“THIS UNFATHOMABLE LONGING”: THE PERVERSE AND THE UNCANNY IN

EDGAR ALLAN POE

by

Madeline Hecker, B.A.

A thesis submitted to the Graduate Council of

Texas State University in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
with a Major in Literature
May 2022

Committee Members:

Robert T. Tally Jr., Chair

Katie Kapurch

Suparno Banerjee
COPYRIGHT

by

Madeline Hecker

2022
 FAIR USE AND AUTHOR’S PERMISSION STATEMENT

Fair Use

This work is protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States (Public Law 94-553,
section 107). Consistent with fair use as defined in the Copyright Laws, brief quotations
from this material are allowed with proper acknowledgement. Use of this material for
financial gain without the author’s express written permission is not allowed.

Duplication Permission

As the copyright holder of this work I, Madeline Hecker, authorize duplication of this
work, in whole or in part, for educational or scholarly purposes only.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The completion of this thesis would not have been possible for me to achieve on my own.

I would like to thank some of the people who assisted me greatly in completing both my

Master of Arts in Literature degree and the accompanying thesis project. I would like to

extend my deepest gratitude to my thesis advisor, Dr. Robert T. Tally Jr. Thank you for

guiding me through the process of creating an original and thoughtful thesis and for

leading me through many revisions with helpful advice and encouragement. You helped

me turn my original idea into something much more focused and clear. I would also like

to thank Dr. Katie Kapurch and Dr. Suparno Banerjee for serving as my committee

members. Thank you for giving me your time, support and guidance. I would also like to

thank all of my friends at Texas State University for their insight and advice. Of course,

this degree and thesis would have been much harder to complete without the love and

encouragement of my loved ones. First, I would like to thank my parents, Glenn Elwood

Hecker III (Trey) and Cecilia Bartoš Hecker, for all of their emotional support and words

of wisdom. Thank you both for encouraging me to follow my dreams. Next, I cannot

thank my boyfriend of four years, Eddy Lopez Matuk, enough for all of his advice, love,

and help. Thank you for committing to our relationship while I pursued my dream of

earning my Master’s Degree out-of-state and for enduring the 430-mile distance between

us for the past two years. Lastly, thank you to my Aussie Shepherd, Marnie. Thank you

for always being there for me and making life easier and happier.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................…...............................................................….iv

ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... vi

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................1

II. THE PERVERSE AND THE UNCANNY IN “THE FALL OF THE HOUSE
OF USHER” ......................................................................................................10

III. UNCANNINESS AND UNKNOWABILITY IN “THE MAN OF THE

CROWD” ..........................................................................................................23

IV. THE UNHEIMLICH IN “THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH” ............37

V. SELF-VEXING AND PERVERSITY IN “THE BLACK CAT” AND “THE

IMP OF THE PERVERSE” .............................................................................54

VI. CONCLUSION................................................................................................73

REFERENCES .................................................................................................................76

v
 ABSTRACT

Edgar Allan Poe is among one of America’s most significant writers of the

nineteenth century, and his works remain prevalent in the twenty first century. In this

thesis, I explore five of Poe’s most well-known short stories in connection with Sigmund

Freud’s theory of the uncanny alongside Poe’s own conception of the perverse. The

works which I offer a reading of are “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Man of the

Crowd,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Imp of the

Perverse.” All of these tales evoke a certain sense of horror and anxiety within the reader.

Through the Freudian concept of the uncanny, the impact of intellectual uncertainty,

unknowability, and death are further analyzed. Poe offers his idea of perversity within his

short stories “The Black Cat” and “The Imp of the Perverse.” With uncanniness and

perversion in mind, I offer my readings of these classic stories through the lens of

psychoanalytic literary criticism.

vi
 I. INTRODUCTION

Edgar Allan Poe is undoubtedly one of America’s most well-known and beloved

authors. Almost everyone has read at least one short story or poem by Poe in their

lifetime, and most people are left with fond memories of reading his works. According to

Kevin Hayes, “Those who choose the study of literature as their profession may take on

of two different directions. They may … become enthusiasts and devote much of their

professional lives to the study of Poe’s life and art or, alternatively, they may turn skeptic

and question Poe’s significance to literary history” (2). Clearly, I fall into the former of

the two camps. There is something so intriguing about Poe’s writing which connects

emotionally and psychologically to readers. Not only did his writing make tremendous

contributions to science fiction, the Gothic tradition, and the detective genre, Poe greatly

advanced horror fiction. By writing in a style which disarms readers through the

utilization of terror, fear, emotional intensity, and strong theatrical elements, Poe’s

sensational works operated at the level of the human psyche. Since some of his prose and

poetry evoke anxiety and horror in tandem with a wide range of emotions including

happiness and love, Poe is often thought of as an intensely psychological writer. Hence, it

is not surprising that many critics and readers have looked deeper into the psychoanalytic

elements of his works. This is not to suggest that Poe anticipated Freudian theory before

its invention decades later, but Freudian theory can be used to illuminate Poe’s writing in

productive ways.

Poe is a master of transforming conventional views in the sense that he takes a

familiar scene and alters it in a way that distorts the reader’s view of it. According to

Robert T. Tally Jr., “Poe invokes a fantastic and unsettling presence, half-familiar but

1
still strange, that causes the reader to doubt even that which she or he thought was

known. Poe’s own literary theory, then, is imbued with the spirit of the perverse” (8).

Perversity in Poe’s works will be the focal point for which I base my psychoanalytic

readings of a select few of his writings. There is something in such short stories such as

“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Man of the Crowd,” “The Masque of the Red

Death,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Imp of the Perverse” which unsettles readers in a way

that leads to a sense of doubt about reality. The perversity and the uncanny horror within

the chosen works will be the central focus of this thesis.

In 1933, Marie Bonaparte’s The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-

analytic Interpretation made it “clear that psychoanalysis could inspire new and

inventive ways of reading literature” (Peeples 29-30). Though this work’s conclusions are

largely discredited now, its enduring significance resulted in later psychoanalytic

readings by scholars such as Jacques Lacan. There has since been an expansion on “the

old-school Freudian reading of Poe by focusing less on Poe’s unconscious and more on

the collective unconscious he tapped into” (Peeples 49). Rather than viewing Poe’s works

as a direct result of his own unconscious drives and repressed desires, it is imperative to

note that Poe was aware of the psychology of his time, the popularity of horror fiction,

and the public’s own passions or manias in order to sell more copies of his writings.

Poe’s complex and often troubled characters are not a reflection of his true personal life.

Often, in the past, scholars have confused Poe’s biography with the subjects of his works.

However, they are not one in the same. I believe that this tendency to view his writing as

a projection of his own self stems from the depth of psychological complexity that his

characters exhibit. For example, if one of his narrators has a drinking problem, some may

2
try to equate that to Poe’s own life and the author’s experiences with alcohol. However,

this is not the aim of this thesis. Rather than combining the stories with Poe’s life, it is

important to examine the characters and narratives separate from the author, and indeed,

few of Poe’s characters can be credibly viewed as being based on himself.

However, there is a great deal to be gained from exploring Poe’s literary

creations, and a greater understanding of the complex workings of the human mind can

be procured from studying these works through the lens of psychoanalytic literary theory.

As Scott Peeples has observed, it is important to

recognize the ways that Poe’s tales, for all their abstraction and stylized

Gothicism, convey profound insights into human experience without focusing

narrowly on Poe, his characters, or “the reader.” And a good case could be made

that psychoanalysis is the best way to discover how, in Hoffman’s words, from

“conditions so willed, contrived, and unactual, he succeeds in evoking real terror,

real love, real hatred, real guilt, the real Imp of the Perverse.” (Peeples 51,

quoting Hoffman 325)

In this quote, Peeples is drawing from Daniel Hoffman’s influential study, Poe Poe Poe

Poe Poe Poe Poe, to show how Poe is successful in evoking real and raw emotions

within his writing. Poe draws in the readers to the scene of the story and makes it feel as

though they are experiencing what the narrator experiences. The complexity of human

experience is something which Poe seemed to deeply understand and keep in mind while

writing. His short stories and poems reach into the minds of each reader, causing whoever

experiences his writing to feel some sort of emotion. There is a reason why Poe remains

so well-loved and ubiquitous in American Literature all of these years later. There is

3
something within the works that grabs the attention of the reader and affects their psyche.

In The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, Peeples explains, “Why the narrators of ‘The

Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Black Cat’ kill the ones they either love or are loved by [is due

to] twin fears: of being misunderstood (both narrators are driven by an intense need to

explain themselves) and of being isolated from other people” (51). Through

psychoanalytic theory, a deeper understanding of Poe’s characters and settings emerges.

What seems complex and unknown in his works begs to be explored through a

psychoanalytic lens. Through this process, the seemingly arbitrary or unclear motivations

of the characters, plot, and setting gains meaning.

In order to begin, it is important to outline the Freudian psychoanalytic theories in

particular that I will use to closely read and analyze a select few of Poe’s works. “The

‘Uncanny’,” a 1919 essay by Freud, is the main work which will guide my research, but

it is important to lay some of the groundwork of psychoanalytic criticism more generally.

Peeples asserts, “Psychoanalysis at first must have seemed like nothing more than a new

set of tools that could be used to perform the same old tasks of author study, enabling

critics to make bolder claims about … Poe’s ‘mind’ and ‘character’” (29). However,

there is much more to psychoanalytic literary theory than examining the author’s psyche.

Psychoanalysis has grown exponentially since its inception. While it may have initially

served as a new method for studying authors, it has certainly developed past that point. It

is an important lens to read literary works through as it provides a way to examine the

desires, motivations, fears, and perverse tendencies of the characters and the human

experience in general. Readers can go beyond the characters of the text and relate these

theories to real life. Peeples asserts, “The best psychoanalytic readings are a dialogue

4
between the analyst and the text-as-analysand … in which insight into the human

experience that transcends both analyst and analysand emerges in the process” (48). The

main benefit of reading literature through a psychoanalytic lens is the deeper

understanding of humanity and the complexity of the mind’s inner workings. There is so

much to be learned from studying literature, and it can teach readers a great deal about

human nature, tendencies, motivations, fears, and much more.

