“The Man of the Crowd” stood out to me as the black sheep of this selection of Poe’s work. We were tasked with looking for patterns, but I couldn’t help to feel that there was something “against” the pattern with this piece. Most notably, Poe removes the role of the macabre mansion or house. There is a post up (Cate’s) that talks of Poe’s use of architecture to affect the reader’s emotions – to feel certain emotions, like the characters of the stories. Yet “The Man of the Crowd” sets itself on “one of the principal thoroughfares of the city” and wide in the open-air (656). I saw the use of the house as a way for Poe to control his characters (or the variables of the story) – and thus, the mixture of fact and fiction. In the case of “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Masque of the Red Death”, this is especially true because isolation guarantees that only the narrative survives through a limited point of view (see the many posts on the unreliability of Poe’s narrators).
Except the busy streets of London are very real. So how does Poe keep the same sense of foreboding? The setting of night-time, fog, falling rain, street-lamp lighting, the anonymity of a crowd, and this strange, older man, acts in a similar fashion in framing the story as the house/mansion.
The narrator’s fascination with the man binds the setting to only where the man goes in a few hours. The man’s face as having “within my mind [brought] the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment […] of supreme despair” (659). Furthermore, the start of night and the street-lamp illumination of the man’s face starts the “chase”, but the nearing of day and the bright light of the “suburban temples of Intemperance – one of the palaces of the fiend, Gin” (661) marks the end.
The sense that this chase was fruitless or that we are back where it started emphasizes the conclusion of the narrator that “er lasst sich nicht lesen” (662).
-Katherine Adee
This is a great observation! I actually think it’s very important that the narrator of this piece is less concerned with fixing us in a setting. I agree, the streets of London (the lighting, time of day, occasional landmark descriptions) are vivid enough, but the focus of the descriptions are primarily situated on the man and his every expression and action. I think this emphasizes the keen observation and unsettling obsession the follower has with this man in the crowd; he is honed in and completely enthralled, and likely not focusing on his surroundings in an attempt to keep tracking the man in the crowd and his every move. In this way, the shift seems to work perfectly with the plot in this story.
Hi Katherine!
I totally agree with you in the sense that “The Man in the Crowd” stood out to me against Poe’s other stories. If I had read this on it’s own, I wouldn’t have expected it to be by Poe because of the fact that it didn’t line up with my expectations of what he writes in his stories. You have made it clear though, that it is actually similar to his other stories, just not as explicit. Although it is outside, it still becomes dark and most of it happens during the night. Although it is outside, the streets are winding, just like the hallways in his other stories. I appreciate the fact that you pulled out these aspects of the story that show that this story is in fact similar to others.