Perverseness in Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart and Black Cat

Ruhr-Uni-Bochum
Englische Fakultät

    Perverseness in Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart and Black Cat

Hausarbeit

von

Anja Einhorn

20.03.2002

PREFACE

This term paper deals with Edgar Allan Poe´s short stories "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart", which are both examples of men who give in to a strange inner force which Poe himself calls "perverseness".
His notion of this term is explicitly used in what could be called his "short-story-essay": "The Imp of the Perverse".
First of all it is neccessary to explain what Poe meant by this certain force, apart and beyond the ordinary understanding of "perverseness".
After that his two tales of terror mentioned above will be compared according to their common themes.
First a short summary of each will be given, followed by the point-of-view-technique Poe uses for a certain purpose.
Then the victims of the stories and the narrators´ causes of fear will be explored. Both tales obviously deal with the causes of domestic violence that occur as the result of an irrational fear (either superstition or ancient belief).
Then both protagonists will be characterized as perverse criminals who give in to their dark side and annihilate themselves.
Furthermore there´s a discussion of narrative style and images and the ending of the stories.
At last especially "The Black Cat" is explored considering its content of truth.

So the reader may see that Poe gave us two little masterpieces in human psychology to think about: The "spirit of perverseness" is lurking in everybody...

I. ABOUT PERVERSENESS

"What could be more perverse than a personal quest for dissolution?", one may ask after reading Poe´s short stories.
The countervailing coercion of man - the perverse, that primal instinct, that seed of destruction, lurks - as Poe believed - inside everyone. Interestingly, Poe′s belief in the perverse caused him to go beyond traditional morality. He tries to search out this radical impulse, which he believed rules the dark side of human behaviour.
When Poe speaks of perverseness, he does not intend narrower denotations of the various forms of the word. He does not mean "perverted," as in sexual miscreance. Though such deviancy may be perverse, it is not equal to the examples of perversity which Poe explains in his tales.
Selfdestruction of the protagonist is the prevailing topic in his stories.
His unrestraint and often horrible descriptions of human misdeeds display that he isn´t interested in doing justice to morality.
Poe instead intended to show what occurred to him as the natural order of man′s behavior, rather than to engage in futile speculation concerning what God intended for the individual. Poe asks through one of his narrators,
if we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being? If we cannot understand him in his objective creatures, how then in his substantive moods and phases of creation? (Poe, "The Imp of the Perverse", p. 358)
Poe was evidently interested in strange forces, often mistaken by the pedants of his and our time, as moral evil, but which Poe saw differently. Rather, he explored the counterpart to creativity, insisting that humans are also predisposed towards the perverse, that radical impulse described for us by the narrator of "The Imp of the Perverse," who declares that
no reason can be more unreasonable; but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain than I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. 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, a primitive impulse - elementary. ("The Imp of the Perverse", p. 358)
The culturally conditioned reader can easily miss Poe′s point here if he pays more importance to the moral meaning of the word "wrong", overriding Poe′s intent. In Poe, wrong is wrong because it is perverse, not because the Bible told him so. Wrong is wrong because it harms the personality who initiates the action.
"The Imp of the Perverse" is both a short story and an essay, which displays a psychological theory as a concept of the perverse. This - the author through his narrator explains - is "an innate and primitive principle of human action" and "in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motiviert." (Poe, "The Imp of the Perverse", p. 358)
As also in "The Black Cat" the author claims that "we act, for the reason that we should not". (Poe, "The Imp of the Perverse", p. 358)

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