Freud’s “The ‘Uncanny’” deals with the psychological experience of finding

strangeness in the ordinary and familiar. In German, the word for “uncanny” is

unheimlich, which could also be understood as “unhomely,” and Freud examines the

wordplay between the “homely” and its opposite, which is why some might consider the

unheimlich to refer to the “unfamiliar.” According to Freud, the “uncanny” is

“undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror” (219).

This theory deals with the emotions of distress and repulsion and focuses on the

aesthetics of what is frightening. Since Poe’s more Gothic tales describe events and

things in an unsettling and eerie manner, Freud’s theory of the uncanny relates to and

illuminates this feeling of something recognizable. According to Freud, “we can only say

that what is novel can easily become frightening and uncanny; some new things are

frightening but not by any means all. Something has to be added to what is novel and

unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny” (221). Intellectual uncertainty is essential to the

formation of this uncanny feeling. There must be a sense of doubt and uneasiness

regarding a familiar object or thing. By being placed in an unfamiliar environment or

being less oriented in an environment, one’s sense of the uncanny intensifies.

Freud remarks that there is an important difference to be made between the terms

5
“unfamiliar” and “uncanny.” The “uncanny” focuses on “this particular shade of what is

frightening,” (221) not just what is unfamiliar. The uncanny feeling can also be found in

“an unintended recurrence of the same situation [which] also result in the same feeling of

helplessness and of uncanniness … or one may wander about in a dark, strange room,

looking for the door or the electric switch, and collide time after time with the same piece

of furniture” (237). Recurring events and emotions of fear and powerlessness evoke the

uncanny phenomenon. Therefore, involuntary repetition is another source of an

atmosphere of the uncanny. This “forces upon us the idea of something fateful and

inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of ‘chance’” (237). The

uncanny feeling is evoked in stories like “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Man

of the Crowd,” and this will be further explored in the following chapters.

Recurrence and repetition are some of the triggers of evoking the feeling of the

uncanny. Freud states:

If psycho-analytic theory is correct in maintaining that every affect belonging to

an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into

anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be one class in

which the frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening

element can be shown to be something repressed with recurs. This class of

frightening things would then constitute the uncanny. (241)

There is no limit to the frightening things which Poe incorporates into these select works.

The inclusion of fright as an element feeds into the evocation of strong emotional

responses from both the characters and the reader. This also creates a more fruitful space

for psychoanalytic reading and response. Freud emphasizes that, when something is

6
uncanny, it is not “new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in

the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression”

(241). There is the uncanny in events or things that come to the surface which were

meant to remain in the dark. For example, the presence of dead bodies and death in

general is also rooted in the uncanny. The fear of death is a primitive fear which is deeply

ingrained within humans. Though these fears are usually repressed, an event where one

sees a dead body or deals with death causes the emergence of this repression.

Additionally, “the uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative

productions … is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it

contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be

found in real life” (249). While the uncanny phenomenon may be more limited in real

life, it comes out much more in fiction writing and literature.

While Poe’s characters and settings are depicted as places and people found in the

real world, the emotions and events he creates through his writing induce uncanny

elements which may not be found in day-to-day life. Freud argues “that fiction presents

more opportunities for creating uncanny feelings than are possible in real life” (251). So

long as the setting of the fictional story is material and is based in reality, the uncanny

retains its effect and character. One more intriguing point raised by Freud is the authority

that the writer holds over the reader. He says, “The storyteller has a peculiarly directive

power over us; by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current

of our emotions, to dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another, and he often

obtains a great variety of effects from the same material” (251). This is what Poe does.

He controls and guides his reader’s emotions as they read the story. He evokes this sense

7
of fright and uncanny through his settings based in material reality and the repetition of

certain characters and events.

The chapters that follow will explore these issues in more detail, in relation to

specific works by Poe. The order I have chosen to follow for the organization of my

thesis is chronological, following the order in which Poe’s tales were first written and

published. (Poe’s tales were frequently reprinted, sometimes with revisions, throughout

his lifetime, so a strictly chronological study can become complicated; however, in

examining the concepts of the uncanny and the perverse, approaching the five tales I

examine in this order seems appropriate.) Beginning with the earliest of the selected

texts, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), and ending with the latest, “The Imp of

the Perverse” (1845), the chapters are arranged in a way that follows the progression of

Poe’s writing over these years.

Chapter Two focuses on both the uncanny and the perverse within the context of

“The Fall of the House of Usher.” Through the narrator’s and Roderick Usher’s choice to

amplify their own pain and misery, the perversity of the situation is evident. Additionally,

the strange yet familiar feeling the narrator experiences while looking at the Usher house,

as well as the odd burial and return of Madeline Usher from the grave, evoke the

uncanny.

Chapter Three deals with the uncanny and the unknowable within “The Man of

the Crowd” (1840). This tale deals with horror in the sense that outside forces have the

power to infect man’s inner self and soul. While the narrator pursues his elusive man of

the crowd, he experiences intellectual uncertainty and doubts his own capabilities of

“reading” others.

8
 Chapter Four will focus on the uncanny within “The Masque of the Red Death”

(1842). Since the subject of death and the sight of dead bodies are the most powerful

subjects for evoking the uncanny, there is a great deal to be explored within this tale.

“The Masque of the Red Death” is especially timely to this Covid period where there is

the looming fear of being contaminated by outside forces, and I would like to briefly tie

in today’s world with this tale and how this terrifying and constant death surrounding

society today affects the psyche.

Chapter Five will focus on the theme of the unconscious drives manifesting

themselves through the behavior of key characters. The works that will be analyzed

through this lens are “The Black Cat” (1843) and “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845). In

“The Black Cat,” the narrator describes the spirit of perverseness which is in him that

drives this “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself.” This theme is shared by the

other work, and the chapter will further explore this connection of perversity and “self-

vexing.”

Finally, the Chapter Six, the conclusion, will wrap up the major points of the

thesis and highlight the main findings resulting from my research and analysis.

9
II. THE PERVERSE AND THE UNCANNY IN “THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF

USHER”

Poe’s 1839 short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” features an unnamed

narrator who is visiting his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, in a strange, terrifying

estate. Also living within the odd house is Roderick’s twin sister, Madeline Usher. Both

of the siblings are suffering from mysterious and odd maladies, and even though

Madeline does not utter one word within the story, she remains a central character to the

narrative. This chapter focuses on Poe’s idea of the perverse as well as Freud’s theory of

the uncanny, which may be useful concepts to bear in mind while reading this story.

Poe is a master of engaging his audience by using the mental strategy of

perversity, which in turn makes him skilled at creating enigmatic and horrific tales.

According to Louise J. Kaplan’s “The Perverse Strategy in ‘The Fall of the House of

Usher,’” perversity is a “complex strategy of mind, with its unique principles for

regulating the negotiations between Desire and Authority. To achieve its aims, the

perverse strategy employs mechanisms of mystification, concealment, and illusion,

devices characteristic of the tales of Edgar Allan Poe” (Kaplan 46). Perversity involves

the human mind and soul, and Poe’s tale includes these characteristics. There are

elements of illusion and secrecy in the story which underline the perversity. According to

Poe’s theory of the perverse, it is the submission to the urge to commit wrongful acts for

the sake of doing something bad. It is the self-destructive impulse which lives in the mind

of every human. To some extent, everyone is affected by the spirit of the perverse. This is

evident in his works, “The Black Cat,” as well as “The Imp of the Perverse.” It is also

present within this short story as well.

10
 “The Fall of the House of Usher” is widely considered a tale of terror and horror,

and it centers around death, decay, and destruction. The tale features many elements that

Poe had used in other stories, including the way that the narrator acts as a sort of double

for the reader, insofar as both are eager to solve the mysteries presented. According to

Robert T. Tally Jr.,

we are presented with another unnamed and largely unknown narrator, who

elaborates the wondrous events of the tale in a relatively straightforward, patient

manner, thus inviting us to make sense of them. However, true to a form

frequently employed in Poe’s writings, this presentation is a ruse, and by the

story’s end the elements of the narrative render themselves inscrutable once more.

(74)

This story is largely about the unknowable and intellectual uncertainty. Poe leaves his

audience unsure about the reality of the events within the story, and there is not a clear

and concise explanation of what the elements of the story mean.

Through the narrator’s interactions with Roderick and Madeline Usher, there is a

sense of mystery and concealment. The narrator admits that he never even knew Roderick

had a sister, and he never speaks directly to, or meets, Madeline. In fact, he only sees her

briefly on one occasion, apart from her climactic return at the end of the tale. Poe creates

shadows within the work which prevent readers from clearly understanding the narrative

or its characters. Kaplan asserts that, “Whatever enigmas Poe brings into focus in ‘The

Fall of the House of Usher,’ there are always the shadows of the unseen, the uncanny, the

unknowable, implications of some darker secret that is being kept from us” (46).

