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The Assignation

Questions About The Assignation

by Edgar Allan Poe

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To those who have read this story, do you think the marchesa dropped her child into the canal on purpose?
Jason Harris I found this comment (https://lalammar.wordpress.com/2013/0...) to be the key to understanding the story for me. The traditional interpretation seems …moreI found this comment (https://lalammar.wordpress.com/2013/0...) to be the key to understanding the story for me. The traditional interpretation seems to be a suicide pact, though it's not clear to me how the child in the canal fits in this interpretation. The text from the link follows:

"A reading that fits the details of the story better is that the narrator and Mentoni conspired to kill the lovers. That explains the ridiculous story about losing an oar and just accidentally drifting to the ducal palace at the exact moment all hell broke loose. And the coincidence of the baby going into the drink at exactly the time the hero was standing on a nearby window ledge. Mentoni arranged it in order to do exactly what it did: force the Marchesa’s lover into the open. That also explains why Mentoni was unconcerned about saving the baby and why the swimmers were only looking on the surface. It explains why the Marchesa now agrees to run away with the hero. (Why would his saving the baby make her decide to kill herself?) The narrator is in love with the Marchesa. That explains his steamy descriptions of her. (And he really loves her feet!) And finally that explains the poem. The NARRATOR wrote it. It was he who loved the Marchesa long ago in London and lost her to “a voice from the future”: the Byronic hero. (Notice the reference to her feet!) He is trying to pass his sappy poem off as the work of the Genius of Romance, but the facts won’t cooperate. Here’s the kicker: the story is a spoof of Thomas Moore’s biography of Byron, a best-seller at the time, which told in part of Moore’s visit to Byron’s palazzo in Venice and of Byron’s affair with the Countess Guiccioli. A feature of the bio that Poe would have loved: Moore printed a poem written in pencil by Byron at a young age; Moore believed it had been composed by Byron himself and never published, but in the 1830 edition (which Poe surely saw) he admitted that it was written and published by someone else altogether. Byron merely copied it. Poe took Moore’s blunder and made it the smoking gun in what is really the world’s first murder mystery."(less)
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