opposition between phallic and castrated, as well as in the opposition between masculine and feminine (231).

Obviously, for Freud, sadomasochism was not exclusively, or even primarily, a sexual disorder. Instead, it is the basis for all human activity. As such, it could be the ground of activities between male-male participants or between male-female participants. If sadomasochism were to take place between two men, it would be characterized as involving a phallic participant (the active, dominant party) and a castrated (passive, submissive party), whereas if sadomasochism were to occur between a man and a woman, the man would be masculine, the woman feminine. (Freud doesn’t seem to have reckoned a place in his scheme of things for masochism between two women, but, perhaps, sadomasochism between two women could be said to follow either the male-male paradigm, with the active, dominant participant adopting the role of the phallic woman while the other performed the role of the feminine party, or the male-female model, with the active, dominant participant adopting the masculine role while the other woman performed the feminine role.)

If sadomasochism truly underlies all human behavior, it is obviously a component of the conduct of horror fiction characters. Initially, the monster functions as the sadist, which is to say, the phallic, or masculine, and antagonistic, aggressive character, while the hero or heroine and the victims adopt the role of the castrated or feminine characters. However , during the course of the story, these roles are apt to be reversed, so that the sadistic-phallic-masculine monster becomes the masochistic-castrated-feminine character and the masochistic-castrated-feminine hero or heroine and the victims--those that remain alive, at any rate--become the sadistic-phallic-masculine predators. Indeed, in slasher movies, it has become a common motif for the sole survivor, a female character, to outlast even the monster, often banishing or destroying it so that she becomes the final girl (the last character standing). During the course of the story, the viewer (or, it may be, the reader), who identifies with the protagonist, is allowed to experience both poles of the sadomasochistic continuum (and, no doubt, several points between them).

The sadomasochism of the drama or narrative can be provided by an external source or it can occur internally, within the character, as Bronfen points out in the closing paragraph of her article:

Within Gothic literature phantasy enactments of sado-masochism can be found in the intersubjective conflict, the domination-submission played through in narratives where political institutions are shown to inflict violence on their subjects, notably [in]. . . scenes of torture. . . . But they can also be manifested in the register of intrasubjective conflict, where characters enact the struggle between a sadistic super-ego as a representative of the law and a masochistic ego as representative of forbidden pleasures, by suffering from guilt, self-punishment, or self-purging. . . (232).

As examples of novels in which the sadomasochism derives from “intersubjective conflict,” Bronfen cites the works of Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Charles Maturin; as examples of stories that contain “intrasubjective conflict,” she mentions the works by Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, and James Hogg.

For my own part, I believe that Freud’s theory concerning sadomasochism as a universal basis for human behavior has merit (although, typically, I am myself anything but Freudian in outlook and am not, in general, a big fan of psychology or, at least, of psychologizing), and Bronfen’s division of “enactments of sado-masochism” into “intersubjective” and “intrasubjective” conflict seems valid, although films like The Descent, it may be argued, are predicated upon both types of conflict, the threats to the characters coming at once from without and from within.

Connie's Plight

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Professor Joyce Carol Oates

In Joyce Carol Oates’ short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have you Been?” (1966), the teenage protagonist Connie meets antagonist Arnold Friend, who is, according to some critics, Satan (or perhaps a satyr) in disguise; an imaginary embodiment of Connie’s own confused notions of men and romance; or an actual killer.

The answer to the story’s first question is, most likely, to be raped and murdered. The question is obviously related to the second question, “Where have you been?” For many critics, the answer to this second question is, in a sense, nowhere. Connie’s mother is vain and superficial, and her father is disinterested in the matters of the family whom he helped to create. Neither parent has done any parenting; consequently, their teenage daughter has no moral basis upon which to base her own conduct and she is easy prey for Arnold and his accomplice, Ellie Oscar (in real life, John Saunders). Connie’s view of life, informed by the events, interests, artifacts, and pursuits of popular culture, is insufficient to sustain her in the crisis she encounters in the person of her adversary. She is as much a victim of her parents and the superficial society in which they live as she is of Friend.