Alongside perversity, unknowability and uncanniness play an important role. According

11
to Freud in his essay on the uncanny, “The uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in

stories and imaginative productions, merits in truth a separate discussion. Above all, it is

a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the

latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life” (249). In

reading Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” through the lens of Freud’s uncanny,

there is a great deal to be discussed. As Freud argued, literature is a “fertile province” for

the uncanny – even more so than real life. Therefore, Poe’s imaginary characters and

setting will contain more elements of the uncanny which may not be present in the real

world. For example, within this story, there is a house with a strange, dull atmosphere

that seems to deeply bother the narrator, the reanimation of the deceased Madeline Usher,

and the intellectual uncertainty that the narrator experiences.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” begins with an epigraph from the French poet

Pierre-Jean de Béranger, which (according to Kaplan) “warns of a potential dissolution of

the borders between illusion and reality. We learn at once that the heart of the artist,

Roderick Usher, is like a lute that resonates to all that touches it” (Kaplan 48). The

epigraph reads, “Son couer est un luth suspend: Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne” (Poe

126). Kevin Hayes provides this translation in The Annotated Poe: “His heart is a

hanging lute;/ As soon as it is touched, it responds” (96). Roderick Usher, an artist who is

acutely aware of his senses, has a heart which is so isolated and sensitive that it will

immediately react the moment it is touched. This sensitivity and awareness of the senses

is described by Roderick to the narrator. Roderick explains to his friend at length “what

he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family

evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy – a mere nervous affection, he

12
immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host

of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered

me” (Poe 131). Following this, the narrator lists some of these “unnatural sensations” that

he finds in Roderick. He says that his friend “suffered from a morbid acuteness of the

senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of

certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a

faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments,

which did not inspire him with horror” (131). These “unnatural sensations” are

reminiscent of the epigraph’s mention of the heart’s sensitivity to touch.

The somber and gloomy tone of the story is immediately set by the narrator in the

first line: “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year,

when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on

horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the

shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher” (Poe

126). There is a lifeless and depressing scene painted for the reader as soon as the story

opens. The narrator notices the melancholia and desolation of the house’s presence. It is a

house which has a strong impact on the narrator, and it is a deeply unhomely space. There

is something about this house which stirs a strong negative response within the narrator.

Just by looking at the house, he is made uncomfortable and is bothered by its presence.

The narrator wonders, “I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the

building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the

feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with

which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or

13
terrible” (126). The darkness and gloom of the house affects the narrator by increasing

his anxiety and fear.

The effect of perversity within “The Fall of the House of Usher” creates a sense

of uncertainty. It is important to define what perversity is within the context of Poe’s

writing. One definition is offered by Tally:

Poe’s perversity is certainly visible in the psychological phenomenon he identifies

as perverseness, in which one sometimes consciously and deliberately acts against

one’s own interest and better judgment so as to vex oneself, to thwart one’s own

desires, or to amplify one’s own pain. But one may also find the spirit of the

perverse operating in Poe’s peculiar approach to his craft, an approach that often

prevents the author from making that communicative bond with the reader that

would engender understanding and empathy. (83)

In this story, Roderick Usher as well as the narrator, exhibit perverseness through their

amplification of their pain as well as their denial of their desires. Poe’s writing often

leaves his readers with unanswered questions and a feeling of confusion about the events

which unfold in his tales. In this instance, perversity in “The Fall of the House of Usher”

leaves readers with a sense of uncertainty about what happens within the narrative.

In the beginning, the narrator received a letter from his childhood friend, Roderick

Usher. He is the proprietor of the strange and horrifying house which arrests the narrator.

In the letter, Roderick “spoke of acute bodily illness – of a mental disorder which

oppressed him” (Poe 127). While the narrator initially comes to visit his friend out of

generosity of spirit, he soon comes to dread Roderick’s presence. Rather than leaving, the

narrator chooses to stay because he is trying to help his old friend in his time of need.

14
Towards the middle of the narrative, Roderick has become unbearable for the narrator to

be around. He says, “It was no wonder that his condition terrified – that it infected me. I

felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own

fantastic yet impressive superstitions” (138). Just by being around Roderick, the

narrator’s inner self and soul are being infected by his “wild influences” and superstitious

nature. He is absorbing all of his erratic and irrational behavioral tendencies. This is a

sort of contagion, which is tied to the uncanny in the sense that it is an inexplicable and

profoundly affective experience. Much like the opening scene, where the narrator does

not understand how the house and its surroundings can have such a strong effect on his

soul, the experience of being with Roderick has a similar effect. The narrator describes,

in depth, the shocking existence that Roderick endures:

To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. ‘I shall perish,’

said he, ‘I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall

I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I

shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate

upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger,

except in its absolute effect – in terror. In this unnerved – in this pitiable condition

– I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and

reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR. (131)

Roderick is experiencing a great deal of terror, and he believes that he will definitely die

“in this deplorable folly.” Roderick is greatly suffering due to his fears, and he is unable

to alleviate his fear.

According to Kaplan,

15
 Existence itself is a torment for Roderick. He lives with the dread that this pitiable

condition of his senses will eventually lead him to ‘abandon life and reason

together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.’ He is possessed by a

superstition that the form and substance of the House itself, the very sentience of

the stones and foliage, have obtained a power over his spirit. (50)

Roderick believes that his body, mind, and soul have become imbued with the spirit of

the house. To him, he has no power over himself because the house controls his fate. The

house is depicted as a sentient being that has power over Roderick.

Along with the perverse, the uncanny can be applied to my reading of “The Fall

of the House of Usher.” As Freud points out, “some languages in use to-day can only

render the German expression ‘an unheimlich house’ by ‘a haunted house’” (Freud 241),

and the House of Usher fits into this description, as it is less “haunted” (e.g., by ghosts)

and more “unhomely” in that weird sense Freud discusses. The Usher house definitely

fits the unhomely description. It is not a welcoming space, but one which is evocative of

gloom and melancholia. He notes that:

I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole

mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their

immediate vicinity – an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven,

but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent

tarn – a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-

hued. (Poe 128)

That is, he admits that it is his own mind, his reason working on his imagination, that had

created this “superstition,” and not the other way around. The phrase offered by Freud,

16
“haunted house,” seems fitting for this place. Its appearance, its residents, and its strange

and electric aura create this spooky and haunting image. The narrator is frightened by the

house, and he seems to feel that it is haunted in the sense that it is alive and holds power

over him. In “The ‘Uncanny,’” Freud cites the psychoanalyst Ernst Jentsch, who states

that one of the strongest devices for creating an uncanny effect is when someone “doubts

whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless

object might not be in fact animate” (Freud 226). Throughout the entire narrative, the

narrator is doubting whether or not the house is alive. There seems to be this powerful

hold that the house has over both the narrator and Roderick Usher. For the narrator, this

intellectual uncertainty, much like the narrator in Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” drives

him to doubt his own abilities and his own understanding of reality. The house of Usher,

similarly to the old man in “The Man of the Crowd” is an unreadable text.

In attempting to analyze the effect that the House has on him, the narrator of “The

Fall of the House of Usher” comes to the conclusion that he will not be able to

understand it fully. “I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that

while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have

the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations

beyond our depth” (Poe 126-27). Although a house is typically a very simple and

ordinary structure, the narrator accepts the fact that the house has a great power and

influence over those who experience it. He is greatly affected by its presence even though

it is a simple and everyday object.

The idea that something is familiar yet unfamiliar is central to the idea of the

uncanny. In order for something to be uncanny, or unhomely, it must evoke fright and

17
uncertainty within the person after viewing something familiar and normal. According to

Hayes, “Poe formulates a psychological problem: getting in touch with one’s feelings is

not always a great thing. In other words, being conscious of anxiety, paranoia, or fear can

increase these feelings” (98). The narrator definitely increases his own feelings of fright

and anxiety by acknowledging and dwelling on them. The narrator feels a great deal of

terror and uncertainty when he looks upon the house:

And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to

the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy

– a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the

sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to

believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere

peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity – an atmosphere which had no

affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees,

and the gray wall, and the silent tarn – a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish,

faintly discernible, and leaden-hued. (Poe 128)

The narrator’s mind creates this peculiar uncanny idea that the house is otherworldly,

with a bright and peculiar aura surrounding it. He feels that the whole area (the house, the

trees, the lake, everything) has power over him and his mind.

This intellectual uncertainty continues for the narrator as the story progresses. In

Freud’s words where he talks about Jentsch:

On the whole, Jentsch did not get beyond this relation of the uncanny to the novel

and unfamiliar. He ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of

uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it

18
 were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The better oriented in

his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of

something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it. (221)

This uncertainty evokes the uncanny within the text and with the reader. Not only is the

narrator unfamiliar with his surroundings, he is unsure what it is about this atmosphere

which bothers him so much.

Perhaps the most uncanny event within “The Fall of the House of Usher” is the

burial and return of the lady Madeline, Roderick’s sister. The narrator recalls how

Roderick and he temporarily entombed her body within the house’s donjon that lay

directly underneath the narrator’s chamber. He describes this location as, “small, damp,

and entirely without means of admission for light” (Poe 137). While this action is bizarre

enough, the strangeness heightens when the narrator discovers “a striking similitude

between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining,

perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the

deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature

had always existed between them” (137-138). They seem remarkably similar in

appearance to the point where there is a sort of reflection or doubling of the characters.

Roderick is faced, literally, with the dead body of his twin sister, which must be greatly

unsettling given their remarkable physical similarity. In a way, it would be like looking at

himself in the casket. Not only is the resemblance uncanny, but their characters are

shockingly alike. They are both suffering from curious illnesses, they are both the last

survivors of the Usher family, and they are both unsettling and uncomfortable for the

narrator to be around.

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 Once they locate Madeline’s body to the tomb, the narrator notes, “The disease

which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all

maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom

and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in

death” (Poe 138). This lifelike appearance of Madeline raises the question, “Was she

really dead?” According to the rapidly deteriorating Roderick later on, “We have put her

living in the tomb!” (143). Now there is intellectual uncertainty within the state of

Madeline as she was entombed in the house. Either she was buried alive or she has

returned from the dead. According to Freud, the presence of a dead body is the most

common for evoking the uncanny. In Freud’s words, “Apparent death and the re-

animation of the dead have been represented as most uncanny themes” (246).

