[In the following essay, Harris indicates how Masonic imagery coheres the tale's ironic effects.]

"The Cask of Amontillado" has been less often read for itself than used to support theories about Poe's life, his psyche, or his narrative technique. It well illustrates his obsession with live burial and his use of sadism as a Gothic device,¹ and it meets exactly the criteria of unity and economy set out in his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. But such readings separate theme and form, emphasizing one at the other's expense, and neglect the irony of Montresor's trowel, that symbol of brotherhood and instrument of death. This irony gives coherence to the images of the tale and to many of Montresor's apparently gratuitous, sadistic sarcasms—and suggest a motive for murder as well.²

From the beginning Montresor has a motive—or thinks he does: "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge" (p. 167).³ The chill grows as we progressively discover that Montresor, a connoisseur of the ironic, has a premeditated plan. Relying on Fortunato's envy and pride and his weakness for wine, he has arranged for his servants to desert for the holidays; he carries an ominous trowel beneath his cloak; the cave has been recently swept of old bones. Suddenly the plan is clear: entombment. And just as his revelation of the trowel at mid-point in their journey underground confirms the existence of a plan, its irony suggests his motive. When Montresor is surprised by a gesture of Fortunato's, Fortunato underscores his lack of comprehension; Fortunato is a freemason and Montresor is not:

"Then you are not of the brotherhood."

"How?"

"You are not of the masons."

"Yes, yes," I said. "Yes, yes."

"You? Impossible! A mason?"

"A mason," I replied.

"A sign," he said, "a sign."

"It is this," I answered producing from beneath the folds of my requeuaire a trowel.

"You jest," he exclaimed, recoiling a few paces (pp. 171-172).

Fortunato's incredulity suggests that Montresor is a Catholic.

Earlier in the tale Montresor has gathered to himself several details that have religious, particularly Catholic, associations. The coat of arms of the house of Montresor with its vengeful motto, "Nemo me impune lacessit," is more than a simple revenge motif. The circuitous device—"A huge human foot d'or, in a field of azure; the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are embedded in the heel" (p. 171)—is taken from the curse upon the serpent in Genesis 3:14. This is not an image of impartial revenge, but the traditional representation of the Church militant triumphing over the forces of evil in retribution for Adam's fall.⁴

"The Cask" is set at carnival time, a Catholic season, just before Lent, and the tale itself begins as a confession. The underground passages below the palazzo are literally "the catacombs of the Montresors" (p. 169), but the phrase also recalls the history of the early Church. The wine they seek, though its eucharistic significance is not elaborated, appropriately suggests through its non-existence the ironic perversion of Montresor's religious devotion.

Montresor's pun on "mason" is dramatized when he walls Fortunato behind eleven courses of carefully laid stone. He consistently describes his handiwork as "masonry" or "mason-work," and in the final paragraph, among the double-edged words against and reerected and the relics that may represent the Church, the word is surely symbolic: "Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones" (p. 175). The story ends on a resoundingly Catholic note: "In pace requiescat," the final words of the requiem mass.

Although the occasion for murder is as mysterious as ever, it is clear that the hostility between the two characters is worked out in terms of the Catholic-masonic opposition. This is not to say that Poe saw his tale as a morality play, a cataclysmic battle between Good and Evil, nor is it probable that Montresor is much more of a Catholic than Poe needed for the plot. Catholicism, like other aspects of medieval life, was for Poe a Gothic device used to intensify effect. Among Roderick Usher's favorite books are "a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum" and "his chief delight," a "rare and curious book in quarto Gothic . . . the Vigiliae Mortuorum Secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae"⁵ The Inquisition is the source of horror in "The Pit and the Pendulum," and the Church and immurement are linked in "The Black Cat," whose protagonist conceals his wife's body in a wall "in the cellar—as the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their victims."⁶