Short Fiction: A Critical Companion by Robert C. Evans, Anne C. Little, and Barbara Wiedemann (Locust Hill Press, West Cornwall, CT, 1997) provides excerpts of critical texts that summarize much of the more important criticism concerning “Where Are You Going, Where Have you Been?” and other short stories.

According to one of the critics whose views are included in this volume, despite its seemingly supernatural elements, the story should not be read as allegorical because it is based upon the actual rape and murder of a teenage girl, Alleen Rowe, by serial killer Charles Schmid. Connie is Rowe’s fictional equivalent, just as Friend is a stand-in for Schmid. As A. R. Courtland points out in “Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ As Pure Realism” (Studies in Short Fiction 26 [1989]: 505-010), Oates took many of the details of both Connie’s and Friend’s appearance and behavior from reports of the crime:

. . . [Like Connie,] Alleen Rowe was fifteen, had just washed her hair and was home alone. In addition, Schmid, although older, frequented teenage hangouts, was short though physically fit, dyed his hair, wore make-up, stuffed his boots, drove a gold car, and listened to rock music--all details that Oates incorporates into her story (173).

Moreover, the apparently supernatural elements of the story can be easily explained as natural incidents, Courtland argues:

His seemingly supernatural powers can be explained: his knowledge about Connie could easily have been acquired in her small town or even gathered through his own observations. Some of his statements are clever guesses (he mentions the type of food at the picnic, corn, and the activities of the guests, sitting and drinking) and other comments are wrong (he describes one guest as a fat lady, a statement that startles Connie, although she fills in a name and wonders why the woman is at the picnic (173).

Because the story is based upon actual, if fictionalized, events, to read it as fantastic is to do a disservice to the narrative, Courtland believes: “Reading the story as an allegory lessens its impact” (173).

Other critics disagree, arguing that an allegorical reading of the story enhances its values by adding verisimilitude to its plot. For example, Tom Quirk (“A Source for ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Studies in Short Fiction [1981]: 413:19) contends that “Oates’ fictionalizing of actual people and events does not detract from the impact of the story but rather heightens it, for the evil she depicts exists” (176).

Against the idea that Friend could not represent an embodiment of Satan, Joyce M. Wegs (“Don’t You Know Who I Am?” The Grotesque in Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” ed. Elaine Showalter, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Pp. 99-107) insists that “Friend is not just a murderer but also represents the devil. Connie, who has accepted the values of popular culture for her religion, mistakenly sees Friend as her savior.” Moreover, Wegs argues, some of Friend’s knowledge and behavior can just as well be attributed to supernatural as to natural powers, suggesting that he is a supernatural entity: “Friend, whose name suggests ‘fiend,’ appears to know all about Connie, cannot cross a threshold without being invited, places his sign on her, and wears boots to hide his cloven feet.” However, she also suggests that Friend is, in part, also a representation of “Connie’s sexual desires and fears.” As such, Wegs implies, Connie’s parents and the superficial culture that Americans tend to embrace are as much responsible for Friend’s existence as their daughter is responsible: “Connie cannot direct or control her actions, but the blame lies with her parents and a culture that gives her no moral guidance” (179).

Regarding the psychosocial origin and significance of Friend, Gretchen Schultz and R. J. R. Rockwood (“In Fairyland Without a Map: Connie’s Exploration Inward in Joyce Carol Oates’ ‘Where Are We Going, Where Have You Been?’” Literature and Psychology 30 [1980]: 155-67) agree, indicating that “the story represents Connie’s view of the world and Arnold Friend, the Schmid figure, exists in her mind. Connie, a confused adolescent, who creates the Arnold who matches her view of reality, is at ‘the boundary between childhood and adulthood,’ hesitant and yet anxious to enter the new world of experience which is opening before her.” Although Schultz and Rockwood do not seem to go along with Weg’s idea that Friend is also literally a fiend (he’s an inner demon, in their view), they do concur that his origin is at least in part due to an insufficient view of the world: “Unfortunately Connie does not have the needed help that would enable her to make this passage successfully. . . . Connie has received her messages from movies and songs, insufficient guides with their romantic and idealized themes” (177).

