Anne Hviid-Pilgaard Master Thesis 31/05 2012 Table of Contents

Poe and the Perverse

The theme of madness, as I have already established, is often present in Poe’s short stories. This is emphasised by Poe’s narrators in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”, who are both concerned with convincing the readers that they are not mad even though their stories seem to tell a different tale. However, common to the narrators is that they both struggle with keeping their impulses at bay. In “The Black Cat” the narrator fantasises about torturing and killing his cat, in “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator is obsessed with his companion’s, an old man who he lives with, “vulture-like” eye and therefore wants to murder the old man in order to get rid of the eye and find peace. The narrator in “The Raven” also seems to suffer from these urges to destroy, however, in this poem, the object of his destruction is himself, when he is torn between forgetting and remembering his lost lover Lenore. As mentioned in a previous chapter, the narrator is the one who decides whether or not the raven’s answer “nevermore” should have a positive or a negative ring to it. This is made evident when he first asks the raven:

‘Nothing further then he uttered - not a feather then he fluttered –
Till I scarcely more than muttered `Other friends have flown before -
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.'
Then the bird said, `Nevermore.' (Raven, 1845)

Here the birds answer still has a positive ring to it, however, as the narrator’s questions changes character, so does the tone of “nevermore”:

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -
Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.' (Raven, 1845)

Common to all three of Poe’s narratives is that there seems to be no explanation as to why the narrators torment themselves, like in “The Raven”, or others e.g. the cat and wife. In order to find an explanation to this behaviour we need to look towards Poe’s short story “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), in which the key to unlocking the truth behind the madness seems to be. “The Imp of the Perverse” differs from other of Poe’s short stories, because it begins as an essay, before moving on to the well-known style of a written confession. Frederick S. Frank author of The Poe Encyclopaedia (1997) writes on the subject that ‘the tale combines elements of confessional narrative and discursive essay, moving from an objective commentary on the human tendency to commit acts of perversity to a subjective outburst by the murderer-narrator (…)’ (Frank, 1997; 174). “The Imp of the Perverse”, “The Black Cat”, and “The Tell-Tale Heart” all share the same motif of uncontrollable, perverse impulses which the narrators act upon, and subsequently betray themselves by confessing to their crimes. In “The Imp of the Perverse” the narrator becomes torment by the thought of being exposed as the murderer of an unnamed man (who he killed by placing a candle which emitted a poisonous vapour in his room), and in the end is forced by his own fears of exposure to admit to the murder. Even though the narrative is so similar to the other two short stories, “The Imp of the Perverse” seems to offer the key to unlocking the question as to whether or not the narrators are haunted by some kind of devil, or if their madness can be explained in terms of this world, e.g. through psychology. Poe explains the destructive as well as self-destructive impulses which are experienced by all three narrators as a mental stage, which he refers to as ‘the Imp of the Perverse’, meaning the impulse to do something wrong:

‘Had I not been thus prolix, you might either have misunderstood me altogether, or, with the rabble, have fancied me mad. As it is, you will easily perceive that I am one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse.’ (The Imp, 1845; 264)

By attributing the narrator’s madness to the Imp of the Perverse, Poe breaks with the tradition of connecting madness, murder and other macabre incidents to the devil or simply uncontrollable and inexplicable urges, hence Foucault’s claim that madness was shunned by the Enlightenment, and instead opens the door to the possibility of rationalising the dark sides of humanity and not simply discarding them as being the devils work. This idea of removing the responsibility from a Deity is emphasised when the coroner comes to determine how the narrator’s victim had died:

‘I need not describe the easy artifices by which I substituted, in his bed-room candle-stand, a wax light of my own making for the one which I there found. The next morning he was discovered dead in his bed, and the coroner’s verdict was – “Death by the visitation of God”.’ (The Imp, 1845; 264)

Here Poe nearly mocks the idea that a deity, either good or bad, should be responsible for the death of the unnamed man. Instead he clearly shows that the murder was committed by a man with no connection to the devil, or any other higher power, but simply his own disturbed mind influenced by the Imp of the Perverse. When Poe describes this perversity as something which takes over the mind and leads the individual to harm itself or others, whether it is done by words or violence, the description is quite similar to Freud’s theories concerning the id. Poe writes that ‘nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong’s sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, primitive impulse – elementary’ (The Imp, 1845; 262). This idea if a ‘radical, primitive impulse’ is in keeping with Freud’s later theories claiming that the id is an omnipresent, emotion-driven part of the human, which can only be controlled by a strong super-ego formed by society. In contrast to Freud, but in keeping with the beliefs of the Enlightenment, Poe here writes, that these perverse impulses cannot be analysed, however, as we shall see in the following chapter, Poe still attempted to do so by means of phrenology.