Madness and Symbols in Edgar Allan Poes Short Stories - Essay Example

Madness and Symbols in Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories The short story is an art form that was first mastered by the 19th century writer Edgar Allan Poe. Poe had been left an orphan at a very young age and grew up in the house of adoptive parents, the Allans, who did not understand his more passionate temperament. After struggling to find his niche, Poe’s first book of poems was published when he was only 19 and he began writing short stories at the age of 23 (Conklin, 1989). In perfecting this form, Poe said “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression” (Mowery, 1997). As he tells his frequently bizarre and frightening tales, Poe presents his readers with symbol-rich imagery and descriptions based on binary oppositions to help build the suspense and horror of his tale. As Mowery explains, binary oppositions are things such as hot and cold, male and female, dark and light. “It is in the subtle shifts in our expectations of the character that tension and conflict are developed” (1997). This concept is frequently illustrated in terms of the madness that comes upon characters as they experience deep feelings that had potential to overwhelm. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat” and “Ligeia,” Edgar Allan Poe uses madness and symbolism to convey love and hate. Poe employs two primary objects in “The Tell-Tale Heart” to illustrate the cause of his narrator’s madness. The old man’s eye is the first of these symbols to appear within the text of the story. As the narrator attempts to explain why he felt led to murder, he says, It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had 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! 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; and so by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever. (156). Basic medical knowledge to the modern reader quickly identifies this condition as symptoms of a cataract, a film that gradually creeps over the eye of an elderly person, eventually rendering him or her blind while also changing the color of the eye to a pale bluish color. It is this encroachment that seems to so bother the narrator, “it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye” (257). “The concept of the evil eye dates back to ancient times. It was believed that those who possessed the evil eye had the power to harm people or possessions merely by looking at them” (Young, 2003: 6). The presence of the evil eye in the loved old man is the catalyst that leads to the narrator’s madness. The other major symbol that appears in the story is announced within the title; it is the old man’s heart. The heart begins to take on its meaning just as the eye has begun to work its way out of the story. As the narrator continues to stare at the eye revealed in the small light of the lantern, the sound of the beating heart takes on substance and life. When the narrator first perceives it, he says, “there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sounds well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart” (158-159). This sound makes him angry again because he is forced to connect the old man’s heart, and his love, with the baleful gleam of the evil eye that has been so distracting. As this beating sounds increases its rate, the narrator begins to feel it will wake the neighbors and is incited to action. When the heart begins beating again after the murder, the reader begins to question the true source of the sound. “The narrator starts hearing the heartbeat two times, right before the killing and after the killing. The heartbeat that the narrator is hearing is the heartbeat of his own. His conscience is warning him of the consequences he may encounter if he does the deed, eventually leading the narrator to confess the crime” (Sado, 2000). The heartbeat can also be said to symbolize the love the narrator felt for the old man, which will never go away and will always haunt him/her because of the harm they did to him. Having set things up in terms of the two symbols conflicting against one another, the narrator of the tale continues to insist that he is not mad, eventually convincing the reader this is not the case. It is seen almost at once that the incongruity of the ‘evil eye’ housed within a person that had been loved drives this caregiver to extreme distraction, pushing his/her mental state over into a madness that sought escape in whatever form it could devise. “He discloses a deep psychological confusion. Almost casually he admits lack of normal motivation … Yet in spite of this affection he says that the idea of murder ‘haunted me day and night’” (Robinson, 1965: 369). Although the rationality of the actions taken are illustrated as a means of proving the absence of madness, “If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body” (159), the macabre details delivered completely without emotion and with a simple step-by-step precision tend to hint otherwise, “The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs” (159). This casual approach to murder and the horrid butchering that occurred afterward is further accented by the narrator’s audacity of placing his own chair directly over the spot where the body was hidden as s/he talked with the officers that had come to investigate a shriek that was heard. “The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was singularly at ease” (160). As the tale ends, it becomes clear not only that the narrator is completely insane, but also that this insanity was brought about by an inability to avoid the evil eye and the guilt of having killed a loved person placed within the narrator’s care. The story of “The Black Cat” deals with the concepts of unconditional love and retribution. In this story, the main character has a fondness for a cat that gradually turns to hatred as the man is overtaken by alcoholism. Unlike the character in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the progression of this character’s madness is shown in increments as he first cuts out an eye of the cat and then hangs him. The first of