The Disturbed, The Demented, The Damned:
A Discussion of the Nature of Evil in the Stories of Edgar Allen Poe
The human mind is a vast, complex entity, capable of experiencing blinding love and all-consuming hate, of acting upon impulses of pure goodness and ineffable evil, of dividing extremes with a swath of gradient gray so broad that white is linked inextricably to black. The mind is rendered unable to distinguish betwixt the two. It is an ocean roiling with ambiguity, and all too often, moral strength and conviction are lost within those vast waves separating the understanding of what is right from what is wrong. Impulse steals its insidious way into the mind, a beckoning Lorelei to the soul's demise; madness bursts forth, the dashing of the soul upon the rocks of iniquity. When morality falls victim to that mental blurring of lines, evil is quick to usurp its place. The smallest of things- a cat, a cataracted eye, a mere fancy- can drive the whim to frenzy, and the will to murder.
The first question at hand is one of motivation- of what, precisely, drives the mind to such depraved depths- and Edgar Allen Poe proves masterful in his various literary attempts to answer this question. Three companionate short stories- "The Imp of the Perverse," "The Black Cat," and "The Tell-Tale Heart-" are linked by a common theme of violence, which brings us to the second question of why Poe chose to connect these stories in the way that he did. The answer to the first is simple- or so it seems. The violence wrought in all three stories is essentially the product of madness- despite the narrators' insistences to the contrary- yet all three of those narrators state, or at least imply, that they were driven to do what they did by some perversity inherent in the human spirit, that is universal to all mankind. It is only logical to ask, when faced with the possibility that the potential for evil lies dormant within us all, why some are driven to act upon the impulse to do wrong, while others are able to stave that impulse off, and therein lies the answer to the second question. Perhaps Poe intended to make a broad statement regarding the capacity of every human being for evil- or perhaps he wished to provide a basis for evil- or, more specifically, for violence- in madness. If all humans can be made subject to the so-called "imp of the perverse," it can be no coincidence that Poe chose to portray those succumbing to the whims of the imp as being less able to effectively utilize their wits than any ordinary man off of the street. The difference, he seems to be saying, between one who can resist the urge to commit wrong and one who cannot lies in one's state of mind.
I think it prudent, first, to discuss the nature of the ubiquitous "imp" that afflicts the human spirit. In "The Imp of the Perverse," the narrator speaks at length about the "overwhelming" human tendency to "do wrong for wrong's sake," claiming that actions begot of urges to act without rational motive are born not of reason, or "analysis," but of primitive instinct- of impulse (Poe 272). There exists something within the human spirit that is inherently capricious and contrary, acting in self-destructive or antagonistic ways simply because it revels in the thrill begot of doing something it knows it should not be doing- this is the "imp." No one can claim to be free from the influences of what is essentially born of instinct, and Poe's guilty narrators apply this universality to their confessions quite liberally in hopes of appealing to their audiences' sympathy. The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart," for example, muses that "it is impossible to say how first the idea entered [his] brain," implying a sort of enslavement to sudden whim in his behavior (121). The narrator of "The Black Cat" takes this idea of impulsive perverseness a step further than even that. He relates how, after his initial mutilation of his once-beloved cat- which was brought on by a spell of drunken fury- he was set upon, "as if to [his] final and irrevocable overthrow" by the "spirit of PERVERSENESS," which he describes almost desperately as being "one of the primitive impulses of the human heart;" the committance of "vile or silly action[s]," he claims, are common to all men (65). In insisting that the violent actions he then carried out were undertaken in this spirit of perverseness, he attempts to undermine the true magnitude of those actions' brutality, playing up the "bandwagon effect" of perversity's universality to connect with the audience to whom he is confessing (Elswick 2). He is, in a word, justifying himself; he is rationalizing. All men experience this "unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself," he seems to be saying (Poe 65). All men "do wrong for wrong's sake only," no matter how "intellectual or logical" they may purport to be (65, 271). In fact, it is more difficult still to deny the puissance of the "imp's" influence when its victim is an intellectual.