Although male readers tend to enjoy “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” Oates’ story appeals more to adolescent girls and young women, perhaps, who can better relate to her plight. Connie is socially awkward and seems to have low self-esteem. She also lacks autonomy and a developed sense of herself as a self, or person. Rather than thinking and feeling for herself, she relies upon cues from others as to how she should think and feel about situations. Her mother, a vain woman whose own looks have faded, is envious of her daughter’s beauty and, assuming that Connie is as vain about her own looks as she herself once was, scolds the teen whenever she sees Connie looking at her reflection in a mirror. This is how Oates introduces her protagonist:

Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn't much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. "Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you're so pretty?" she would say.

Connie, as it turns out, is vain, as her mother suspects, perhaps for the same reason that her mother was once obsessed with her own appearance. Connie is astute at feminine psychology as it relates to the importance that society places on girls’ and women’s looks and, lacking self-esteem and confidence about herself as a person, she seeks to find a sense of self-worth in her appearance:

Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.

It is her insecurity and her vanity, her dependence upon being considered beautiful by others, that makes Connie such easy prey to Friend’s compliments. However, she is also vulnerable because she feels unloved. Left home by her parents and sister June, who is “so plain and chunky and steady” that her mother is always unfavorably comparing Connie to her, Connie dreams of “a kind of love, the caresses of love, and her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice he had been, how sweet it always was, not the way someone like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs.”

Connie’s father is seldom home to provide her with an example of adult masculinity that would counter such adolescent notions of love, to provide needed discipline, or to protect his family from the likes of Friend: “Their father was away at work most of the time and when he came home he wanted supper and he read the newspaper at supper and after supper he went to bed. He didn't bother talking much to them.”

On some level, however, Connie does appear to know that her behavior would not always be approved or even accepted at home. As a result, Connie affects one manner of dress and a certain manner of conduct at home and another “away from home,” her hypocrisy partly defiance, partly a seeking after of her own identity, partly an affectation of sensuality intended to heighten and maintain her popularity among boys, and partly a result of her insecurities:

She wore a pull-over jersey blouse that looked one way when she was at home and another way when she was away from home. Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head; her mouth, which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright and pink on these evenings out; her laugh, which was cynical and drawling at home—"Ha, ha, very funny,"—but highpitched [sic].

Connie is a complex, not a simple, character, yet she lives in a simple world that provides her with a simple--indeed, simplistic--view or life that is also dangerously superficial. Connie becomes the sort of girl the movies and magazines and songs suggest she should be; these media of popular culture are as much guides to how she should behave (and think and feel) as the “mirrors” into which she continually peers or the “other people's faces” she constantly checks “ to make sure her own was all right.” In the moral vacuum of modern America, popular culture’s shallow and phony values sweep in to fill the void of the adolescent self.

To get the full benefit of the multivalent themes and insights that Oates’ rich story contains, one pretty much has to bite the bullet and read it him- or herself. The beauty of the story is, after all, largely in its details and in the various ways in which it can be read, including, to my way of thinking, at any rate, both realistically and allegorically. Indeed, for horror fans, as soon as Friend and his friend, Ellie, arrive at Connie’s house, their bizarre behavior and grotesque dialogue leaves no doubt that, however real the actual crime upon which Oates bases her story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” goes so beyond the world of the everyday (without, paradoxically, ever leaving it) that there is no alternative but to read it both ways simultaneously, as realistic narrative and allegorical fantasy.

By the way, you can read about Charles Schmid’s crimes at TruTV’s Crime Library (“Charles Schmid: The Pied Piper”), and an online text of Oates’ story is available at Celestial Timepiece. I heartily recommend both. For film fans, there’s also Smooth Talk (1985), directed by Joyce Chopra and starring Laura Dern as Connie and Treat Williams as Arnold Friend. The set of large black-and-white photographs that appeared in Life magazine following Schmidt's arrest put a personal face on the true-life persons (except for Alleen herself) who were associated as friends, acquaintances, and victims of Schmid and of the law enforcement and judicial system representatives who finally brought him to justice. The images can be viewed at the LIFE photo archive hosted by Google. Just type in “Charles Schmid” (without quotation marks) to access the photographs.