Inability to look Beyond the Mind’s Eye
Once when I was a little girl, a babysitter of mine decided to hold an egg hunt for my little brother and me in front of the house. We searched high and low for the colorful eggs and were successful in finding all but one. We went crazy over that egg searching in the planters, crawling underneath the car, and looking up in high to reach places, but no luck. The longer we tried finding that egg the more desperate our thoughts became in thinking she must have hidden the egg somewhere especially secretive. All the while, we ignored her as she said, “look its right in front of you!” After several minutes of searching we finally gave up and asked her to show us where she had cleverly hid the egg. She walked over to the car and there right in plain sight stood the egg on the car’s front window. How we missed the egg, I do not know.
Have you ever looked for an object, for example a pair of keys for instance, and had no luck in finding them? You think of every possible place these keys could have disappeared off to but you cannot find them. When you are about to give up you spot those sly pair of keys that were lying there right in front of you the whole entire time. This idea of hiding in plain sight is a common theme found in several of Poe’s short stories, as well as Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. This idea of hiding something in reach and where everyone can see it interestingly becomes the safest place to go undiscovered. As humans we tend to make things more complicated than they should be. We reason that the most secure places have to be discreetly hidden away and hard to get to. As a result we automatically overlook the most obvious places. Although Poe’s Purloined Letter and Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are two very different stories, they both share this same notion of outwitting one’s opponent through the use of hiding an object or one’s self in plain sight.
In the Purloined