"The Imp of the Perverse" is unique among the three stories in question in that the "story" of it does not begin until the end of the text. What precedes the narrator's confession to the murder of a man (who, by all accounts, is guilty of no offense) is an extensively detailed essay that expounds upon the nature of perversity in the human spirit. The proof is nearly philosophical in its scrupulous presentation of examples both concrete and abstract; the "earnest desire to tantalize a listener by circumlocution," the abject unwillingness to perform a task "which must be speedily performed," and the "ghastly and loathsome" longing to throw oneself off of a precipice, are desires which are nearly universal in their familiarity, and therefore predispose the audience toward attending to the narrator's sordid tale with a greater modicum of understanding when he reveals that he was "one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse" (272, 273, 274). No matter how much "thorough deliberation" he put into the brutal murder of his victim- going so far as to study him for months to ascertain his ablutionary habits before placing a poisoned candle in his bedchamber- he must not, in his view, be considered mad in any sense of the term (274). If he is to be believed, one cannot be written off as mad simply for acting at the behest of the spirit of the perverse when that spirit whispers its whims into the ears of all men. One cannot be denounced as evil simply because those whims happen to be ineffably immoral.
Of course, a very logical claim can be made to the contrary, for not all men areso enslaved to their imps that they carry out their impulses without hesitation. There is, undoubtedly, something that separates those who can exercise control over their subconscious whims from those who cannot, and if the true natures of these three stories' narrators are taken into account, that "something" may well be mental state. All three narrators are set apart from their fellow men in that a full measure of sanity is conspicuously absent in them. The narrator of "The Imp of the Perverse" may be an articulate, deeply cognitive individual, but despite that, and his elaborate defensive appeal to universal impulsivity, there can be no mistaking his actions for those of a sane man. In a similar vein, the narrator of "The Black Cat," once a docile, kindly soul who once adored animals above even himself, becomes so twisted by irrational hatred and fear of his cat that he brutally murders it, its fellow feline, and his wife. He attempts to shunt the blame for his newfound proclivity for violence not only onto his own Imp of the Perverse, but onto alcoholism, the "Fiend Intemperance" (64). Neither of the Imp nor the drink, however, can be held accountable for the essentially groundless rage he directs toward his beloved animals when sober. What must instead be faulted isthat irrationality of his anger, his hatred, his fear- the chaotic state of his mind, that prevents him from resisting the impulse to harm those who have done him no wrong.
It is the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart," however, who is truly marked as being isolated from sane society. He incriminates himself right from the outset of his story; his vehement, frenzied attempts to rationalize his murder and mutilation of the old man with whom he lives bespeak of a mind profoundly chaotic and disordered, and even as he revels in his own "sagacity," it is apparent that his mental state is only devolving further beyond hope of recovery (122). His words are disjointed, harshly punctuated, often repeated, as though their speaker were gasping for breath, or trembling, or even laughing uncontrollably. "Nervous-very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am," he says of himself, and his anxiety- nay, paranoia- is painfully evident to the reader as he takes fevered hours to peek in on the old man, drives himself to a fury listening to the beating of his own tattooing heart, obsesses- as does the afflicted soul at the helm of "The Imp of the Perverse"- over the possibility of discovery (121). He is clever, certainly, in his methods of murder and body disposal, but he is driven wholly by his passions- passions that are inflamed by hallucinations and delusions born of a diseased body and mind- and so his cleverness is wasted, for the violence it engenders can only lead to disaster.
The nineteenth-century defense attorney Peter Browne once described an insane person as one who "has lost the use of his reason": not one who has lost his reason entirely, but one whose "affections" or "will" are "deranged," leading to an ability to use what intellect is available to him to a productive or socially acceptable end (qtd. in Cleman 629). Poe's three narrators are by no means men lacking in intelligence. All three exhibit the ability to carefully plan and deliberate as they contrive either their methods of murder or their methods of dealing with the murders' aftermaths; as highly developed as their intellects are, however, they are "fixed unreasonably on a single goal…that rides rough-shod [sic] over [their brains]" in the classic modi operandi of monomaniacs (631). When these single goals tend toward the murderous, the term "deranged" can all too easily be applied to the bearer of those goals. Reason, intellect, and will can no longer be trusted not to go to inhuman and inhumane lengths to achieve their singular objectives. If the whims of the Imp could be suppressed before, they cannot be any longer- not when they urge one so urgently, beseechingly, toward the objective that has come to dominate his mind like a plague.