Even if she was never dead, both the narrator and Roderick believed her to be so

when they buried her. Therefore, her reappearance has the impact of the return of the

dead on them both because they considered her dead. The narrator recalls:

It was the work of the rushing gust – but then without those doors there did stand

the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood

upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion

of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and

fro upon the threshold – then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon

the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore

him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated. (Poe 143)

Within this passage, there is a great deal to unpack. Roderick was correct in his earlier

fear that he will meet his death in this “deplorable folly” (131). He is confronted with his

20
terrors and fears when Madeline returns from her temporary grave. He seems to have

died of fright caused by the reanimation of his dead sister as he instantly dies when she

falls onto him and brings him to the floor. In Freud’s essay, he explains, “Most likely our

fear [of death] still implies the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his

survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him” (242). This is a very

interesting idea to consider here. Perhaps this is what happened between Roderick and

Madeline. When she died, she became his enemy in a way and came back to take him

with her to share their new life in death together. Since they only had each other and were

the last two Ushers in existence, perhaps Madeline returned to take Roderick with her to

join her in death so that they could begin a new life.

After witnessing this return of the dead and the sudden death of Roderick, the

narrator flees the house in horror. Once outside, he notices:

there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind – the entire orb of the satellite burst at

once upon my sight – my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder –

there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters –

and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the

fragments of the “House of Usher.” (Poe 144)

As soon as Madeline collapsed onto Roderick, the house began to collapse in on itself.

The narrator turns to see the House of Usher falling into the dark lake that he looked into

in the beginning of the narrative. However, “the narrator can encounter and witness the

phenomenon of the fall of the house of Usher, but neither he nor the reader has any

greater certainties about it. It is another text that does not let itself to be read” (Tally 75).

It is not made clear to the reader exactly how this happened all of a sudden, but it is a

21
reflection of the intellectual uncertainty that envelops “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Much like the narrator’s enigmatic subject in “The Man of the Crowd,” which centers

around uncertainty and the unknowable, the collapse of the Usher house is a book which

cannot be read. There is no clear and certain explanation of what happened. The reader,

just like the narrator, is left with uncertainty and an unsatisfied curiosity.

In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the unnamed narrator is placed in the strange

and terrifying atmosphere of the House of Usher as well as the final two Ushers,

Roderick and Madeline. Throughout the narrative, there is a progressive loss of

intellectual certainty and reason. The narrator comes to question what is real and what is

not, especially when it comes to his awareness that this is not an ordinary place. While a

house itself is not something unfamiliar to the narrator, the great sense of dread and

gloom that permeates his soul evokes within him the feeling of the uncanny. He is not

quite sure what it is about the house, or about his old friend, which makes him feel so

frightened, but he acknowledges his anxiety and fear. Along with this, there is a looming

presence of perversion in the story. Both he and Roderick amplify their own fears and

experience terrifying thoughts. This horror tale blends the perverse with the uncanny,

thus creating a frightening and enigmatic story. Earlier, I suggested an idea of contagion,

that is, that the narrator begins to believe the same sort of things Roderick believes. It is

as if his madness is contagious. Contagion in this sense is touched on in “The Man of the

Crowd” as the narrator’s mind and soul are infected by his object of pursuit.

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 III. UNCANNINESS AND UNKNOWABILITY IN “THE MAN OF THE

CROWD”

Poe’s enigmatic short story, “The Man of the Crowd,” follows a day (plus a night

and then the next day) in the life of the narrator as he observes strangers that pass through

the streets of London from the relative safety of a coffeehouse. Arguably, this tale

focuses on curiosity and unknowability, which may be productively interpreted through a

psychoanalytic reading of the story. In Freud’s essay on the uncanny (or unheimlich, to

use the German word), for example, the feeling of the uncanny can stem from that which

is “concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know of or about it,

[something] withheld from others” (223). The withholding and concealment of

information is central to “The Man of the Crowd.” In this tale, the narrator becomes

hyper focused on a single individual whose character is unable to be understood or

categorized, and who clearly does not fit into the clearly identifiable “types” the narrator

is used to seeing. By closely following the strange man through the crowded streets of

London, the narrator strives to know more about the man. The overwhelming sense of

uncertainty as to who the man was or what his purpose was causes the narrator to spend

an entire evening, night, and most of the subsequent day stalking the man and following

his every move. What began as “people-watching” from a café window turns into a quest

to read the unreadable. This journey slowly unravels the narrator’s perception on his

ability to read people well while bringing forth that which should have remained hidden.

The narrator fears the uncertainty and unknowability of the old man; however, he

is left dissatisfied as he is unable to realize that he himself is a double of the unreadable

man he has been following. Freud’s theory of the uncanny, particularly with respect to

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the fear of the unknown, allows for a deeper psychoanalytic reading of this short story.

For me, one of the main questions that comes to mind while reading this story is, “Why

does the narrator need to categorize and understand the man he follows?” He is deeply

curious about the lives of those around him, and he seems compelled to label everyone

into different and distinct categories. This could be because he needs to feel that his

world is in order.

In his essay on the uncanny, Freud quotes Friedrich Schelling, who had offered

this definition of the uncanny, or unheimlich (which could be literally translated as

“unhomely”):“’Unheimlich’ is the name for everything that ought to have remained…

secret and hidden but has come to light” (224). That is, the unheimlich involves things

that do not belong outside the home, things best left private or hidden, in Schelling’s

view. There are certain things within the world and within people that should not be

known. This lack of knowability and certainty rattles the narrator of “The Man of the

Crowd” and causes him to doubt his capabilities of reading others. Before encountering

the man of the crowd, the narrator states, “I could frequently read, even in that brief

interval of a glance, the history of long years” (Poe 233). He boasts about his ability to

figure strangers out after a short period of observing them. Therefore, the fact that he

cannot immediately read this particular man deeply bothers him. This fact that some

things simply cannot be read because they do not allow themselves to be read is an

example of that which should have remained hidden from the light but has come forth.

The narrator takes a perverse interest in the strange man, and this brings forth things that

should have remained unknown to him. As Poe’s narrator says, “There are some secrets

which do not permit themselves to be told” (229). It is important to note here the there is

24
a difference between struggling to find the truth and encountering a text which does not

allow itself to be understood at all. The man that the narrator follows is a secret which

does not permit itself to be read.

“The Man of the Crowd” opens with an epigraph from Jean de la Bruyère: “Ce

grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul,” (229), which roughly translates to, “This great

misfortune, of not being able to be alone.” This idea that one is alone yet never alone

carries throughout the tale. The beginning epigraph from Bruyère and the opening

sentence, “It was well said of a certain German book that ‘es lässt sich nicht lesen’ it does

not permit itself to be read” (229), are interconnected. According to Jeremy Cagle’s

article, “Reading Well: Transcendental Hermeneutics in Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’,”

the connection between the two lines “is that in being ‘alone’ – as the story’s narrator

certainly is, especially in his current state of phenomenal, almost supernal, wellness – one

might perhaps have the opportunity to read what is normally unreadable, to know what is

normally unknowable” (20). The narrator seems to pride himself in his ability to

successfully group strangers together and divide passersby into different categories. He

seems quite sure of his skill when it comes to reading others. In his current state, the

narrator perhaps feels overly confident and sees the old man as the ultimate challenge to

his abilities.

Towards the beginning of the story, the narrator divulges that he is convalescent,

having recently recovered from a long sickness. He informs us that:

For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent, and, with

returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so

precisely the converse of ennui – moods of the keenest appetency, when the film

25
 from the mental vision departs… and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly

its every-day condition. (229)

Not only is he recovering from an illness, he is in a state of supreme wellness. He

describes his mood and intellectual strength to be excellent. This level of phenomenal

health he describes would lead him to overestimate his own abilities and actions. Despite

his feelings of euphoric health, the narrator is attempting to rejoin the world after

suffering from an illness. In today’s society, many people are challenged with this every

day. Once someone recovers from Covid, for example, or any other serious illness, there

is often a great deal of hesitation in being around other people, especially large crowds

again out of a fear that they will fall ill with the virus once more.

This aspect of the short story makes this even more timely in this Covid era. The

narrator of the story displays a strong curiosity toward other people. He enjoys passing

the time studying the movements and demeanors of those in the crowded streets of

London. Readers first find him sitting in the D--------- Coffee-House in London amusing

himself “for the greater part of the afternoon … in peering through the smoky panes into

the street” (229). He includes with great detail the crowds and the dispositions of various

groups of people. The narrator remarks that, “Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I

derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I felt a calm

but inquisitive interest in every thing” (229). The overwhelming joy the narrator

experiences from breathing freely again reminds me of the supreme feeling of freedom

many must feel after recovering from Covid or wearing a face mask for hours on end.

The remark about finding pleasure within “legitimate sources of pain” could relate to

Freud’s notion of the uncanny. Through pain, the narrator derives pleasure. Any feeling is

26
better than the numbness of illness, so the narrator relishes in pain as it is a sign of feeling

well. Taking pleasure even in pain connotes that feeling of finding the homely and

familiar within something unpleasant and unhomely. It is perverse in a way to find

comfort from something painful or uncomfortable.

The narrator’s time spent categorizing different people and studying their dress,

appearance, and differences brings him great satisfaction. At first, the narrator is very

confident in his ability to “read” the passersby that he is observing. He carefully

categorizes them into groups and distinguishes the differences and commonalities of

everyone he watches. The narrator believes that he is an excellent reader of people;

however, he comes to be rather uncertain in his abilities. The first shift towards

uncertainty occurs in the following passage:

But, as the darkness came on, the throng momently increased; and, by the time the

lamps were well lighted, two dense and continuous tides of population were

rushing past the door. At this particular period of the evening I had never before

been in a similar situation, and the tumultuous sea of human heads filled me,

therefore, with a delicious novelty of emotion. I gave up, at length, all care of

things within the hotel, and became absorbed in contemplation of the scene

without. (229-230)

The narrator has become completely detached from his physical setting of the coffee

house and is now totally immersed in the crowds passing by. He is absolutely fascinated

and intrigued by this “tumultuous sea of human heads” that he completely forgets about

everything else.

