Notes on Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Imp of the Perverse'

 

'The Imp of the Perverse' - Illustration by Arthur Rackham 

in Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1935) [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

'The Imp of the Perverse' is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, examining how a desire to do those things that we know we should not do can lead to our own destruction. 

 

This desire is imagined by Poe in the form of a small and mischievous being prone to causing trouble and leading men astray; i.e., what is called within European folklore an imp [2].   

 

Recommended to me by the Irish poet Síomón Solomon, I thought it might be nice to while away the hours on a Sunday afternoon reading it together ...

 

 

II. 

 

The story reads initially almost as an essay, as the narrator explains at length his theory on the imp of the perverse. 

 

Describing it as a primitive propensity of the human soul that causes people - including himself - to commit acts against their self-interest, he claims that it has been overlooked by scientists, priests, and other scholars because they could not perceive its necessity or understand how the imp of the perverse might advance knowledge of the human condition. 

 

In brief: the idea of it simply never occurred to them; it didn't fit into their scheme of things, including their map of the brain (the latter having been designed according to popular moral superstition by a rational and purposeful deity who had made man in his own image).   

 

Our narrator says: "Having thus fathomed to his satisfaction the intentions of Jehovah, out of these intentions [man] built his innumerable systems of mind" and a well organ-ised human body; i.e., one with a mouth for eating, an arse for shitting, and - having determined it to be God's will "that man should continue his species" - an organ of amativeness as well.      

 

In this way, we can conceive of man as an ideal creature, with every organ representing either "a propensity, a moral sentiment, or a faculty of the pure intellect". 

 

Deleuze and Guattari may not be happy with this arrangement, but they are in a minority; most people are content to believe they have a divine origin and a preconceived destiny (remember, dear reader, that this tale was written in 1845, thirty-seven years before Nietzsche's madman was to announce the death of God and over a hundred years before Aratud introduced the idea of a body without organs) [3].     

 

 

III. 

 

The narrator goes on to say that it would have been wiser to have classified man according to his actions, "rather than upon the basis of what we took it for granted the Deity intended him to do". For if we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, "how then in his inconceivable thoughts" ...? 

 

If only more attention had been paid to man's actions, then perverseness - "for want of a more characteristic term" - would have been recognised as "an innate and primitive principle of human action"; albeit an irrational one in that it obliges us to act in a way that often makes no sense and has no benefit (which, in fact, is often harmful): 

 

"In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable; but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong's sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse - elementary." 

 

And this, says the narrator, is undeniable: "No one who trustingly consults and thoroughly questions his own soul, will be disposed to deny the entire radicalness of the propensity in question." 

 

I suppose, if I stop to think about it, there may well be something in what he says. Certainly, whenever I'm presenting a paper to an audience and I look around the faces gathered before I begin, I'm often tempted, sensing no connection, to simply walk off the stage and out of the room without a word of explanation (something Larry David was notorious for doing during his early days as a stand-up comic).  

 

Either that, or to stay and piss people off with deliberate vagueness and a refusal to take a position: 

 

"The speaker is aware that he displeases [...] yet, the thought strikes him, that by certain involutions and parentheses, this anger may be engendered. That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing [...] is indulged." 

 

Having said that, sometimes, like Sebastian Horsley, I'm only too happy to flatter an audience and adapt my views to suit them [4] (being transpositional means I can move swiftly from one side of an argument to the other - or neither - without too much cognitive dissonance). 

 

As for procrastination ... Well, I'll say something about that later [5].

 

 

IV. 

 

Is it the imp of the perverse that ultimately brings us to the brink of suicide? That tempts us to "peer into the abyss" until we grow sick and dizzy? 

 

Possibly. 

 

"Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degree our sickness and dizziness, and horror, become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling" 

 

Is the ultimate practice of joy before death to imagine "our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height"? 

 

Again, that's possible - and it would explain Annabella's ecstasy as she stands atop the Eiffel Tower and contemplates jumping to her death [6]. This thought of falling - "for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination" - is the thing she most vividly desires. 

 

"And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore, do we the more impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of one, who shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge." 

 

Again, it's not rational; it's a perverse defiance of logic, sound reason, and common sense. But without a "friendly arm to check us" - Annabella looks round for someone strong and brave to save her - there's a very strong possibility we will jump and meet a very sticky end. 

