The Personality of Edgar Allen Poe - Case Study Example

POEPSYCH Edgar Allen Poe is widely regarded today as an who was ahead of his time, in terms of literary conventions, the development of the modern short-story form, and other innovations, including his use of unconventional meter in poetry. Certainly, during his time, Poe was not as appreciated as he is today. And long before the social science of psychology was codified in the fourth quarter of the 19th century, Poe, through his stories and other texts, demonstrated that he had keen awareness of how the human mind worked. Looking at the stories “The Black Cat,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” one can see psychological complexities and keen descriptions of human behavior, which show Poe to be an author with a keen grasp of the human mind and its workings. In terms of background, before the analysis of these stories, something must be said of Poe himself. Although he is best remembered as a writer of macabre and horror stories, but he was also an extensive essayist, poet, and prolific originator of new forms of literature in America. Poe’s early life was marked by hardship as his estranged foster father never gave him any money (his mother was a vaudeville actress) and expected him to get a job like an accountant, and frowned on his ideas of becoming a writer. Poe joined the military as a young man in part to get away from this situation, and even at the height of his writing career, he was plagued by problems of financial difficulties and alcoholism. “Poe is one of the best known American authors, but his literary legacy is complex and confusing. Poe pioneered many of the most enduring forms of American popular culture, including the detective story, science fiction, and the gothic or sensational tale; yet he also exerted a profound influence on Modernism… Poe’s fiction celebrates both the hyper rationality of the detective and the inability of philosophy to account for the perverse” (Lauter, 2006). Poe never did get much money for his writing during his life, even though he held several editorial positions. However, his stories show an author with a keen interest, intellect, and instinctive knack for the psychological workings of the mind. Seeing these beginnings that reflect on Poe’s own life leads to a possible parallel between Poe’s knack for psychology and Dupin in his story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” who appears not to be just a detective, but also a mind-reader. Secondary sources also can shed light or obfuscate a text, but most commentators seem to see this story as the birth of the modern detective. Before the real action of Poe’s story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” begins, there is a long prelude section in which the narrator, before introducing the Dupin character, goes into a deep analysis of different kinds of cleverness and psychological powers in humans. This prelude brings up a lot of the themes that then go on to define what Dupin seeks to display in his own use of psychological cleverness and mental acumen. The narrator makes distinctions between different kinds of acumen and cleverness, and clearly values one kind over the other. It is interesting to see the game of chess brought down a notch when the narrator says that it does not really take any true cleverness to play it, but rather only intense concentration (Poe, 2010). In this section, Poe is clearly using the games of chess and checkers as metaphors for the psychology of the human mind. So much is made of chess as a metaphor, today as in Poe’s time, and it is interesting to hear a point of view that states that true cleverness and acumen might best be shown in the way a person plays checkers, instead of chess. That is, people can memorize chess moves and pay attention to the possible complicated array of pieces and moves: the rook can only go straight, the bishop can only go on a diagonal, and the knight can only leap in L-shapes. The narrator notes that the complicated game of chess is one thing, but someone playing checkers is involved in something that is more one-on-one and simple. “Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation” (Poe, 2010). Although this is more accessible to the modern reader than whist, the narrator clearly has a great opinion that anyone can play chess and fail at life, but it takes a certain kind of person to be good at whist and also successful at life. A lot of these themes in the prelude were very interesting from a perspective of Poe’s prophetic interest in psychology, but they also detracted from the story in a way, because it seemed to be getting started very slow, and there was no mention of murder or intrigue; it seemed just to be a person going on about how they defined cleverness. However, from another perspective, this section shows Poe as a psychologist hard at work. These ruminations became more important later on, as well, when the story really started to get going on about the third page, with the introduction of Dupin. In describing how Dupin figures out the murders of the women, Poe goes deep into a psychological analysis that is based on the same principles of logic, reason, and precision which motivated Sigmund Freud years later. The narrator was upset when first talking and walking in Paris he heard a change in voice and aspect in Dupin, and then again when he was explaining how the orangutan dispatched the two reclusive ladies and escaped out the window. “His manner at these moments was frigid and abstract; his eyes were vacant in expression; while his voice, usually a rich tenor, rose into a treble which would have sounded petulantly but for the deliberateness and entire distinctiveness of the enunciation” (Poe, 2010). From a psychological perspective, this description reads like a list of symptoms. I appreciated this aspect of the story’s narrative description because it seemed to make a sort of combination between the supernatural idea of being possessed and the hyper-rational idea of solving problems through logical and deductive thinking (which, as mentioned, was later picked up by thinkers like Freud and Jung). “It is not too much to say that neither of us believe in preternatural events. Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye were not destroyed by spirits. The doers of the deed were material and escaped materially. Then how? Fortunately, there is but one mode of reasoning upon the point, and that mode must lead us to a definite conclusion” (Poe, 2010). Freud, when defining the id, ego, and superego, was similarly definite in his own conclusions and reasoning. While “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is a story that sees Poe in his psychological mode externally, some of his other stories use (and predate) psychology equally effectively, but from a more internal perspective. The location of “The Black Cat” is in Poe’s story of the same name. The location of the selection occurs throughout the story since it is not a targeted quotation but rather a general theme. The context can be related to Poe’s themes of the fantastic and supernatural, but in showing the growing path of madness in his main character, from child to adult, in this story, Poe predates Freud’s fascination with childhood as the source for psychological problems. The significance of the black cat is that it describes how the narrator of the story is getting more paranoid and is attributing this to the black cat. “I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame” (Poe, 2010). The narrator of the story then mutilates the cat with a pen-knife. Note that in the above description, Poe seems to use a religious mode of possession to describe the narrator’s action. But from a more psychological perspective, this same passage can be seen to be a psychotic break with reality which the narrator has, and which the story shows he has been building up to. Long before the path of paranoid psychosis was traced officially by Freud and others, Poe showed it quite clearly in this, and other, stories. “I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence. My pets, of course, were made to feel the change in my disposition. I not only neglected, but ill-used them” (Poe, 2010). The narrator’s path to madness is thus seen as a logical process, rather than as something that has been foist upon him by the devil. This represents Poe’s foreknowledge of the coming split between rational (psychological) and religious explanations for human behavior, and the workings of the complex human mind. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe also uses psychological rationality to counteract what he views as the decay and oppression of the past. In essence, the narrator of this story acts as a traveling psychologist who makes a house call on Roderick Usher, notes his symptoms, and makes a diagnosis based on his objective, scientific process of reasoning. This process of reasoning is seen to be antithetical to the debased state of Usher, who perhaps represents the failure of Romanticism and religion to provide the same answers psychology was soon to provide. The house decays and is destroyed, just like the minds and bodies of many of the characters. The plot of the story follows the narrator as he visits his old friend Roderick Usher, who is going insane, and Roderick winds up burying his sister alive in his old mansion, the House of Usher. His sister comes back from the grave and kills him before she too dies, and the narrator leaves the house after reading from a book that comes to life. As he is leaving, he looks over his shoulder and sees the entire house sinking into a type of moat or swamp. Looking deeper than these plot details, the reader can see the theme of psychological destruction and decay in “The Fall of the House of Usher” in various ways. First of all, Roderick Usher is going insane, and the narrator visits him in the capacity of a helper, much as a psychologist would. Usher has lost hold on what is going on around him, and he is depressed all the time. He is collapsing mentally and has less and less control over his morbid fantasies, even though he still does things like play guitar and paint. His mind is literally being destroyed by the gloom and depression of his setting, and he does not seem to get any better as the story goes on, despite the “talk therapy” that the narrator attempts to engage him in (later, as in the Wolf Man and other cases, Freud was not 100% successful either). At first, we hope that the narrator might succeed in curing his depression, but it becomes clear that Roderick is a lost cause. From the very first time we see him, Poe describes Usher as being a corpse-like man, where he had been healthy and fit before he began to sink into his madness: “The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous luster of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded… I could not… connect its… expression with any idea of simple humanity” (Poe, 721). Hearing his old friend talk, Poe’s narrator notes that he is either speaking in a sort of indecisive stutter or showing the speech patterns of a drunk or someone who has smoked too much opium. This shows that both his body and his mind have been let to decay and have gone to waste. He sits around in the “neglected vault” of his house, “with no disturbance from the breath of the external air… beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability” (Poe, 720). This shows that on the surface, the narrator sees the decay of the house, but still hopes for the best when looking underneath the decay for signs of instability, just as a psychologist would hope for the best in a patient like Roderick. In the house, he doesn’t find anything that would lead him to consider it unstable, but in Roderick, the decay seems to have sunken in to lead to his destruction. Poe was influenced by, and influenced in turn, French symbolist poetry of his time, by poets like Baudelaire. In turn, he influenced generations of other writers, and arguably, psychologists such as Freud and Jung. Poe’s approach in many of his stories, just as Freud’s was to be later in his case studies, was to take a horrific or fantastic element and describe it in a scientific style, such as the description of the narrator’s changing relationship with the cat in “The Black Cat,” Roderick’s descent in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or the mental acuity and reasonable, scientific process of Dupin in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In each of these stories, Poe shows himself not only to be a master of the short story, but also, a literary figure who foresaw the gradual rise of psychoanalysis in the later years of the 19th century. REFERENCE Lauter, P (2006). Edgar Allen Poe. Heath Anthology of American Literature. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Poe, EA (2007). The Murders in the Rue Morgue. www.literature.org … (2010). The Black Cat. www.literature.org … (2010). The Fall of the House of Usher. www.literature.org Read More