6 - Scopophilia and scopophobia: Poe's readerly flâneur

Summary

One of the biggest thrills available to flaneurs, voyeurs, and other watchers in Poe's fiction – of which the Chevalier Auguste Dupin is the most notorious and voyeuristic – involves scrutinizing the outward appearances of passers-by and reading them as texts whose meaning is perfectly transparent. Dupin's companion and chronicler reports that, at “the advent of the true Darkness,” which is to say under the cover of night, the two men

sallied forth into the streets, arm in arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.

At such times I could not help remarking and admiring (although from his rich ideality I had been prepared to expect it) a peculiar analytic ability in Dupin. He seemed, too, to take an eager delight in its exercise – if not exactly in its display – and did not hesitate to confess the pleasure thus derived. He boasted to me, with a low chuckling laugh, that most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms, and was wont to follow up such assertions by direct and very startling proofs of his intimate knowledge of my own.

(“RM,” p. 144)

I will return to Dupin's intimate knowledge of his companion and how he acquires it. To begin with, let us note that observation is intimately linked to pleasure. Dupin's is the self-congratulatory chuckle of a spectator whose gaze penetrates everything and everyone, and whose scopophilia is heightened by the fact that he himself is impenetrable, unreadable.