As Cagle puts it, “For the reader, the past, or historical horizon, is filled with the

27
darkness of ignorance; and, for the narrator, it is filled with the darkness of illness. Thus,

the past is essentially nonexistent” (28). There is very little to be known about the

narrator, other than he is in London, he is recovering from some illness, and he is

interested in watching people in crowds. He immerses himself in the crowd and detaches

from the world around him. This pulls readers into the story and into the mind of the

narrator. Readers are ignorant to who the narrator is and what his intentions are in the

same way that the narrator feels about the mysterious “man of the crowd.” The setting of

the short story greatly influences the impact of the work. London’s bustling

thoroughfares and overflow of people walking continuously throughout the streets give

the narrator a great deal to focus on. Since he prides himself in being able to read these

types of people, it makes it all the more frustrating when he cannot read this particular

old man. However, the “metropolitan locale also exerts its influence on Poe’s nightmare

of the unknowable, as the city itself becomes a kind of barrier to understanding and a

scene of profound uncertainty” (Tally 110). With hundreds of thousands of people living

together in one city, it is very easy to become lost. Whether intentionally or accidentally,

it is quite effortless for someone to blend in amongst the teeming sea of unnamed people

and faces. It is notable that Poe sets this tale in London, at the time one of the largest

cities in the world, with over a million inhabitants. It would be hard to imagine a “man of

the crowd” existing, in smaller cities or towns. The narrator himself appears to be an

urbanite who finds nothing uncommon in crowds of people still on the streets even late at

night.

Since there are thousands of different people that the narrator observes, it is

interesting to think about why he chooses the figure he does. In order to attempt to

28
understand why the narrator narrows in on this one particular man, it is important to look

at this passage carefully:

With my brow to the glass, I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob, when

suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepit old man, some

sixty-five or seventy years of age,) – a countenance which at once arrested and

absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its

expression. Any thing even remotely resembling that expression I had never seen

before. As I endeavored, during the brief minute of my original survey, to form

some analysis of the meaning conveyed, there arose confusedly and paradoxically

within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of

avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of

excessive terror, of intense – of supreme despair. I felt singularly aroused,

startled, fascinated. (233)

The story’s narrator feels compelled to follow the man through the crowd and continue

observing him because there was something about the man’s appearance, specifically his

facial expression, that greatly troubled them. The man had such a peculiar and distinctive

face that the narrator had never encountered anything like it before. His level of curiosity

skyrockets when he cannot immediately figure out this person. Unlike all the others he

watched from the café window, the old man remains a mystery.

While the narrator attempts to figure out why he feels this way, a plethora of ideas

“confusedly and paradoxically” (233) arose in his mind. The narrator then lists several

different emotions that he experienced within his mind, from “vast mental power” to

“supreme despair” (233). Eventually, it can be concluded that the narrator has such a

29
strong emotional response to this strange man because he cannot be read. The fact that he

failed to place the enigmatic man into a category and was unable to read him like a book

deeply fascinated the narrator and “then came a craving desire to keep the man in view –

to know more of him” (233). The description of the speaker’s idiosyncratic subject

increases the mystery behind him. The man “was short in stature, very thin, and

apparently very feeble. His clothes, generally, were filthy and ragged; but as he came,

now and then, within the strong glare of a lamp, I perceived that his linen, although dirty,

was of beautiful texture” (233-34). The old man is described as being small and weak,

not exactly a threatening presence. Also, the narrator seems to doubt his own eyes at

times when observing the man. He is dressed in both shabby yet elegant linens. The

narrator cannot even distinguish the social class of the man based on his clothing. His

description presents the paradox of dirty and beautiful. The narrator begins losing his

security of what he knows when he studies the old man’s clothing and appearance. He is

unable to pinpoint exactly what he looks like. His surety of his mind and abilities begins

to come into question.

Intellectual uncertainty comes to define the narrator as he borderline stalks the

man through the night. Within “The ‘Uncanny,’” Freud discusses the ideas of Ernst

Jentsch, a German psychiatrist and author of “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” which

in part inspired Freud to write his own essay. In Freud’s words, Jentsch “ascribes the

essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty”

(221). The narrator begins to doubt his own thoughts and even sees things which he is

uncertain are actually there. As Mark Windsor has observed, in works of fiction, the

“uncertainty about what is real is a necessary component of what it means to experience

30
something as uncanny” (45). Within the story, the narrator believes that he sees a dagger

and a diamond within the coat of the man he is following. He notes, “I caught a glimpse

of both a diamond and of a dagger. These observations heightened my curiosity, and I

resolved to follow the stranger whithersoever he should go” (Poe 234). The dagger he

believes he sees at one point is never proven to actually exist. Even if it did exist, there’s

no evidence of its being used for criminal ends. Keeping the definition of Jentsch in

mind, this uncertainty and doubt of reality the narrator experiences is an example of the

uncanny within the story. There is a sort of crisis which results when the narrator realizes

he is not able to read the man. He admits, “I was at a loss to comprehend the

waywardness of his actions” (236). Observing the actions of the man fails to lead the

narrator to notice any pattern or order. It almost becomes vexing to the narrator that he is

unsuccessful in reading his subject.

Within the story, there is this idea of the public versus the private. As Cagle

observes, “To begin with, it is important to remember that Poe’s narrator is convalescing,

or becoming well” (28). Throughout my reading of the story, I was always conscious of

the fact that our narrator is recovering from an illness. The progression of the narrative

pushes the narrator from the private to the public through the action of following the man.

As he physically walks next to hundreds of strangers in the crowded streets of London, he

is no longer in his private and possibly secluded life as he was when he was ill. Once he

left the coffeehouse in pursuit of the strange man, he entered the public sphere once

again. There is a great emphasis on the exploration of what is unknowable and

unreadable throughout “The Man of the Crowd,” and the narrator is the subject tormented

by his own curiosity and the fact that some things simply cannot be known.

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 In the opening line of the story, the narrator mentions a certain book of which it is

said that “it does not allow itself to be read” (Poe 229). This very inscrutability is central

to “The Man of the Crowd,” as the narrator comes to find out that some things (and some

people) do not permit themselves to be read and understood. According to Robert T.

Tally Jr:

Whereas the personal narrative form aimed at making the unfamiliar familiar,

domesticating the exotic, or making the unknown known, Poe’s perversion of the

form strikingly asserts the inscrutability and unknowability of these uncanny

experiences or events. With Poe, these cannot be “brought home” in the sense of

being made knowable, and the anxiety or terror is therefore enhanced. (73)

The narrator is unable to read the old man that he pursues so closely and for so long. This

is its own special type of terror, one that disarms the narrator and brings them to the

realization that they are unable to read the man. All efforts to do so would be futile and in

vain. He does not know what his next move will be, nor does he understand why the man

is doing all of this. The narrator remarks, “The old manner of the strange re-appeared…

He urged his way steadily and perseveringly. I was surprised, however, to find upon his

having made the circuit of the square, that he turned and retraced his steps” (234). He is

surprised that this repetition and recurrence is continuing. The mind of the old man is still

a secret and an unreadable mystery.

While the narrator follows the retraced path of the old man, there is moment

where, “once nearly detecting me as he came round with a sudden movement” (234-35),

the old man almost spots his pursuer. However, even when the two come face-to-face, it

is as though the old man does not notice the narrator at all. Even more importantly, the

32
old man never seemed to care who the narrator was. According to Cagle, “The Man of

the Crowd” is:

a narrative committed to the existence of irrationality [where] Poe essentially

formulates an argument questioning the very possibility of experience. If our

basic human impulses, whether rational or irrational, are ultimately inestimable, if

the book (or body) will not permit itself to be read – then how are we to assume

the security of reason and experience? (29)

The narrator’s earlier confidence in his ability “to read” those in the crowd is shattered

when confronted with a text that challenges his own certainty and belief in his abilities.

Through the narrator, Poe creates a story which causes readers to question their own

experiences and the very nature of knowledge and logic. Without being able to read other

things and other people, how can experiences and reason be trusted?

The narrator eventually tires of fruitlessly chasing the old man. He comes to the

conclusion that he “is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is

the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of

his deeds” (237). At this point, the narrator seems to be grasping at straws for a rational

conclusion. Had the old man been a master criminal, the narrator would have

immediately categorized him as such, and at the very most, he could have easily been

able to figure out what his intentions were during the night. Certainly, the narrator never

witnessed the old man committing any crimes. Therefore, it is not possible that the

narrator’s conclusion about the man being “the type and genius of deep crime” must be

taken with a grain of salt, or even rejected entirely as an unlikely surmise. The narrator is

trying to explain the unexplainable instead of admitting the old man is simply an

33
unreadable text. The narrator attempted to understand the nature of his subject but failed.

In his essay on the uncanny, Freud says, “We are not supposed to be looking on at the

products of a madman’s imagination, behind which we, with the superiority of rational

minds, are able to detect the sober truth; and yet this knowledge does not lessen the

impression of uncanniness in the least degree” (230-31). This concept can be applied to

Poe’s short story in that the narrator is depicted as being of sound mind and thus rational,

but he is unable to unearth the truth. More uncanny still is the suggestion that the

“rational mind” cannot know the truth, which would then undermine the narrator’s (and

also the reader’s) sense of well-being.

In “The Man of the Crowd,” Poe “makes the seemingly knowledgeable narrator a

kind of dupe, one who prides himself on his knowledge and perspicacity only to discover

that he cannot really figure out what is happening” (Tally 69). No matter how intently he

studied the man nor how closely he followed him, his deeds and behavior remain a

mystery. The overall tone of uncertainty creates a sense of anxiety and horror within the

short story. Within the tale itself, the narrator is never again comforted after encountering

the old man for the first time. He is unable to figure out what or who the man is, and his

own perception of others and his supposedly keen insight into reading others based on

appearance unravels.