 

 

V.

 

It turns out that the narrator is in chains sitting in a condemned man's prison cell; that the above is an attempt to explain how he came to find himself in such circumstances. He's not mad, as most people think, but is rather "one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse".   

 

What happened, exactly? 

 

Well, the narrator commited murder in order to inherit a man's estate: 

 

"It is impossible that any deed could have been wrought with a more thorough deliberation. For weeks, for months, I pondered upon the means of the murder. I rejected a thousand schemes, because their accomplishment involved a chance of detection."

 

Eventually, after reading some French memoirs, he hits on the idea of using a poisoned candle (i.e., one that releases toxic fumes when burned): 

 

"The idea struck my fancy at once. I knew my victim’s habit of reading in bed. I knew, too, that his apartment was narrow and ill-ventilated."  

 

And although he effectively got away with it after a coroner declared the death to be in accordance with the will of God, he is eventually gripped by a self-destructive impulse to confess his crime in public:

 

"Having inherited his estate, all went well with me for years. The idea of detection never once entered my brain. Of the remains of the fatal taper, I had myself carefully disposed. I had left no shadow of a clue by which it would he possible to convict, or even to suspect me of the crime. It is inconceivable how rich a sentiment of satisfaction arose in my bosom as I reflected upon my absolute security. For a very long period of time, I was accustomed to revel in this sentiment. It afforded me more real delight than all the mere worldly advantages accruing from my sin. But there arrived at length [...] a haunting and harassing thought [...] I could scarcely get rid of for an instant." 

 

"One day, while sauntering along the streets, I arrested myself in the act of murmuring, half aloud [...] 'I am safe - I am safe - yes - if I be not fool enough to make open confession!'  No sooner had I spoken these words, than I felt an icy chill creep to my heart."

 

For our narrator knows where his perversity would lead; first to jail and then to the gallows - and that there was nothing he could do about it: 

 

"I had had some experience in these fits of perversity [...] and I remembered well, that in no instance, I had successfully resisted their attacks. And now my own casual self suggestion, that I might possibly be fool enough to confess the murder of which I had been guilty, confronted me, as if the very ghost of him whom I had murdered - and beckoned me on to death." 

 

Poe concludes his tale with the following passages, spoken by the narrator:

 

"At first, I made an effort to shake off this nightmare of the soul. I walked vigorously - faster - still faster - at length I ran. I felt a maddening desire to shriek aloud. Every succeeding wave of thought overwhelmed me with new terror [...] I still quickened my pace. I bounded like a madman through the crowded thoroughfares. At length, the populace took the alarm, and pursued me. I felt then the consummation of my fate. 

      Could I have torn out my tongue, I would have done it - but a rough voice resounded in my ears - a rougher grasp seized me by the shoulder. I turned - I gasped for breath. For a moment, I experienced all the pangs of suffocation; I became blind, and deaf, and giddy; and then, some invisible fiend, I thought, struck me with his broad palm upon the back. The long-imprisoned secret burst forth from my soul."

      They say that I spoke with a distinct enunciation, but with marked emphasis and passionate hurry, as if in dread of interruption before concluding the brief but pregnant sentences that consigned me to the hangman and to hell. 

      Having related all that was necessary for the fullest judicial conviction, I fell prostrate in a swoon."

 

 

VI.

 

Is there any more to say? 

 

Only that Poe's abysmal theory - and I'm using that word in the literary-philosophical sense - of the imp of the perverse is, as fearful thoughts go, one that I like very much; it might not be quite as chilling as he intended, but it certainly makes one question one's own self-destructive tendencies and the desire to deliberately give the game away as it were [7].    

 

It's surely better to think we confess our sins not from guilt or a moral sense of right and wrong (conscience) but from perversity; I for one would rather have a little imp on my shoulder than that annoying little twat Jiminy Cricket.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] All quotes from and references to 'The Imp of the Perverse' are to the version published in this edition of Poe's tales which can be read free online by clicking here. 

      The tale first appeared in the July 1845 issue of Graham's Magazine (Vol. XXVIII). 

