Animal Utterances, Human Speech, and Poe’s Ventriloquism

Abstract

This article examines how animal utterances relate to human speech in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Raven.” To depict apparent conversations between beast and human in each of these works, Edgar Allan Poe adapts aspects of “distant-voice” ventriloquism, a popular nineteenth-century entertainment in which a lone performer spoke with imagined characters who remained unseen or offstage. Although all four works seem to depict interspecies communication, the animals’ cries remain stubbornly mysterious, and Poe focuses instead on how human interlocutors interpret those sounds. Even when animals exhibit some deliberation, their utterances still serve as disembodied projections of human consciousness.