Throughout the story’s progression, the narrator becomes a sort of double for the

man he is following. In a way, he turns into the “man of the crowd” now that he has

recovered and rejoined society. He is no longer separated from others as he once was

during his illness, and he has become just another person amongst the hundreds within

the crowds. In the end, the narrator admits, “The worst heart of the world is a grosser

34
book than the ‘Hortulus Animæ,’ and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God

that ‘es lässt sich nicht lesen’” (237). Defeated, dissatisfied, and frustrated, the narrator

finally concludes that some secrets cannot be told as they are not permitted to be shared.

As Cagle concludes, “What ‘The Man of the Crowd’ demonstrates, then, is not the

narrator as a reader without the capacity to read the text but the text not permitting itself

to be read” (20). The man did not allow himself to be figured out by others. He was not

aware of the narrator and was not actively hiding the truth from him; however, he is

simply someone who never permits themselves to be openly read and known. Much like

Prince Prospero in “The Masque of the Red Death,” who thought he understood how to

“read” the situation of the Red Death, the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” is

unsuccessful in his quest. Prospero found out that the Red Death is a text which does not

permit itself to be read. Neither Prospero nor this narrator accomplish their quest of

reading their text.

Perhaps it is better that some books, and people, do not allow themselves to be

read by others, but the narrator does not seem to agree. He does give up on his mission,

but he does not gain the result he so badly wanted. The narrator’s certainty in his ability

to read others is challenged by an inherently unreadable man. Not only does the narrator

fail in reading this man of the crowd, his supposedly successful readings of others in the

crowd are now questioned by himself and the readers. The conclusion causes the narrator

to admit that he is not as good of a reader as he once thought, and maybe it is merciful of

God to create such unreadable texts. As the narrator suggests, it is a mercy to be spared of

seeing such horrible truths. Through the lens of Freud’s uncanny, the narrator’s

nightmare of being stuck in this realm of unknowability and intellectual uncertainty is

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viewed in a different way. The story is one with the uncanniness of unknowability and

discovering that which should have remained hidden but has come to light. The narrator’s

curiosity led him to the awareness of the difficult lesson that some things simply cannot

be known because they do not allow themselves to be known.

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 IV. THE UNHEIMLICH IN “THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH”

Poe’s 1842 short story “The Masque of the Red Death,” follows the final

moments of Prince Prospero and his guests at his lavish, albeit unseemly, masquerade

ball. Set in an unnamed country overrun with a horrible disease known as the Red Death,

there is death and suffering outside of the prince’s fortified walls. This tale deals with

contamination and contagion, along with horror in the sense that outside forces have the

power to infect man’s inner self and soul. The rooms of Prince Prospero’s abbey reflect

his bizarre and somewhat insane tastes. “The Masque of the Red Death” is especially

timely to the world today as there is a looming fear of being contaminated by outside

forces. Covid-19 has disarmed societies across the globe, and the idea that the outside

world, one’s neighbors or co-workers, even one’s most trusted allies, can cause them

harm, has created a frightening reality. Prince Prospero hosts a lavish masquerade ball

even though most of the people of the land are perishing from this deadly disease. His

arrogance and false sense of security is shortly challenged as an unidentified figure

dressed as the Red Death unnerves the crowd, ultimately taking the lives of the prince

and his guests.

In my reading, the Freudian theory of the uncanny amplifies the perverseness of

the tale. The subject of the uncanny is, in Freud’s words, “undoubtedly related to what is

frightening – to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not

always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear

in general” (Freud 219). According to a footnote by translator James Strachey in “The

‘Uncanny,’” “The German word, translated throughout this paper by the English

37
‘uncanny,’ is ‘unheimlich,’ literally ‘unhomely.’ The English term is not, of course, an

exact equivalent of the German one” (219). Keeping this difference of translations in

mind is particularly important when applying the uncanny concept to Poe’s “The Masque

of the Red Death.”

The events that unfold within this tale take place in the abbey of Prince Prospero.

Although a traditionally homely environment, this has become a bizarre and unhomely

place due to the prince’s unusual tastes and the looming presence of the Red Death. The

narrator begins, “The ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country. No pestilence had

ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal – the redness and the

horror of blood” (Poe 37). The horrifying tone of this tale is set right away, with a clear

theme of death and destruction. Freud’s theory of the uncanny, “that class of the

frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (220), offers a

way of understanding the effects of Poe’s tale as the story unfolds. Redness and blood are

prominent features in this short story, which is also related to the plague itself. The

symptoms of the pestilence “were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse

bleeding at the pores, with dissolution” (Poe 37). The description of the Red Death

intensifies: “The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim,

were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-

men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents

of half an hour” (Poe 37). Not only does one suffering from the disease meet their

ultimate demise, but they are also shunned by their fellows, marked with this hideous

redness in the face as a diseased person.

Prince Prospero, the main character of “The Masque of the Red Death,” embodies

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health, wealth, and power. His very name evokes images of prosperity and authority.

Despite all of the suffering of his people, “the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless

and sagacious” (37). As long as he and his close friends remain safe, he does not seem

overly worried by the plague destroying all of those under his dominion. Although they

are doing the right thing by quarantining, throwing a huge party is not the most intelligent

choice during a plague. Much like many arrogant people today, the prince throws a

massive party despite the rampant death and suffering happening around him. Many

celebrities, including the Kardashians and the former president of the United States,

Donald Trump, have treated the current pandemic with much less care and respect as

those who do not have financial security (see, e.g. Carly Ledbetter’s “Kendall Jenner

Faces Backlash for Packed Pandemic Birthday Party” and Peter Baker and Maggie

Haberman’s “Trump Tests Positive for the Coronavirus”). Being wealthy grants people

priority access to vaccines, testing, and world class medical care; therefore, they do not

often take the same precautions (avoiding travel, social distancing, and wearing masks in

public) that others do. The prince does take the proper steps to quarantine himself:

When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a

thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his

court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.

This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own

eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates

of iron. (Poe 37)

However, he does not self-isolate while walled in behind the iron gates of his fortress.

Instead, he chooses to host a grand masque in the midst of the plague. This demonstrates

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the overconfidence and vanity of the prince along with his belief that his wealth will keep

him safe from the Red Death.

One can see how so many readers have found “The Masque of the Red Death” so

relevant to the Covid era today (see, e.g., Maya Phillips, “The Rich Can’t Hide from a

Plague”). This imagery and language relates to Covid-19 and the world as it is now.

There are plenty of people, including Covid-19 deniers, those who refuse the vaccine,

refuse to wear masks, and continue to gather in large crowds despite the warnings from

the government. There is a false sense of confidence that they are immune from this

deadly disease.

This chapter focuses on the presence of the uncanny in a few aspects of “The

Masque of the Red Death,” including the seven suites of Prince Prospero’s masquerade

setting, the strange ebony clock, and the mysterious and unknown figure which seems to

suddenly appear. In order to lead into the discussion of these aspects, I will first take a

look at the very odd and seemingly anachronistic narrator of Poe’s tale.

“The Masque of the Red Death” tests the boundaries of what is real through the

narrator. The narrator of this short story is different than many others of Poe’s works and

sets the tone for the bizarre and peculiar tale. There is a distinct oddness about the

narrator and the perspective that he brings to the situation. The narrative voice appears to

create a point of view transcending the laws of time. According to David R. Dudley’s

“Dead or Alive: The Booby-Trapped Narrator of Poe’s ‘Masque of the Red Death,’”

although the narrator “never appears in a scene, he is always on the scene” (169). Unlike

many other Poe narrators, normally first-person narrators recounting their own

experiences, this story is not about the speaker at all. He is merely the messenger,

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relaying what happened within Prospero’s abbey to the outside world and to audiences of

different eras. It seems that the narrator is not even a first-person narrator most of the

time, but there are exactly three instances where the narrator refers to himself: “But first

let me tell of the rooms in which it was held” (Poe 38), “And the music ceased, as I have

told” (39), and, “In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted” (40). The first

sentence where the narrator introduces themselves in the first person “exemplifies Poe’s

use of what critical theorists call the ‘dramatized author,’ that is, a narrator that does not

function as a character in a story but instead hovers over the tale and becomes visible

through the narration” (Hayes 235). The narrator reveals themselves through the use of

“me,” thus making themselves visible to the reader. This first-person pronoun establishes

the fact that the narrator either survived the Red Death or somehow was there to tell the

tale sometime after the event. Although there are only two other instances where the

narrator reveals their voice to the reader, it is enough to establish themselves as a voice of

authority on the matter. There is no one else left alive to relay what happened during the

masquerade, so the reader must rely on the narrator’s account. As Dudley observes, “The

problem is that while he has witnessed the fatal events inside Prince Prospero’s sealed

abbey and survives to tell the tale, we learn at the end that everyone within the abbey

dies. The narrator’s survival is therefore paradoxical” (169). The narrator could not have

been present during the masquerade because Poe makes it clear at the end of the story

that no one survived. Poe’s narrator recounts that, “one by one dropped the revellers in

the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall”

(42). Therefore, the narrator could not have been physically present at the time of the

masquerade.

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 Additionally, there is something about the way the story is told which makes it

seem like this event occurred somewhere in the distant past. Dudley argues that “[t]he

setting of ‘Red Death’ seems older by at least a century or two, giving the narrator an

odd, duplicitous, then-and-now quality. The narrator is simultaneously in Prospero’s

time, Poe’s time, and the reader’s time” (170). The anachronistic nature of the narrator

leads me to the conclusion that, whoever they are, they are not actually present at

Prospero’s party. Unlike the revelers of Prospero’s ball, the narrator does not meet their

death within the abbey because time does not apply to them. The characters in “The

Masque of the Red Death” attempt to escape the reality of the Red Death until time no

longer permits them to live this way.