Montresor's Catholicism—even if it is only nominal and melodramatic—is essential to the unity of the story. At the beginning Montresor gives us his two criteria for revenge: "A wrong," he says, "is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong" (p. 167). The first requirement is fulfilled. No retribution seems to have overtaken Montresor. He does not speak from prison; his tone is never remorseful;⁷ and in spite of the use in the story of religious trappings, there is no hint of divine retribution. But the second criterion is a loose end, a violation of narrative economy if Fortunato dies without understanding why.⁸ Knowing Montresor is a Catholic, we, like Fortunato, can hear the irony of what have been seen as a villain's final sadistic sarcasms and understand the terms on which the revenge has been undertaken. By the time the first course is laid, the "intoxication of Fortunato had in a great measure worn off (p. 174). He is sober enough to see Montresor's intent, to scream, to protest that he has seen the jest. He is sober enough to beg: "For the love of God, Montresor!" and to hear more than mere mockery in the reply. "Yes," I said, "for the love of God!" (p. 175). It is a declaration of motive, a triumphal boast, and the understanding silences Fortunato. The last stone is wedged into place.

The final line—"In pace requiescat!"—is not an expression of "sanctimonious contentment," a plea to be freed of guilt, or a sarcasm uttered as Montresor sees that Fortunato died without recognizing that his murder was an act of vengeance.⁹ It is an appropriate ironic comment on the death of a mason, a santification of Montresor's private auto-da-fé.

Whether our failure to see the mason-Catholic conflict in the story has been the result of a modern preoccupation with mental aberration and "motiveless evil" or of Poe's failure to work out the conflict clearly, permitting his irony to give itself away more readily, "The Cask of Amontillado" is a more coherent tale than has been thought. Its details of horror are not merely decorative sadism but part of an ironic vengeance; and Montresor, whether his plan is evidence of sanity or madness, has what in Poe's world at least constitutes a motive for murder.

Notes

¹ Joseph Wood Krutch found the "simple sadism" of the story another of Poe's flights from reality to "neurotic delights" (Edgar Allon Poe: A Study in Genius, New York, 1926, p. 78). David M. Rein sees the story as a revenge fantasy with Fortunato standing for Mr. Allan (Edgar A. Poe: The Inner Pattern, New York, 1960, p. 42). Francis B. Dedmond takes the tale as psycho-drama: the avenger is Poe, the victim Thomas Dunn English, the cask Poe's libel suit against English ("'The Cask of Amontillado' and the War of the Literati," Modern Language Quarterly, XV [1954], 137-146). Only recently has James W. Gargano defended the story as a work of art and "not just an ingenious Gothic exercise" ("'The Cask of Amontillado': A Masquerade of Motive and Identity," Studies in Short Fiction, IV [1967], 119-126). For a fuller review of recent scholarship, see Gargano.

² Montresor's apparent lack of motive has been exaggerated. Edward H. Davidson believes that in Montresor's narrative "the 'I' does not function as a mind; we never know what has made him hate Fortunato nor are we aware that he has even laid out any plan to effect his revenge" (Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Study, Cambridge, Mass., 1957, pp. 201-202). J. Rea maintains that Montresor's vengeance is merely an excuse used to conceal his motiveless perversity ("Poe's 'The Cask of Amontillado,'" Studies in Short Fiction, IV [1967], 55-69).

³ Page numbers in parentheses refer to The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Virginia Edition, James A. Harrison, ed. (New York, 1902), vol. v.

⁴ See Paradise Lost, X, 179-190.

⁵The Complete Works, Harrison, ed., II, 287.

⁶Ibid. IV, 152.

⁷ Robert H. Fossum, however, sees a desire for peace of conscience, expressed in the final line, as Montresor's reason for telling the story after fifty years ("Poe's 'The Cask of Amontillado,'" The Explicator. XVII [1958], Item 16).

⁸ Believing that Fortunato dies unenlightened, Dorothy Norris Foote finds the irony of the story is at Montresor's expense (Poe's "'The Cask of Amontillado,'" The Explicator, XX [1961], Item 16).

⁹ The views, respectively, of Rein (p. 42), Fossum, and Foote.