 

[2] I'm assuming that Poe decided on the figure of an imp rather than that of a demon or some othersupernatural entity because it might be read as short for impulse (i.e., a strong and sudden urge to act). It might also suggest the related term impetus (i.e., a force which drives something forward).  

 

[3] Antonin Artaud first used the phrase corps sans organes in his 1947 radio play known in English as To Have Done with the Judgment of God, describing it as a state of liberation from imposed structures and automatic reactions, allowing for true freedom. It was later developed as a philosophical concept by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their two-volume study of capitalism and schizophrenia: L'anti-Œdipe (1972) and Mille Plateaux (1980). 

      Nietzsche first used the phrase Gott ist tot in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882), III. 125. It quickly became so well associated with him that it has almost become his catchphrase.

 

[4] Upon seeing someone make for the exit in the middle of a talk he was giving about his life as a dandy in the underworld, Horsley magnificently said: 'Don't go, I'll say the opposite if it will make you love me.' 

 

[5] Only joking. And in fact I have already written about this topic; see the post of 14 June 2014: click here. The narrator of Poe's tale does provide a nice description of procrastination for those who are interested: 

      "We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow; and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse using the word with no comprehension of the principle."   

 

[6] I'm referring to the Bow Wow Wow song 'Sexy Eiffel Towers' which first appeared on Your Cassette Pet (EMI Records, 1980) and, later, on the compilation album Girl Bites Dog (Parlophone Records, 1993): click here.  

 

[7] I think it may be stretching things to suggest that Poe's fictional theory of the imp of the perverse anticipates Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the death drive, but, nevertheless, several commentators have been quick to see and insist upon a connection.  

Reflections on the Lovely Lady Christabel

Lorrie Millington: Lady Christabel (1983)

 

 

I.

 

I have to admit, my knowledge of the English Romantic poet Coleridge is fairly limited; I know he was pals with Wordsworth; I know he helped introduce the English-speaking world to German idealism; and I know he was fond of opium. 

 

If pushed, I suppose I would also admit to knowing he was an influential literary critic and dreamed at one time of establishing an egalitarian community on pantisocratic lines. 

 

Oh, and I know of course that he's the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Kubla Khan (completed in 1797, but not published until 1816). 

 

However, it's the long narrative poem Christabel that fascinates me at the moment and which I would like to briefly reflect on here ... 

 

II.

 

Christabel consists of two parts; the first writen in 1797 and the second in 1800. [1]

 

The story concerns a central female character - Christabel - who one day goes into the woods to pray by a large oak tree. There, she encounters a strange young woman named Geraldine, who claims to have been abducted from her home by men on horseback. 

Sympathetic to Geraldine's plight, she takes her home with her and they spend the night together, sharing a bed (this despite a number of supernatural signs that Christabel might have been well-advised to take as warnings). 

Whilst Christabel remains somewhat enchanted by Geraldine, she gradually begins to realise the latter's malign (possibly inhuman) nature. Her father, however, is completely enthralled by the latter and orders a grand procession to celebrate her rescue.

 

Somewhat frustratingly, that's where the (unfinished) poem stops; it appears that Coleridge couldn't quite make up his mind about how to end it.    

 

III.

 

This poem appeals to me for its queer gothic character, founded upon a number of perverse and supernatural elements, and I'm not surprised to learn that Shelley and Byron were both obsessed with Christabel. If it gave the former nightmares, the latter was delighted by its sapphic undertones (the relationship between Christabel and Geraldine is implicitly sexual).   

 

Other writers who have fallen under the poem's spell include Edgar Allan Poe [2], Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [3], Renée Vivien [4], and A.S. Byatt, who names a fictional romantic poet Christabel in her award-winning novel Possession (1990).  

 

Unsurprisingly, Christabel also became favourite reading amongst feminists; the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, for example, named her daughter in honour of the poem's eponymous heroine (though she might have been more appropriately named Geraldine in my view) [5].   

 

 

IV.

Finally, a brief note on the image used to illustrate this post ...

Initially, I was going to reproduce Julia Margaret Cameron's 1866 photograph named after Coleridge's poem and depicting the titular character [6]. 

But then I remembered that in an old photo album kept in a box in the attic, I still had a picture sent to me by the artist, model, dancer, and writer Lorrie Millington [7] over forty years ago, of a mannequin named Lady Christabel with whom she shared a house in Leeds. 