Now that it has been established that the narrator offers a bizarre and

anachronistic quality to the story, I will discuss the importance of the passage of time in

regards to the seven suites of the abbey and the ebony clock which is enough to startle

and frighten the revelers to the point where they cease movement. In order to illuminate

Poe’s classic tale in a new way, I will offer a psychoanalytic reading of “The Masque of

the Red Death” by employing Freud’s concept of the uncanny.

The setting of the masquerade is equally important to the characters and their

motivations. In “The ‘Uncanny,’” Freud defines heimlich as, “belonging to the house, not

strange, familiar, tame, intimate, friendly, etc.” (222). The opposite of this, the

unheimlich, is that which is “the opposite of what is familiar [and] is frightening

precisely because it is not known and familiar” (220). Keeping this definition in mind, the

abbey of Prospero is an example of that which is unhomely or unheimlich. According to

Poe’s narrator:

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 The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for colors and effects. He

disregarded the decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his

conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought

him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and

touch him to be sure that he was not. (39)

The prince creates a bizarre and uncanny, or unheimlich, space within his home through

the strange fashion in which he decorates the abbey. Also, this “home” is full of people

who are trying not to think about the plague which is ravaging the country. The colors of

the room and the ebony clock represent the passage of time and reflects the idea that

death comes to all in due time. Even the great wealth of the prince and his friends cannot

protect them from the Red Death. There is a sort of eccentric behavior to the prince’s

tastes and décor which stirs up something familiar yet frightening within those who enter

the abbey.

There are seven rooms where the grand masquerade is held, and each room is

decorated entirely in its own color, save the last room which is decorated in both black

and red. According to Kevin J. Hayes in The Annotated Poe, “The number seven

traditionally symbolizes completeness or perfection – and thus Poe uses it ironically.

Seven sacraments, seven pillars of wisdom, seven deadly sins, seven ages of man: all

deserve consideration in relation to the story’s symbolism” (235). Since Poe is using this

“perfect” number ironically, it is interesting to view the seven rooms within the abbey as

a perversion of completeness. Since everyone within the abbey dies, arguably

prematurely, from the Red Death, their lifespan is not complete in the sense that they

lived fully and died of natural causes. The number of rooms within the abbey is equally

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important to the significance of the colors. If the rooms do in fact represent the timeline

of a human life, Prospero is using this number in a cynical manner. Since the number

seven symbolizes that which has been made complete or whole, the seven rooms could be

representative of the completeness of a human existence. Ironic or not, everyone’s lives

within the abbey end, thus completing their lifespan. The range of suites are symbolic of

a lifespan, beginning with birth, following the several stages of life, and of course ending

with death. Poe employs the emblematic number seven as a tool for irony and inverts a

traditionally positive symbol into something dark. Therefore, the numerology within

“The Masque of the Red Death” comments on the seven stages of life, ranging from birth

in the easternmost suite to death in the westernmost suite. However, the number seven is

only part of the equation. The colors of the suites is also important to the discussion of

the rooms.

In Brett Zimmerman’s article, “The Puzzle of the Color Symbolism in ‘The

Masque of the Red Death’: Solved at Last?” Zimmerman concludes that there is a strong

“connection of blue with the divine and immortality” (64). The idea that blue represents

immortality is interesting, considering the fact that everyone within the abbey dies at the

end. Perhaps this is Poe’s way of using this conventionally positive and divine color in a

negative or frightening way. The colors of each suite, progressing from blue, purple,

green, orange, white, violet, and finally, black, follow the stages and changes of the

human existence. Hayes argues, “Creating a sequence of colors that resembles yet

deviates from the visible spectrum, Poe teasingly invites speculation. In any case, the

motley-colored suite of rooms offers numerous possible interpretations” (235). While

there is no certain answer to the definite meaning of the colors of the rooms, the different

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colors of the rooms within Prospero’s bizarre abbey are symbolic of the passage of time

and the cycle of a human life. The rooms span from the east to the west, and the room “at

the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue” (Poe 38). Blue is a generally

positive color, associated with the sky and beginnings. It could be said that blue

represents the start of life. The second room is totally decorated in purple, a traditional

and ancient symbol of royalty. Therefore, the second room signifies the social status of

Prince Prospero, who “came from a prebirth realm of blue simultaneously into the world

and into the purple” (Zimmerman 65). Since this is the prince’s abbey and therefore his

own color choice, it is fitting that the color of royalty should be included following the

color symbolic of birth and beginning. Zimmerman asserts that green, the color of the

third room, became known as a symbol for madness in the Middle Ages (65). Poe hints at

Prospero’s madness through the bizarre manner in which he decorates the abbey for the

masque. Prospero is an interesting figure, as he seems to straddle the line of insanity and

normalcy. As the rooms progress, there is a marked shift from positive colors to more

dark and negative ones. Zimmerman notes:

The first three hues in Poe’s polychromatic tale are generally positive but, as we

move toward the last four, the medial tone is orange. It represents the middle of

the human lifespan and is located, appropriately, at the middle of the imperial

suite. It is also the transition between the positive colors of blue, purple, and green

and the mortuary colors of white, violet, red and black. Beginning with orange,

then, the hues now take on sinister associations. (65)

In keeping with Zimmerman’s theory that the progression of colors is emblematic of the

progression of the human life, it is appropriate that orange, a color often found at the dusk

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of day, is symbolic of the final years of life. The next room is white, a traditional color of

burial cloths, symbolizes that “Prospero begins to enter the western part of his suite and is

indeed, literally and symbolically, going to his death” (66). While the age of the prince is

never disclosed, the white room represents his approach towards death, the Red Death in

this case. The second to last room is decorated in violet, another mortuary color

according to Zimmerman’s argument. He asserts, “Violet, then, like white, is a mortuary

color, perfectly situated between white and black in Poe’s scheme” (67). The fact that

Prospero selects this color for the next-to-last suite is grimly ironic and perhaps even a bit

cynical. Considering that he and his countrymen are surrounded by this Red Death, the

dark and morbid rooms within his supposedly safe abbey are a reminder of the very

plague they are trying to forget. The prince would be more than aware of the meaning of

this color, and he deliberately placed it next to the final black and red suite. It could be

that this was done as a tempting of fate. He knows the severity of the plague, yet he

throws a large party while locking himself and his friends away to protect themselves.

The violet color, indicative of the final moments of life, is perhaps the prince testing his

own mortality.

Most important to the study of the room colors is the description of the seventh

suite. Black and red are the sole colors within the seventh and final chamber. This room

connects to the prevalence of blood and redness which marks the victims of the

pestilence. This apartment represents the infection of someone by the Red Death, and the

final stage of life. Within its four walls, the very pestilence which the revelers are hiding

from is embodied. The seventh room:

was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and

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 down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue.

But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the

decorations. The panes were scarlet – a deep blood color. (Poe 38)

As the sun sets in the west, this room represents the end of the “day,” meaning the end of

the human existence. Typically, black is symbolic of fear, horror, and certainly, of death.

Black is the main color which conjures feelings of loss and mourning, and it is the typical

color worn by most funeral attendees in America. It is within this westernmost suite

where the ebony clock resides and where few of the party guests dare step foot inside. In

the “black chamber the effect of the fire-light that streamed upon the dark hangings

through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look

upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold

enough to set foot within its precincts at all” (38-39). This final chamber is the most

unheimlich room of them all. The very sight of it makes guests feel that particular shade

of what is frightening as there is something within its confines that calls to the familiar in

some way. In this case, the partygoers are so uncomfortable because they are faced with

death and a reminder of their own mortality. Furthermore, they are confronted with a

haunting reminder of the Red Death. This apartment, symbolizing death, is so frightening

that hardly anyone at the party could even pass by the doorway or step within its

confines.

Zimmerman argues that the black room also represents “mental degradation” and

“insanity” (68). It is within this seventh room where Prince Prospero and his guests meet

their death. There is an air of madness and chaos when, “summoning the wild courage of

despair, a throng of revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and,

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seizing the mummer … gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and

corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any

tangible form” (Poe 42). With a great sense of urgency and madness, the revelers sought

to destroy the figure after the death of the prince. However, their mood of anger and

revenge soon shifts to one of horror and fright as they discover there is no physical being

within the costume. The interpretation that the black room symbolizes madness and

mental degradation is supported through the wild manner in which the revelers attack the

figure. There is no more social order at this point, and there is also no more life within the

abbey once they enter this room.

This black and red chamber exemplifies the uncanny as it is so frightening that

very few can even lay their eyes on it. According to the narrator, “And to him whose foot

falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more

solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulge in the more remote

gaieties of the other apartments” (Poe 40). There is something so horrifying about the

space that reminds the guests of their repressed fear of death. Despite the general gaiety

of the masque, “they avoid Prospero’s ominously furnished seventh chamber like the

plague, dreading the hourly toll of its giant clock” (Dudley 172). Within this black room,

there stood in the western corner “a gigantic clock of ebony … there came from the

brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud an deep and exceedingly

musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour… there was

a brief disconcert of the whole gay company” (Poe 39). The guests become increasingly

aware of the passage of time with every chime of the clock. There is something strange

and disconcerting about the sight and sound of this particular clock. Its presence within

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the seventh suite is especially symbolic of the passage of time and the fleeting moments

of life. Whenever the clock sounds on the hour, it is enough to bring the revelers to stop

any movement. It is an audible reminder that time marches on, even inside of a fortified

abbey. The peculiarity of the clock’s sound stirs within the guests a sense of discomfort

and tension. The inclusion of this grim and dark room is an odd choice since Prospero is

attempting to shut out the world and escape the Red Death. Dudley asserts that “Prospero

attempts to control death by fitting it into his own work as a motif rather than as a reality.

But a memento mori’s controlled and distanced image of death must fail in the end, and

to Prospero’s dismay the reality of death intrudes upon his masquerade” (172). The

inevitability of death is represented through Prospero’s bizarre multicolored abbey. No

matter how hard he tried to protect himself and his friends from the Red Death, the

pestilence reigned supreme in the end.