The nature of evil is one that has long frustrated humanity. Rational souls entrenched in the lawful morality of day-to-day living find themselves unable to fathom how some among their number prove capable of committing fiendish atrocities against their own kind; they worriedly ask themselves where, why, those sorry few went wrong. They do not think to ask whether they, too, might join that legion of the disturbed, the demented, the damned. For all that Poe's three narrators in "The Imp of the Perverse," "The Black Cat," and "The Tell-Tale Heart" propagate the idea of some innate perversity in the human spirit that leads the mind to violate its and society's codes of right and wrong- a perversity that is universal, dangling over even the most logical of souls- the stories nevertheless provide those logical souls with some sort of hope: a hope, paradoxically, that lies in madness. That the violence inherent in the narrators' evil deeds comes in conjunction with the disordered conditions of their minds cannot easily be denied; Poe, therefore, appears to posit that the basis of the doing of evil deeds lies within that mental turmoil rather than in the human spirit as a whole. Some men are clearly more able to resist the call of the Imp than others, simply by virtue of the greater modicum of sanity afforded to them. Those men, then, can rest easy, knowing that their lives and moral virtues will remain intact...assuming, of course, that their reason doesn't simply desert them, too. Surely stranger things could be said to have happened.
Works Cited
Cleman, John. "Irresistible Impulses: Edgar Allan Poe and the Insanity Defense." American Literature, vol. 63, no. 4, 1991, pp. 623–640.
Elswick, Morgan E. "The Unspeakable: Fearing Madness in Poe's 'The Black Cat.'" The Downtown Review, vol. 2, no. 2, 2015. .edu
Poe, Edgar Allen. "The Black Cat." Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966. 63-70. Print.
Poe, Edgar Allen. "The Imp of the Perverse." Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966. 271-275. Print.
Poe, Edgar Allen. "The Tell-Tale Heart." Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966. 121-124. Print.
Works Consulted
Cimenian, Tamar. "The Tells of the Hideous Heart: A Stylistic Analysis of The Tell-Tale Heart." Print.
Gargano, James W. "'THE BLACK CAT': PERVERSENESS RECONSIDERED." Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 2, no. 2, 1960, pp. 172–178.
Gargano, James W. "The Question of Poe's Narrators." College English, vol. 25, no. 3, 1963, pp. 177–181..
Kelly, Sean J. "'I Blush, I Burn, I Shudder, While I Pen the Damnable Atrocity': Penning Perversion in Poe's 'The Black Cat.'" The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 13, no. 2, 2012, pp. 81–108.
Krappe, Edith Smith. "A Possible Source for Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and 'The Black Cat.'" American Literature, vol. 12, no. 1, 1940, pp. 84–88.
McGhee, Alexandra J. "Morbid Conditions: Poe and the Sublimity of Disease." The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 14, no. 1, 2013, pp. 55–70.
Reilly, John E. "A Source for the Immuration in 'The Black Cat.'" Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 48, no. 1, 1993, pp. 93–95.
Reilly, John E. "The Lesser Death-Watch and 'The Tell-Tale Heart.'" The American Transcendental Quarterly, vol. 2, 1969, pp. 3-9.
Robinson, E. Arthur. "Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart.'" Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 19, no. 4, 1965, pp. 369–378.
Shen, Dan. "Edgar Allan Poe's Aesthetic Theory, the Insanity Debate, and the Ethically Oriented Dynamics of 'The Tell-Tale Heart.'" Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 63, no. 3, 2008, pp. 321–345.
Tucker, B. D. "'The Tell-Tale Heart' and the 'Evil Eye.'" The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, 1981, pp. 92–98.