 

In the summer of 1984, I began writing a 20,000 word novella entitled 'The Girl in the Mystery Castle', about Miss Millington and her relationship with the lovely Lady Christabel and it has always been my intention to one day complete this tale.

 

However, as this now seems very unlikely, I have decided to share the photo here ...

 

If one looks closely enough, one will see that Christabel is wearing a wig that has been braided pirate style and has an Apache war stripe painted across her nose, the reason being that Lorrie and I were both Ant People back in the early-mid '80s.   

 

Notes

 

[1] Coleridge planned on adding three further parts, but these were never completed. The work was published in a pamphlet in 1816, alongside Kubla Khan and another poem, The Pains of Sleep (written 1803). Christabel can be read on the Poetry Foundation website: click here. 

 

[2] Poe's poem 'The Sleeper' (1831) is said to be inspired by Christabel. It can be read on the Poetry Foundation website: click here.

 

[3] Le Fanu based the character of Mircalla, the Countess Karnstein, on Geraldine. See my post of 13 April 2020 on the topic of vampiric lesbianism in which I discuss Le Fanu's novella Carmilla (1872): click here.  

[4] Vivien's 1904 novel L'Etre Double, a lesbian romance, was also inspired by Coleridge's poem Christabel. See my post of 9 October 2013 in praise of sapphic decadence in which I discuss the work of Renée Vivien: click here.

 

[5] I'm not a fan of the militant idealism and the terrorist tactics advocated by Pankhurst, which invariably collapse into the black hole of fascism. See the post dated 17 February 2024 on suffragettes and the BUF: click here. 

 

[6] For more details and to view the photograph, please visit the Met Museum website: click here. And for a post dated 23 June 2023 written with reference to Cameron's photography, click here.  

 

[7] For a post dated 18 April 2015 written in memory of Lorrie Millington, click here.

Forever Dead and Lovely: Notes on Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse

Izima Kaoru: Kimura Yoshino wears Alexander McQueen #484 (2007)

Part of the Landscapes with a Corpse series

Galerie Andreas Binder (Munich)

artnet.com

 

No matter how we die, we will travel up to the world 

beyond the sky without regretting how we lived

The phrase drop dead gorgeous, popular with necrophiles and thanatologists alike, also inspired the Japanese fashion photographer Izima Kaoru to stage elaborate death scenes featuring attractive models and well-known actresses dressed in expensive designer outfits that oblige viewers to consider the cultural fascination with the beautiful female corpse.

The sequence of images begin with wide-angle shots and gradually narrow to close-ups of the model. The resulting pictures look rather like film stills and remind us that there's nothing more cinematic than the death of a beautiful woman (to paraphrase Poe), although Kaoru's work demands to be contextualised within a wider art history; one that includes traditional Japanese woodcuts [Ukiyo-e].

It's also important to understand the influence of the Buddhist practice of maranasati - a musing on one's own mortality using various visualisation techniques - upon Kaoru's photography. Thus it is that, prior to taking any pictures, Kaoru asks his models to imagine the circumstances surrounding their deaths (where, when, how, etc.) and to consider also what would constitute the most sightly way of exiting this world (leaving behind a beautiful corpse is never an easy task). 

In sum, Kaoru's pictures are a highly stylised and aesthetically pleasing form of what we in the West term memento mori and not merely images to do with fashion, sex, and cinema born of the floating world (though even if they were that alone, they'd still appeal to me). 

Izima Kaoru: Kimura Yoshino wears Alexander McQueen #483 (2007)

Part of the Landscapes with a Corpse series

Galerie Andreas Binder (Munich)

artnet.com

See: Izima Kaoru, Landscapes with a Corpse, German and English text by Roy Exley, Yuko Hasegawa and Peter Weiermair, (Hatje Kantz, 2008), 192 pages, 171 colour illustrations.

See also the documentary film by Chad Fahs, Landscapes with a Corpse (2014), which follows Izima Kaoru on a journey to create new work and perhaps find the answer to the question of what best constitutes a beautiful death. 

Readers interested in a sister post to this one - on Melanie Pullen's High Fashion Crime Scenes - should click here.

