At the request of someone in the mega I have read the story and will give my thoughts.

Apparently, there is some controversy about the orangutang in this story possibly being a racist metaphor...but I dunno if I see it to be honest.

Granted I don't think I can ever place myself in the mindset of the average reader 200 years ago and how they would of taken the events of the story, and also granted the comparison of black people to apes and being so much stronger and violent and having weird language is a common racist trope through history, but sometimes the curtains are just blue and the orangutang is just an orangutang.

But nothing in the story really struck me as alluding to or having the orangutang stand in for POC.
The point of the story seems to me that the "very smart" civilian investigator character is able to solve the murder and not the police because everyone expected the act to have been carried out by a human and not an animal, so they don't consider the possibility even if on closer inspection of the evidence it starts to line up.

Idk if anyone else has read the story and disagrees, but honestly if you haven't I wouldn't really bother.
most of it is just a dry retelling of the evidence in a newspaper and then Dupin monologuing about how he came to his conclusion based on all the evidence.

My greatest take away was the narrator was in love/gay with Dupin...or atleast that's what I gleamed from the very homoerotic opening.

3/10

  • Vampire [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Apparently, there is some controversy about the orangutang in this story possibly being a racist metaphor…but I dunno if I see it to be honest.

    Between 'Hop-Frog' and 'The Murders In The Rue Morgue' I got the sense that orangutans had a terrifying reputation in Poe's day, were seen as how we see tigers. Nowadays orangutan doesn't instantly mean 'scary' to people; they can be comical or friendly.

    • REallyN [she/her,they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I mean....chimps are chill little dudes, but they also tear people's face off and murder and eat eachother.
      I can definitely see how people seeing/learning about orangutaans for the first time would be terrified.

      • Dangitbobby [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        they also tear people’s face off and murder and eat eachother.

        That wasn't known until the 1970s. And even so, a lot of people idealized chimps as being peaceful and cooperative and thought that that research shouldn't be published as it would cause real-world harm.

      • Vampire [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        About the same time as Poe's stories (well 50 years after, but same century) – http://www.null-entropy.com/2013/01/orangutan-strangling-a-borneo-savage-emmanuel/

    • BolsheWitch [she/her, they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I think I remember reading something about how orangutans at first fought back against Europeans who tried to invade and cut down their forests. Either enough of them were killed that they’ve given up on that idea or there are so few forests left that it’s not a common occurrence.

      Makes sense the Europeans would view them as a threat and dangerous.