these incidents comes about as the man comes home and frightens the cat, causing it to give him “a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer” (163). The narrator’s discussions into the concept of perverseness hint at a tendency for the man to seek punishment for behavior that he realizes is wrong, seeming to understand that his soul deserves to be in hell for the atrocities it had committed even as he hangs the cat. In the end, a living cat becomes entombed within the wall in which the narrator buries his wife. This story “portrays a maniac wavering in his attitudes, killing his wife in one insane outburst when what he really hates is his cat, and causing the truth to come to light by an insane act of false courage” (Buranelli, 1977: 76-77). This madness is different from that experienced by the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” as it is brought on by sudden fits of anger rather than a slow deliberate planning. However, this story depends quite as much upon symbolism in portraying these concepts as any Poe wrote. The cat itself can be seen as a symbol of love throughout much of the story. “I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house. It was even with difficulty that I could prevent him from following me through the streets” (163). This devotion is part of the reason the cat suffers at all, as the man, returning drunk one night, “fancied that the cat avoided my presence” (163). Despite the cruelty shown to it, a fire at the house seems to have spared the man simply because of the intervention of a cat-shaped creature that stayed the flames from his head. When a second cat is found that closely resembles, or perhaps is, the first cat, the narrator automatically connects it with the same emotions he felt for the first. This possible second appearance of Pluto further illustrates a strong bond of love between the cat and the narrator as only such a bond would be able to overcome death. Initially, the narrator is fond of it, seeing in it the same faithfulness and fidelity he expects of both his pets and his wife. However, this friendship, like the first, is a possible source of betrayal and pain, dredging up similar feelings of perversity as the cat begins to compete for the narrator’s affections. “The competition becomes particularly acute, since the narrator and Pluto share the relation first of ‘favorite ... playmates’ and then of ‘friendship,’ metaphorically the relation of close friends for life. The narrator is in the position of being betrayed in love by his best childhood friend” (Crisman, 1984: 88). This possibility for betrayal is further illustrated by the increasingly defined image of a gallows that emerges upon the cat’s breast. This second part of the story takes on the note of retribution. The cat that is adopted is the same size and color, except for a mark of white that gradually grows to resemble the image of the gallows, which infers that this cat is the same one that had been hanged now returned from the dead to seek justice. “In the first section, the narrator’s house is consumed by fire after he has mutilated and subsequently hanged Pluto, his pet cat. Blindly, he refuses to grant any connection between his violence and the fire; yet the image of a hanged cat on the one remaining wall indicates that he will be haunted and hag-ridden by his deed” (Gargano, 1963: 180-181). When the narrator eventually takes a swing at the cat at a time when his rage is finally too much for him to contain, his wife’s interference drives him to yet more violence as he kills her instead, bricking her up inside a wall in his cellar. By keeping silent until the police have arrived, inspected the cellar and determined to leave, the cat ensures that it is the man’s own cleverness, his own perverseness, that eventually gets him caught as he raps on the recently bricked wall with his cane and the cat lets out inhuman yowls that immediately gain the departing policemen’s attention. Poe includes symbols of love and the absence of love in a longer short story entitled “Ligeia.” In this story, the figure of Ligeia herself symbolizes the concept of an idolatrous love that is easily pushed into the realm of obsession. That she is herself a captivating mystery is illustrated in the narrator’s own admission that he knew very little of his wife. “I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia … I have never known the paternal name of her who was my friend and my betrothed” (23). According to Mike Campbell (2007), the name itself was one given to one of the Sirens of Greek myth who, according to legend, always lead men to their doom by using their enchanting voices. Indeed, she is described in almost super-human terms, possessing the alabaster skin of perfection, the larger than ordinary eyes and the “dear music of her low, sweet voice” (24). Her education and intelligence also seem to place her beyond the ordinary scope of women in Poe’s time even as her incredible inner passion belies the outward calm of a well-bred lady. “Like one of those angelic women, cut from the romantic poems, Ligeia is the epitome of physical beauty and cunning intelligence. A true ‘femme fatale’ whom Poe mystifies” (de Mancelos, 1997). As has been suggested, the love represented by Ligeia is not the soft, motherly love of a companion but is instead a passion-filled possessive love that is brought out by the detailed description of the person of Ligeia as opposed to anything inherently important about her, such as her past. Rowena, on the other hand, represents all that is without love. She is described as having the classic beauty of which all men are said to seek, “the fair-haired and blue-eyed” (32). The relationship between the narrator and Rowena could not have been more different from that shared with Ligeia than night from day: “That my wife dreaded the fierce moodiness of my temper – that she shunned me and loved me but little – I could not help perceiving; but it gave me rather pleasure than otherwise. I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man” (32). Connections have been made between this Rowena and the Rowena who appears within Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, in which she was a symbol of conventional, romantic beauty and brought forward images of knighthood and chivalry (Cummings, 2005). However, as the second wife and so markedly different from the first, she cannot but compare disfavorably and her illnesses and ravings are tended to by the physicians with seemingly little concern of the narrator. Madness, as it is illustrated in this short story, then, takes on several characteristics. First, there is the madness of the narrator in his devotion to his first wife as he worships the figure before him, which “passed into my spirit, there dwelling as in a shrine” (26). It becomes obvious in the telling of Ligeia’s death that she had a similar madness for her husband, “For long hours, detaining my hand, would she pour out her before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry” (29). Like the cat in “The Black Cat”, this character seems capable of sustaining a will strong enough to circumvent death and find a means of returning to the object of its affection. This strength of affection leads directly to the final scene, in which Ligeia is perceived to have reanimated and transformed the body of Rowena to that of Ligeia. It is “the vengeance of the former wife over the second one. An improbable and exquisite punishment … by which Ligeia enters and possesses Rowena’s body, to impose herself on her husband” (de Mancelos, 1997). However, this interpretation is called into question by the madness of grief and drug use experienced by the narrator himself. The narrator describes his opium dreams in which the bridal chamber of his England abbey appears to take on a life of its own, casting shadows where no shadows should be and dropping liquid into Rowena’s wine to make her death sure. “I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three or four drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid” (36). The manner in which this event is described immediately calls into question whether it was real or dream. While he insists that it must have been a dream, he also recounts how it must have been real, as the health of the Lady Rowena quickly declined after having taken these drops. Likewise, the final scene, in which the body of Lady Rowena by turns reanimates to some extent and then falls into a greater degree of morbidity is called into question through the means by which the narrator chooses to relate them. “Wild visions, opium-engendered, flitted, shadow-like, before me” (36) as he looks upon the body of Rowena and dreams about Ligeia. At the ending of the tale, the reader is left wondering if this figure before him is the reanimated form of Ligeia as it is presented, or merely the hallucinations of an opium-soaked mind finally reaching its outer limits and passing into the realm of insanity. While madness plays a significant role in all three tales discussed here, most often brought about as the result of a struggle between love and hate, the nature of the madness takes on very different aspects from one story to the next. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator can no longer cope with the disagreement between the evil eye and the heart of the old man who is loved. This causes a slow, festering madness to creep upon him or her that is seen by the individual to be little more than a sharpening of the senses. This type of madness is manifested in a similarly quiet manner, by slow degrees, careful planning and detailed concealment of the body. This is different from the sudden striking madness experienced by the narrator in “The Black Cat”, who might feel remorse afterwards but loses himself in the throws of passion during the commission of his acts of brutality. Finally, the madness of love can be seen to cause the madness of grief and drug addiction in “Ligeia” as well as the haunting possibility of retribution from beyond the grave in the form of Ligeia punishing Rowena for daring to attempt to take her place. All of these manifestations are assisted by specific symbols used throughout each story to help illustrate and deepen the story being told. Thesis: In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat” and “Ligeia,” Edgar Allan Poe uses madness and symbolism to convey love and hate. Introduction A. Introduction to EAP B. Evidence of symbolism C. Thesis statement The Tell-Tale Heart A. Symbolism of the eye B. Symbolism of the heart C. Development of the madness The Black Cat A. Development of the madness B. The cat as a symbol of love C. The cat as a symbol of hate Ligeia A. Ligeia as symbol of love B. Rowena as symbol of life without love C. Madness of Ligeia’s return D. http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides2/Ligeia.html Conclusion Works Cited Buranelli, Vincent. Edgar Allan Poe. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977. Campbell, Mike. “Ligeia.” Behind the Name. March 4, 2007 Crisman, William. “’Mere Household Events’ in Poe’s ‘The Black Cat.’” Studies in American Fiction. Vol. 12, (1984), pp. 87-90. Conklin, Groff. “Introduction.” Ten Great Mysteries of Edgar Allan Poe. New York and London: Scholastic, Inc., 1989. Cummings, Michael J. “Ligeia: A Study Guide.” Cummings’ Study Guides. 2005. March 4, 2007 < http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides2/Ligeia.html> de Mancelos, Joao. “How to Murder a Young and Beautiful Woman: Death in Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic Tales.” Alfarrabio. 1997. Gargano, James W. “The Question of Poe’s Narrators.” College English. Vol. 25, N. 3, (December 1963), pp. 177-181. Mowery, Carl. “An Overview to ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Short Stories for Students. Gale Research. (1997). March 2, 2007 Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat” and “Ligeia.” Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Aerie Books, (2003). Robinson, E. Arthur. “Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Vol. 19, N. 4, (March 1965), pp. 369-378. Sado, Koji. “The Mind of a Killer.” Romanticism. University of North Carolina. 2000. Young, Laura. “The Evil Eye.” Voices. Vol. 13, N. 1, pp. 6-7. Read More