is a Bornean orangutan, a species about which Dupin has read in the works of Baron Georges Frederic Cuvier, a founder of comparative anatomy. It turns out that the human voice was that of a French sailor, who was able to negotiate the tenuous handholds on the side of the building almost as easily as the ape because he has had years of experience in the rigging. Operating on this conjecture, Dupin places a false ad in the newspaper, luring the sailor to his apartment, where, at gunpoint, the frightened man confesses that he owns the orangutan. The ape has killed not from malice but from the instinct to imitate his master, who was shaving when the orangutan snatched the razor and escaped with it. The disarray in the apartment and the strange disposal of the bodies are the result of the beast’s “consciousness of having deserved punishment” and his efforts to conceal his misdeeds.4
The game is over and reason returns: Dupin has solved the case, an innocent suspect is released, the prefect of police makes a partial and grudging concession, and the orangutan is sold for a large sum to the zoo. But loose ends remain, story particles that are indeclinable, irreducible. The setting of the murders in the Rue Morgue suggests a link between the murders in question and the murders of other unidentified victims of unidentified crimes by other unidentified murderers. The orangutan’s voice makes sounds that are identified by “earwitnesses” as human language. Even though these witnesses are mistaken about the speaker, they have made a perfectly understandable error. In more modern times, we are able to distinguish between a human voice and a machine-generated voice on the telephone on the basis of intonation, and humans with cybernetic voice-producing implants, such as those given to laryngeal cancer patients, inevitably sound different from other people. Intonation, then, is a distinctive feature of human language, and the same is true of animal communication. Thus, Poe drives home the similarities between human beings and other animals.
If Dupin has restored reason within the frame of the story, Poe was unable to do so outside the frame. Kant’s work had compromised faith in the limitless power of reason, and only a few decades before Poe wrote his story, the French Revolution had temporarily destroyed this faith by enshrining reason and committing atrocities in its name. At the same time, science was beginning to suggest that evolutionary kinship with apes was a real possibility—although, in the industrialized nations, fear of other primates developed long before Darwin’s work formulated and confirmed the close kinship between humans and nonhuman primates. Poe lived in frightening times.
However, Poe’s source for information about apes, Georges Cuvier, tried to alleviate the fear of the atavistic human. The most respected scientist in France during the early decades of the nineteenth century, Cuvier carried out foundational work in paleontology, comparative anatomy, and zoology. As a paleontologist, he sifted through the fossil record offered by the countryside around Paris and developed a theory of periodic catastrophes, in which all life ended, followed by successive creations. So, unlike many other European scientists who struggled with fossil evidence for a chain of life, Cuvier assured his contemporaries that humans were not at the end of an unbroken evolutionary chain that might have included ape ancestors. As an anatomist, Cuvier specialized in skeletal comparisons, and he concluded that differences in anatomy determined differences in function—not the other way around. Thus, humans were physiologically fitted from the get-go for technological prowess, and apes for an arboreal life (though it must be added that, in Cuvier’s time, so little was known of the anthropoid apes that even their nomenclature was contested). At least to the satisfaction of many of his scientific contemporaries, Cuvier effectively sealed off the human from the ape by using comparative anatomy to reinforce his theory of separate creations.
One particularly nasty aspect of Cuvier’s comparative anatomy was its emphasis on differences among races, which, he speculated, might have been created separately, as separate species or varieties with separate physical and mental abilities. Indeed, many scientists at the time found the geographical proximity of the darker races to the pongid apes suggestive. Cuvier’s work was a boon to proslavery Europeans and Americans, just when the forces of humanitarianism and democracy were threatening slavery, a labor system that had resulted in enormous wealth for the industrialized world. How convenient to speculate that the different races of humans might also be different species!
Such racist implications of Cuvier’s work can be found just below the surface of Poe’s story, in which uncivilized Asians and undercivilized French lower classes are potentially savages. Here, Poe’s narrator muses, after perusing a page from Cuvier’s work, “It was a minute anatomical and generally descriptive account of the large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands. The gigantic stature, the prodigious strength and activity, the wild ferocity, and the imitative propensities of these mammalia are sufficiently well known to all. I understood the full horrors of the murder at once.”5 But the murders are not murders because they are not committed by a human being in command of his faculties. What, then, of other murders, committed by beings without full control of their faculties—individuals of other races, other classes, other ways of life less rational than one’s own? Are these crimes really murders if the perpetrators’ actions are determined by different internal categories, beyond the reach of reason? Poe’s story celebrates reason, but with an undercurrent of fear that there is more to the human experience than rationality and cognition. For Poe, this “more” was not simply, as Kant would have it, the benign categories of time and space, or a morally neutral preference for raspberries over strawberries or the music of Rameau over Mozart, but an indefinable horror.
Poe was not the first to document the conscious or unconscious fear that our bodily likeness to other primates disposes us to lose ourselves beyond the boundaries of reason, and he was certainly not the first to suggest that some humans are closer to animals than others. But “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was written just when these issues were gravitating to the raging center of scientific and cultural debates about species, on the one hand, and human rights, on the other. Racial differences were exaggerated, the taxonomy of simians was debated, the line between human and animal species was often blurred, and even scientists tended to be defensive about biological and possibly psychological similarities between humans and apes.
So “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” serves as a good starting place to examine the powerful images of nonhuman primates in Western culture. The apes and Africans in the Tarzan stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the monkeys and native Indian villagers in Kipling’s Jungle Books, and the fierce tribesmen and monstrous gorilla in King Kong have both created and reinforced fears of the simian within. Although this book will focus on Western attitudes, the possibility that apes embody our own brutal selves is not just a Western idea. For the moment, one example, I hope, will suffice. Thomas Savage, an early explorer and natural scientist working in west Africa, made the following observation, quoted by Thomas Henry Huxley in Man’s Place in Nature: “It is a tradition with the natives generally here, that [gorillas] were once members of their own tribe: that for their depraved habits they were expelled from all human society, and, that through an obstinate indulgence of their vile propensities, they have degenerated into their present state and organization.”6 Although these beliefs about nonhuman primates are not a cultural universal, they have been widely shared by humans all over the world—and swept into a vicious circle of racism, anthropocentrism, imperial exploitation, abuse of monkeys and apes, and destruction of their habitats.
II
The slipperiness of taxonomy—how the physical bodies of various life-forms are described, distinguished, and classified—contributes to political and scientific confusion in discussions about primates, human and otherwise. The eighteenth-century Swedish biologist Charles Linnaeus revolutionized biology by creating a logical classification system that accounted for all known species and allowed for the systematic naming of newly discovered species. Partly as a result of Linnaeus’s work, fossil collecting was all the rage in nineteenth-century Europe, and as paleontologists worked their way through successive geological strata, they discovered a fossil record of changes in species over geological time—though some, like Cuvier, managed to find a way to dismiss the possibility of speciation.
In any case, Charles Darwin was not the first to entertain the idea of evolution. Of the numerous pre-Darwinian attempts to account for apparent evolutionary changes in life-forms, the Philosophie zoologique, published in 1809 by Cuvier’s rival