Editing The Purloined Letter (section)

==Literary significance and criticism==
[[File:Purloined Letter illustration, 1902.jpg|thumb|left|"I stepped to the card rack and put the letter in my pocket" illustration, c. 1864]]
In May 1844, just before its first publication, Poe wrote to [[James Russell Lowell]] that he considered "The Purloined Letter" "perhaps the best of my tales of [[ratiocination]]."<ref name=Quinn421/><ref>{{harvnb|Cornelius|2002|p=33}}</ref> When it was republished in ''The Gift'' in 1845, the editor called it "one of the aptest illustrations which could well be conceived of that curious play of two minds in one person."<ref>{{harvnb|Phillips|1926|pp=930–931}}</ref>

Poe's story provoked a debate among literary theorists in the 1960s and 1970s. [[Jacques Lacan]] argued in ''Ecrits'' that the content of the queen's letter is irrelevant to the story and that the proper "place" of the signifier (the letter itself) is determined by the symbolic structure in which it exists and is displaced, first by the minister and then by Dupin.<ref>Jacques Lacan, "Le seminaire sur 'La Lettre volee'" from ''Ecrits'' (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 11-61, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman as "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" in "French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis", ''Yale French Studies'', No. 48 (1972)</ref> [[Jacques Derrida]] responded to Lacan's reading in "''Le Facteur de la vérité''" ("The Purveyor of Truth"), questioning Lacan's structuralist assumptions.  The triangular relationships that Lacan claims are foundational to the story are not, in fact, more foundational than other structured relationships one can perceive in it.  Derrida sees Lacan's reading as yet another structuralism attempting to establish an ultimate, foundational truth to the story.  In reality, according to Derrida, none of the structural schemas one can see in the story are more foundational than any other.<ref>Jacques Derrida, "Le Facteur de la vérité", ''Poetics'', 21 (1975), pp. 96-147; trans. Willis Domingo, et al., as "The Purveyor of Truth", in "Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy", ''Yale French Studies'', No. 52 (1975), pp. 31-113</ref> Lacan's [[structuralism|structuralist]] reading and Derrida's [[deconstruction|deconstructive]] reading provoked a response by [[Barbara Johnson]], who mediated the debate by suggesting that the letter belongs all along to the queen as a substitute for a phallus.<ref>Barbara Johnson, "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida", from "Literature and Psychoanalysis / The Question of Reading: Otherwise," ''Yale French Studies'', Nos. 55-56 (1977)</ref>

[[Donald E. Pease]] suggests that Lacan "equates the possession of a letter—defined as a 'lack' of content—with 'literal' as opposed to 'symbolic' castration, hence the odor of the feminine. In other words the 'possession' of the lack otherwise displaced by language identifies the possessor with the lack 'she' thinks she possesses. So femininity exists as an 'effect' of the delusion of possession of a lack otherwise displaced (as a masculine effect?) by the endless purloining of the letter."<ref>{{cite journal |first=D. |last=Pease |title=Marginal Politics and 'The Purloined Letter': A Review Essay |journal=Poe Studies |year=1982 |volume=15 |issue=1 |pages=18–24 |doi=10.1111/j.1754-6095.1982.tb00073.x }}</ref>

The debate up to the mid-1980s is collected in a helpful though incomplete volume titled ''The Purloined Poe''.<ref>{{Cite book|isbn = 0-8018-3293-4 |title = The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading|editor-last1 = Muller|editor-first1 = John P.|editor-last2 = Richardson|editor-first2 = William J.|year = 1988|url-access = registration|url = https://archive.org/details/purloinedpoelaca00mull}}</ref> The volume does not include, for instance, Richard Hull's reading based on the work of [[Michel Foucault]], in which he argues that "'The Purloined Letter' is a good text for questioning the metalinguistic claim that artists can't avoid doing surveillance, because it is a discourse on poetry's superiority over surveillance."<ref>"'The Purloined Letter': Poe's Detective Story vs. Panoptic Foucauldian Theory," ''Style'', Summer 1990, Vol. 24, Issue 2, p. 201</ref> [[Slavoj Žižek]] asks "So why ''does'' a letter always arrive at its destination? Why could it not—sometimes at least—also ''fail'' to reach it?"<ref>{{cite book |first=Slavoj |last=Žižek |title=Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out |publisher=Routledge |year=1992 |isbn=0-415-90481-1 }}</ref> [[Hollis Robbins]] critiques Derrida for his own blindness to patriotism in prefacing his reading of "The Purloined Letter" with a reading of "[[The Emperor's New Clothes]]": "In Derrida's view, both Poe's story and Andersen's feature a king whose manhood is imperiled, who is surrounded by habit-driven and ineffectual civil servants, and who is saved by an individual who sees what is obvious. ... Both save the crown from further embarrassment. ... There is never a question that a king could or should fall from grace."<ref>{{cite journal |first=Hollis |last=Robbins |title=The Emperor's New Critique |journal=New Literary History |volume=34 |issue=4 |year=2003 |pages=659–675 |doi=10.1353/nlh.2004.0010 |jstor=20057807 }}</ref>