ABSTRACT
Further tracing the cultural reproduction of heteronormativity, Chapter 3 discusses probability, accident, and abortion in Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), with a coda on late nineteenth-century sexology and the works of Arthur Conan Doyle. In “Marie Rogêt,” queerness is located, paradoxically, both at the origin of the narrative and as a belated addition; it is aligned with abortion, the Real, and radical contingency. Because there is ultimately no motive, no murder, and no way to utter the probable solution, the tale cannot conclude. The “collateral, or incidental, or accidental events” that Dupin promises to convert into meaningful narrative cannot be integrated; the queer threat to reproductive futurism remains fundamentally unspeakable.
