Edgar Allan Poe Case

Edgar Allan Poe

As famous but never wealthy writer Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, and died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849 (Bloom 17 - 18) at the age of 40. Poe's father, David, was a moody alcoholic and abandoned the family when Edgar was two. Within a year of David's desertion, Poe's mother, Elizabeth, died of tuberculosis. Edgar was taken in by John and Frances Allan but never officially adopted (Bloom 12).

Poe's work is still widely read today and many still try to discern how he could have written such dark stories. Some of his critics feel his work mirrored some of the events in his life caused by alcoholism and opium use, and that his use of drugs and alcohol could have created the imagination Poe needed to write them. One critic, Richard Wilbur, said,

"It is not really surprising that some critics should think Poe meaningless, or that others should suppose his meaning unintelligible only to monsters. Poe was not a wide open and perspicuous [clearly expressed; easily understood] writer; indeed, he was a secretive writer both by temperament and by conviction. He sprinkled his stories with sly references to himself and his personal history" (Bloom 52).

Another critic, David Herbert Lawrence wrote,

"Moralists have always wondered helplessly why Poe's morbid tales need have been written" (Bloom 21).

Mr. Lawrence felt that Poe needed to write these tales because old things needed to die and the innocence of the psyche needed to be broken down gradually so this could happen. And yet, perhaps Poe only wrote about the dark side of man because of the adversity he faced as a young boy who lost his parents.

No matter what Poe's critics have said about his work, people all over the world enjoy reading his work today. One reason is that Edgar Allan Poe's tales allow the reader to be privy to the thoughts of murderers who blame something or someone for their criminal act. Poe's stories typically deal with three things. First, there seems to be an obsession of some sort in each tale. Second, the narrator blames this obsession he has with something or someone for the act of murder that he commits. Lastly, his tales involve a participant narrator who is unreliable because in each tale the narrator could be considered, by the reader, to be insane. In "The Telltale Heart," "The Black Cat," and "The Cask of Amontillado," all three of these characteristics of Poe's tales appear.

In the "The Telltale Heart", Poe's narrator is obsessed with the eye of a man because he feels the eye is evil and so has to kill the man to rid himself of having to endure the evil eye looking upon him. The narrator says, "He had the eye of a vulture - a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; ...I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever." However, the narrator proclaimed to love the old man when he said, "I loved the old man. He never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this" (Van Doren Stern 290)! Again, the obsession with the eye, the vulture's eye, caused the narrator to kill the man he claimed to love.

From the beginning of "The Telltale Heart", the reader knows the narrator is mad as he says, "True! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses - not destroyed - not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then, am I mad?" (Van Doren Stern 290). Once read, it is obvious to the reader that the narrator is mentally unstable.

More proof of the narrator's insanity comes as he describes how he entered the old man's room every night for seven nights, waiting to see the eye, and then killed the man on the eighth night. As a result of the obsession which caused the narrator to murder the old man, the narrator cut up the dead body and buried the body parts under the wooden floor in the victim's own bedroom, cementing the reader's belief that the narrator is insane.

In "The Black Cat", Poe's narrator is initially an animal lover and was happy his wife was also. He said, "I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not uncongenial with my own. Observing my partiality for domestic pets, she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the most agreeable kind." They had a menagerie of pets. The narrator says, "We had birds, goldfish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat" (Van Doren Stern 297). The narrator loved the cat. He claimed, "Pluto - this was the cat's name - was my favorite pet and playmate" (Van Doren Stern 298).

Once the narrator begins to regularly consume alcoholic beverages he becomes obsessed with his black cat and becomes easily enraged toward the cat. He says, "One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him" (Van Doren Stern 298). The narrator is intoxicated and becomes obsessed with the perceived actions of the cat but the consumption of alcohol causes him to lose control and eventually he hangs the cat.

Then the narrator acquires another black cat. With his continued use of alcohol, the narrator gets progressively meaner to the second cat and appears to become more insane. His insanity is obvious in the paragraph where he says, "It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name - and for this, above all, I loathed and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster had I dared - it was now I say, the image of a hideous - of a ghastly thing - of the GALLOWS" (Van Doren Stern 304)! Because of the narrator's insanity, he thinks the white mark on the cat looks like the gallows and feels the cat is a monster.

The narrator's insanity progresses until he tries to murder the cat. The murder appears to be an act of the passion of the moment. But, while trying to kill the cat his wife interferes and the narrator says he enters into a "... rage more than demoniacal", and then he says he, "withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her head" (Van Doren Stern 305). Because his wife tried to stop him from killing the cat, he murdered her. He then proceeds to bury the victim, his wife, inside