Edgar Allen Poe and Psychology:

Edgar Allen Poe

Poe and Psychology: The Meaning of Evil in the Lives of his Characters

Discussion of the Imp of the Perverse, the Black Cat and the Tell-Tale Heart

Edgar Allen Poe is well-known as a master of dark horror fiction teeming with murder, death and supernatural elements. The interesting thing about his work however is the particular psychology that he applies to his characters. Thus, in most of his stories, Poe combines an extremely logical and rational argumentation with an irrational plot. The narrator, who is most often the main hero of the story as well, proceeds in his story telling of ghastly events with startling precision and unabated rationality. It is precisely through this intended coalition of the rational and the irrational that Poe's stories make their most powerful psychological argument. Poe thus plainly rejects the idea of madness in his characters, and this is almost always stated even from the beginning of his story. As a proof, his characters seem unusually lucid and very rational. To a certain extent, Poe's stories can be analyzed in accordance to Freud's theory of the 'uncanny' in literature, but it should be noted that this does not cover the entire meaning of his work. More precisely, Poe does a lot more than merely propose a psychological game in which fear and the bizarre merge together to test the limits of the human being; he hints, before Freud himself, at the abysmal and dark human subconscious that defies rationality. Thus, the contrast between the logical pattern of the narrative and its irrational content serves as the main means of showing that irrationality is far stronger than reason.

Thus, the most interesting aspect of the psychology that Poe applies to his characters is certainly related to the way in which the heroes in his stories perform evil in all its forms, through outrageous crimes, without a motive. The fact that the crimes are performed without a motive would normally imply that the characters are insane. Nevertheless, this is precisely the implication that Poe is trying to guard the reader from: the narrators of the odd stories are not mad, but merely mastered by demonic and irrational impulses. In his short story, the Imp of the Perverse, the author approaches precisely this subject of the crime without motive. Thus, he explains that all the irrational drives to do evil come from a paradoxical impulse called 'perverseness' and which causes its victim to do the precise opposite of what reason dictates: "[There is] an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive..."(Poe, 294) Poe claims therefore that this impulse determines people to 'do wrong for wrong's sake', that is to contradict his own rationality: "Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong's sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is radical, a primitive impulse -- elementary."(Poe, 295) Evil is therefore inextricably related to irrationality, and therefore almost uncontrollable. Although psychoanalysis had not been born yet in Poe's time, it is obvious that the writer's psychological investigation of evil is very deep. Poe recognizes the influence of the subconscious over the human reason, and many times, its overwhelming power. He compares the man sitting on the edge of a precipice with someone who is ready to plunge into his own irrationality and obey his darkest impulses: "And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge, for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost."(Poe, 296) This simile between the free plunge into the abyss and the modern definition of the subconscious gulf underlying our minds reveals Poe as a predecessor of psychoanalysis.

The other two stories under discussion, the Black Cat and the Tell-Tale Heart have a very similar narrative structure: the rational, almost detective-like narrator tells the story of his obsession or monomania, revealing one or more terrible crimes that he performed. In the Black Cat, the narrator performs a series of atrocities which begin with the torture of his pets and culminate in the murder of his wife. Before proceeding to tell the story, Poe ironically dares the rational reader to make sense of the irrational story of evil by arranging the events according to "natural cause and effects": "Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place -- some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects."(Poe, 133) it is obvious here and throughout the story that Poe hints at the vulnerability of the human psyche and its subordination to the subconscious and the supernatural at the same time. Thus, the cat represents here a manifestation of the absolute demonic evil, which, as the last image in the story suggests, presides over the human reason. The cat seated on the head of the corpse seems to be the very materialization of the irrational forces that undermine the human spirit. According to some critics, the crimes described and the general irrational behavior of the main character can be considered plausible if it is explained in psychoanalytical terms. Ed Piacentino for example proposes that the narrator answers violently to his childhood frustrations: "The narrator's motive for this cruel and violent crime is, as I see it, psychologically plausible. His wife's effort to save the cat becomes, by association in the narrator's subconscious, a reenactment of his own childhood trauma, an event in which he became the victim of friends who made fun of his own sensitivity." (Piacentino, 163) This explanation lacks substance however, and misses a good part of Poe's intention in the story. Thus, as Joseph Stark observes, Poe points exactly to the insufficiency of the human reason to account for why people perform evil: "The text is radically ambivalent. It explores the issues of moral responsibility and the inexplicability of human evil but supplies no solution. The 'moral' of Poe's tale, then, may be more a statement on the insufficiency of human reason than the nature of the human will." (Stark, 263) Poe thus shows man to be an irrational being, who is permanently endangered by his susceptibility towards performing evil without reason.