Edgar Allan Poe: Crime And Punishment Essay, Research Paper

Edgar Allan Poe: Crime and Punishment A certain group of short stories of Edgar Allan Poe can be described as the “Talesof Gothic Horror”, but I would like to group them as tales of crime and punishment. Allof them are surprisingly simple and the moral meaning easily understood: guilt causes pain;loss of human contact means spiritual death; and conscience must be carefully thoughtabout. The two stories that I felt applied the greatest are The Black Cat and The Tell-TaleHeart. Each has a different style and interpretation, but the main themes are closelyrelated to each other. Before reading these stories, you must understand the mental state the author wasin. In these tales, you can feel the despair that Poe feels. He wrote himself that the “mostdirect, and perhaps, most salutary, is that of self-examination and self knowledge.” He feltthat individuals could obtain a perfectly accurate estimate of oneself. Poe never foundwhat he considered love, and you can identify the torment that it put him through. These”crime and punishment” stories show the perverseness that Poe uses to express his themes. The Tell-Tale Heart is Poe’s first psychological study of domestic violence andguilt. The story covers a period of approximately eight days with most of the importantaction occurring each night around midnight. The location is the home of an elderly manin which the narrator has become a caretaker. This story contains a nameless narrator thatbecomes the main focus of the tale. This narrator may be male or female because Poe usesonly “I” and “me” in reference to this character. Most readers assume that the narrator ismale because of a male author using a first person point of view; however this story canalso be plausible when the deranged protagonist appears as a woman. Poe writes thisstory from the perspective of the murderer of the old man. The narrator, in the particularstory, adds to the overall effect of horror by continually stressing to the reader that he orshe is not mad, and tries to convince us of that fact by how carefully this brutal crime wasplanned and executed. Poe’s story is a case of domestic violence that occurs as the resultof an irrational fear. To the narrator that fear is represented by the old man’s eye. Through the narrator, Poe describes this eye as being pale blue with a film over it, andresembling that of a vulture. The belief in the evil eye dates back to ancient times. Thebelief centers around the idea that those who possess the evil eye have the power to harmpeople or their possessions by merely looking at them. To protect oneself from the powerof the eye, certain measures must be taken. Human nature is a delicate balance of lightand dark, or good and evil. Most of the time this precarious balance is maintained;however, when there is a shift, for whatever reason, the dark or perverse side surfaces. Inthis case, it is the “vulture eye” of the old man that makes the narrator’s blood run cold. Itis this irrational fear which evokes the dark side, and eventually leads to murder. The

narrator plans, executes and conceals the crime. The narrator speaks of an illness that hasheightened the senses: “Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard things in theheavens and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.” The narrator repeatedly insists thathe or she is not mad; however the reader soon realizes that the fear of the vulture eye hasconsumed the narrator, who has now become a victim to the madness which he had hopedto elude. In the story of The Black Cat, it begins with the narrator being in jail awaiting hisexecution, which will occur on the following day, for the brutal murder of his wife. Atthat point, the rest of the story is told in flashback and the he describes it as the events thathave destroyed him. The true focus lies upon the nameless narrator, which is common inPoe’s literary works. Telling the story from the first person point of view intensifies theeffect of moral shock and horror. This character has a tenderness of heart and is fond ofanimals, his favorite being a black cat named Pluto. Poe begins writing this story from theperspective of the narrator that has his character and temperament transformed throughthe use of alcohol. Poe constructed this story in such a way that the events of the taleremain somewhat ambiguous. As the narrator begins to recount the occurrences thatdestroys him, he reminds the reader that maybe it is nothing more than an ordinarysuccession of natural causes and effects. From the beginning, the reader discovers that theman’s personality had undergone a drastic transformation which he attributes to his abuseof alcohol. The reader also discovers that the narrator is superstitious. Even though thenarrator denies this, just as the narrator in the Tell-Tale Heart did in denying that he isinsane, the reader becomes increasingly aware of his superstitious belief as the storyprogresses. Superstition has it that Satan and witches assume the form of black cats. Appropriately, the narrator calls his cat Pluto, who in Greek and Roman mythology wasthe god of the dead and the ruler of the underworld. Poe’s excellent use of foreshadowingis also used in this story. Within the first few paragraphs of the story, the narratorforeshadows that he will violently harm his wife. The Black Cat is Poe’s secondpsychological study of domestic violence and guilt; however, this story does not deal withpremeditated murder. The reader is told that the narrator appears to be happily marriedand has always been kind and gentle. He attributes his downfall to the “spirit ofperverseness” or otherwise known as alcohol. I argue that what the narrator calls”perverseness” is actually conscience. Guilt about his alcoholism seems to the narrator the”perverseness” which causes him to maim and kill the first cat. Guilt about those actionsindirectly leads to the murder of his wife. The disclosure of the crime, as in The Tell-TaleHeart is caused by a warped sense of triumph and the conscience of the murderer. Whatmakes this story different from The Tell-Tale Heart is that Poe has added a new elementto aid in evoking the dark side of the narrator and that is the supernatural.