Further Reflections on a Black Cat

Gino Severini: The Black Cat (1910-11)
Oil on canvas (54.4 x 73 cm)

Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Black Cat (1843) not only influenced many other writers, but also those working within the visual arts, including, for example, the Italian Futurist Gino Severini, whose painting above was included in the first Futurist exhibition, held in Paris, in 1912. 

But perhaps the most interesting work drawing inspiration from Poe's disturbing tale of alcoholism, animal cruelty, and domestic violence, is the 1934 film, The Black Cat,* directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi (the first of eight films to pair the gruesome twosome).

Actually, despite listing Poe's name in the credits, Peter Ruric's screenplay (based on Ulmer's scenario) has no resemblance to the narrative events of Poe's story and the film gets its real inspiration from the life of Aleister Crowley, particularly Karloff's character, Hjalmer Poelzig, a mad Austrian architect with a penchant for chess and black cats, who comes to a grisly end shackled to an embalming rack and skinned alive. 
 
Although it was a box office hit, the film didn't much impress the critics upon its original release, who mostly found it, in the words of one reviewer, more foolish than horrible.

However, Ulmer's movie is now recognised as a bizarre and stylish masterpiece; one that unfolds with the crazy logic of a nightmare and brilliantly develops the psychological horror genre with its creepy atmosphere, sinister soundtrack and an emphasis on the darker (more perverse) elements of the human psyche; including the propensity for incest, sacrifice, necrophilia, and devil worship.

Click here for the trailer

Notes

* Not to be confused with the 1941 film also entitled The Black Cat, dir. Albert S. Rogell and starring Basil Rathbone, which also claims to have been inspired by Poe's short story and also features Lugosi in a cameo role.  

Readers might be interested in a sister post to this one, Reflections on a Black Cat (In Memory of Pluto): click here. 

This post is for Anna, the Italian dental nurse.

Reflections on a Black Cat (In Memory of Pluto)

She is a very fine Cat; a very fine Cat indeed!  
Photo: SA / 2020

I.

Ever since she first wandered into the house and, subsequently, my affection, this beautiful black cat has brought something greater than good luck or prosperity; something that might even be described as a form of solace.

Indeed, I'm now of the view that angels have whiskers rather than wings. Or that even shape-shifting demons can bring us comfort and companionship in times of great distress, far exceeding the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere man.

II.

Of course, I'm not the first to have noticed this, or to have a particular fondness for satanic black cats. Samuel Johnson, for example, was very attached to his feline companion, Hodge, and Edgar Allan Poe also owned a sable-furred familiar, which he described as "one of the most remarkable black cats in the world - and that is saying much; for it will be remembered that black cats are all of them witches".*

Poe also wrote a very disturbing short story entitled 'The Black Cat' (1843), featuring a pussy called Pluto; "a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree", who sadly has the misfortune of having a drunken madman for an owner ...**

One night, the latter - who is also the narrator of the tale - comes home pissed out of his head as always, and takes umbrage at the fact that the cat is avoiding him. He tries to grab hold of the terrified creature, but the latter bites him. And so the man takes out a knife and, with the kind of sadistic cruelty that shamefully characterises humanity, cuts out one of the cat's eyes:

"The fury of a demon [had] 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 [...] I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity."

From that moment on, the animal understandably flees in terror at his master's approach. At first, the man, who, prior to this incident, had been very close to his cat - "Pluto was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house" - feels deep remorse and regrets his cruelty. But this feeling gives way to irritation and a spirit of perverseness:

"Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?" 
 
Thus, one day, in cold blood, he takes poor Pluto into the garden and hangs him from a tree; tears streaming from his eyes, and with the bitterest remorse eating at his heart; "because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin - a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it [...] even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God."

Strangely, that same night his house catches fire, forcing the man and his wife to flee. Returning the next day to examine the smoking ruins, he discovers an image of a gigantic cat with a rope around its neck imprinted on the single wall still standing.

Poe could, I think, have ended the story here. But he doesn't. Continuing the tale, the narrator tells us how, some time later, still feeling guilty and beginning to miss Pluto, he adopts a similar looking cat - it even has an eye missing. However, he soon regrets doing so, as the animal merely amplifies his feelings of guilt and bad conscience:

"I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but - I know not how or why it was - its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually - very gradually - I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence."

Then, one day, the cat gets under his feet causing him to nearly fall down the cellar stairs. Enraged, the man grabs an axe with the intention of killing Pluto 2. He is stopped from doing so by his wife - which is good for the cat, but bad for the woman, as, in vexed frustration and possessed by evil thoughts, he vents his murderous rage on her instead, burying the axe deep in her brain: "She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan."

He decides to conceal the body behind a brick wall in the cellar - "as the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their victims" -  rather than bury it in the garden, for example, and run the risk of being seen by nosy neighbours.

Unfortunately, in his haste to dispose of the body, he accidently entombs the cat and when the police come to investigate the woman's reported disappearance and search his house ... Well, you can guess what happens: a loud, inhuman wailing - "half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell" - gives the game away. Tearing down the wall, the police discover the rotting corpse of the wife and the howling black cat sitting atop the body. 

Poe's tale, then, is in part a revenge fable; the revenge of the feline object. And the narrator not only deserves his fate on the gallows, but to be denied his place in heaven which, as Robert A. Heinlein once remarked, is determined by how we behave toward cats here on earth ...


Notes

* Edgar Allan Poe, 'Instinct Versus Reason - A Black Cat', in Alexander's Weekly Messenger, vol. 4, number 5, (Jan 29, 1840), p. 2. Click here to read online.

** 'The Black Cat' was first published in the August 19, 1843, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It can be found in vol. 2 of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven Edition) and read online courtesy of Project Guttenberg: click here. 

For further reflections on the figure of the black cat, click here. 

Bad Romance

The Fall of the House of Usher, by Kristyla at deviantart.com

What was it about incest that so obsessively fascinated the Romantics? 

Although only Byron had experience of it as a practice, the theme was imaginatively explored by many other poets, including Wordsworth and Shelley, for whom it seemed to function as a spiritual principle of absolute identification of the self with the non-self or other. 

The tragic psychodrama of Wuthering Heights, is founded upon an incestuous bond formed between Catherine and Heathcliff. For whilst they are not blood-siblings, they are nevertheless brought up as brother and sister within the Earnshaw family home. Thus their mad striving for an impossible union is somehow shocking and toxic; giving off a kind of 'chthonian miasma', as Camille Paglia writes, which infects and corrupts the social world.        

Like Emily Bronte, Edgar Allan Poe is also concerned with love, the limitations of love, and the fatal transgression of those limits. For whilst we might live by love, we die or cause death if we take love too far; be it in either a spiritual or a carnal direction. Thus, whilst it's perfectly legitimate to be interested in the object of one's affection and quite natural to want to know a good deal about the person one is perhaps planning to marry, it's profoundly mistaken to totally identify with another and attempt to suck the life out of that being. Each of us kills the thing we love most when we love with the terrible intimacy of the vampire.

In his brilliant reading of Poe, Lawrence writes:

"When the self is broken, and the mystery of the recognition of otherness fails, then the longing for identification with the beloved becomes a lust. And it is this longing for identification, utter merging, which is at the base of the incest problem."

                                                

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe' (Final Version 1923), Studies in Classic American Literature, (CUP, 2003), p. 75.

Via incest, lovers can achieve sensational gratification with the minimum of resistance. But it gradually leads to madness, breakdown and death - as we see with Heathcliff and Catherine, or Roderick and Madeline in Poe's classic tale, The Fall of the House of Usher. Both Catherine and Madeline die having had the life and the love sucked out of them, whilst still unappeased. And so both return from the dead in order to drag their lovers with them into the grave:

"It is lurid and melodramatic, but it really is a symbolic truth of what happens in the last stages of inordinate love, which can recognise none of the sacred mystery of otherness, but must unite into unspeakable identification ... Brother and sister go down together, made one in the unspeakable mystery of death."

- D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe' (First Version 1918-19), Studies in Classic American Literature, (CUP, 2003), p. 238. 

Both Poe and Emily Bronte were great writers, doomed to die young. Was it, one might ask, the same thing which ultimately killed them? For both experienced the same heightened consciousness of desire taken to its furthest extreme as they entered what Lawrence describes as the 'horrible underground passages of the human soul', grimly determined as they were to discover all that there is to know about the obscene disease that ruins so many idealists: Love.