Through the image of the mysterious party guest, the mood tenses and the hidden

fears of each guest becomes amplified. The unidentified figure evoked emotions “of

terror, of horror, and of disgust” (Poe 40) within the minds of the partygoers and the

prince. The strange reveler:

was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the

grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the

countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had

difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not

approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to

assume the type of the Red Death. (41)

The sight of the mysterious figure strongly resembles that of a victim of the Red Death.

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The presence of a dead body is something which is quite uncanny. It reminds people of

their own mortality and draws forth the repressed fears of death, and it may thus engender

a sense of the uncanny in their minds. According to Freud, “many people experience the

feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the

dead, and to spirits and ghosts” (241). Above all other instances which evoke the feeling

of the uncanny, dead bodies and death draw out the uncanny in the strongest manner.

Nothing is more strange yet familiar than that which relates to death. Therefore, it

is not surprising that the appearance of a corpse-like figure at a ball in the midst of vast

death and decay, would evoke within the guests a great sense of dread and discomfort.

Additionally, there “is scarcely any other matter, however, upon which our thoughts and

feelings have changed so little since the very earliest times … as our relation to death”

(241-42). The powerful effect that death has upon the world transcends time and place.

No matter who or where someone is within Poe’s unnamed country in “The Masque of

the Red Death,” the horrible pestilence and inevitability of succumbing to the Red Death

is always a looming presence. It is the oldest and strongest subject which is always in the

back of people’s minds. The figure is unfamiliar to the rest, but that is not simply what

makes him uncanny. The appearance of the figure elicits that particular shade of what is

frightening as there is something old and long familiar about it: the embodiment of the

Red Death. Freud quotes Jentsch, “In telling a story, one of the most successful devices

for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a

particular figure in the story is a human being” (227). By reading “The Masque of the

Red Death” through the lens of Freud’s essay on the uncanny, one finds that the masked

figure creates an uncanny effect, both in the minds of the masqueraders and of the

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readers. It is not until the final moments of the story that it is revealed to readers there is

no physical being under the costume; the earlier figure had disappeared once all the

revelers and the prince were dead. There is something about the figure which arrests the

revelers and causes them to be fearful of its presence. Not only did the figure resemble a

corpse, but “His vesture was dabbled in blood – and his broad brow, with all the features

of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror” (Poe 41). Although they had

previously considered themselves safe from the disease, the partygoers are now face to

face with something that visually represents the very illness they were hiding from.

The strange figure forces Prospero and his company to confront the very plague

which they are trying to evade. Initially, the prince and others simply imagine this to be a

fellow partygoer, only one dressed in this garish outfit. Since the figure is dressed as a

victim of the plague, this reflects both bad taste and explains why everyone finds him so

terrifying. In “The ‘Uncanny,’” Freud argues that, “What is feared is thus a secret

intention of doing harm, and certain signs are taken to mean that that intention has the

necessary power at its command” (240). The presence of this surprise guest evokes such

a high level of fear and dread because he is unknown. The figure arouses the prince’s

anger, for Prospero feels that this guest is insulting everyone by reminding them of the

plague and its horrors beyond his wall. Those around the figure are afraid of being

harmed by it because they do not know what its intentions are. The masked figure is a

threat to their ability to maintain the illusion of safety and security against the Red Death.

The description of the figure only intensifies the frightful presence of it.

The figure evokes a great sense of anger within the prince, so much so that he is

enraged enough to pull a knife on them. At the sight of the ghostly and unknown guest,

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“Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice,

rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him on account of a

deadly terror that had seized upon all” (42). The prince is angry that someone he trusted

to quarantine in his fortress would dress in such an offensive costume. As soon as he

touches the figure, “there was a sharp cry – and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the

sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostate in death the Prince Prospero”

(42). The prince was never truly safe from the horrors of the Red Death, despite how well

he quarantined. This sudden death of the prince leads to the acknowledgement of “the

presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one

dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the

despairing posture of his fall … and Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held

illimitable dominion over all” (42). The sudden death of their host angers the crowd, thus

leading them to attack the mysterious figure that murdered him. Despite their best efforts,

death has penetrated the supposedly impenetrable fortress of Prince Prospero, thus

claiming the lives of all inside. The costume was empty all along, thus rendering the

scene more like a ghost story. The intangible spirit of the Red Death has claimed the lives

of the prince and his guests.

Central to Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” are the enigmatic nature of

death, the passage of time, and the failure of Prince Prospero and his friends to avoid the

Red Death’s fatal grasp. This nineteenth century short story is more relevant to society

than ever. As the world deals with the current Covid-19 pandemic, there is a constant

sense that mysterious or unforeseen disease and death surrounds everyone. These various

elements of Poe’s evocative tale – Prince Prospero’s decision to decorate his abbey in

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such a bizarre and macabre fashion, the inclusion of the large ebony clock which freezes

everyone in their steps, and the unknown figure dressed as a victim of the Red Death –

are illuminated in a new light through the lens of the Freudian theory of the uncanny. No

matter how hard the prince tried to escape the deadly grasp of the plague, neither wealth

nor time were on his side. The Red Death’s immanent presence throughout the story

reinforces the inevitability of death.

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V. SELF-VEXING AND PERVERSITY IN “THE BLACK CAT” AND “THE IMP

OF THE PERVERSE”

This chapter explores the theme of the unconscious drives manifesting themselves

through behavior, vis-à-vis the perverse urges of the mind, as seen in Poe’s “The Black

Cat” (1843) and “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845). In “The Black Cat,” the narrator

describes what he calls “the spirit of perverseness” as an “unfathomable longing of the

soul to vex itself” (Poe 194). This theme is taken up in greater detail in “The Imp of the

Perverse,” a fictional short story that almost appears to be a nonfiction account of the

psychological phenomenon, until the final pages. In each story, the spirit of perverseness

causes the narrator to do something that is totally opposed to their own better judgment

and self-interest. In this chapter I will further explore this connection of perversity and

“self-vexing.”

Both tales explore the idea of psychological perversity within the mind through

their respective narrators. Although “The Imp of the Perverse” was published after “The

Black Cat,” I argue that its analysis of the perverse impulse serves as a sort of outline for

how to read the earlier short story. Within these two tales, there are several similarities.

The narrators of both stories commit a heinous act of murder, both are driven to this point

by their perverse urges, which lead to their own capture and imprisonment, and both are

retelling the events of their crimes on the eve of their execution. Although these

similarities are important to note and will be explored in greater depth, it is also important

to note the slight differences between the two stories. “The Imp of the Perverse” is a sort

of blend between an essay and a short story, whereas “The Black Cat” is more of a

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straightforward fictional short story.

In order to fully analyze the idea of perversity within these two tales, it is

important to first discuss what is meant by the term “perverse.” The whole point of

perversity is that it is clear that doing something would be a bad idea and choosing to do

it anyway. The impulse of perversity exists within every person, and it affects everyone

to varying degrees. Despite knowing it is wrong, in fact, because they know it is wrong,

the narrators commit heinous crimes; they do the acts because they know they should not

do them.

Perhaps the narrator of “The Imp of the Perverse” provides the most detailed

description of what perversity is. The first part of the work is an essay describing

perverseness. “The Imp of the Perverse” is about a mental phenomenon that has

previously been overlooked by scientists in “the consideration of the faculties and

impulses – of the prima mobilia of the human soul” (Poe 202). While most modern

“science” (or pseudoscience, since phrenology is explicitly mentioned) has focused on

the rational, the narrator believes that the root cause and motivation behind most human

behavior is “an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something,

which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term” (202). The

paradoxical nature of this mental faculty is then explained: “In the sense I intend, it is, in

fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt [sic]. Through its promptings we act

without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms,

we may so far modify the reason that we should not” (203). The realization that they

should not be doing something only intensifies the desire to do that very thing. The

narrator of “The Imp of the Perverse” insists that this is a significant part of how the

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human mind works, thus subtly critiquing the view that humans are inherently rational

and motivated by their own rational self-interest.

This perverseness is at the heart of each of these two tales, and it is present not

only in the acts of murder but the overwhelming urge to confess. As the narrator of “The

Black Cat” asserts:

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 knowns he should not? (194)

The narrator insists on the centrality of the perverse within the very nature of the human

mind. That is, the perverse is not understood as an aberration, one affecting only the

mentally ill, for example. Rather, it lies at the core of humanity, and anyone can fall prey

to perversity’s effects. Therefore, the spirit of the perverse urges its victim to act on those

impulses which lead to a desire to do the wrong thing. No matter the outcome, the

perverseness within the human soul incites meaningless and forbidden actions to be

committed.

In “The Black Cat,” the narrator admits his guilt right away. The narrator of “The

Black Cat,” reveals in the first few lines that, “But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would

unburthen my soul” (192). Therefore, the reader instantly knows that this will be a story

about a murderer’s confession. This short story follows the narrator as he remembers and

recounts his “homely narrative” on the eve of his execution. Once a kind and gentle man,

the narrator devolves from a good husband and lover of pets to a violent monster who

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takes his alcohol-fueled anger out on his wife and beloved cat, Pluto. Of all of his pets,

this large black cat is his favorite.

According to Christopher Benfey in “Poe and the Unreadable: ‘The Black Cat’

and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’” “Poe aimed to puzzle his readers. Tale after tale begins or

ends with an invitation to decode or decipher a peculiar sequence of events” (27). Neither

“The Imp of the Perverse” and “The Black Cat” is an exception to that general rule.

Within these two works, there is the retelling of a series of peculiar and unusual events

which causes the readers to follow along closely to figure out what is happening and why

the narrators are behaving in such a bizarre and somewhat insane manner. Both short

stories deal with murderous speakers who are attempting to explain what led them to

commit their crimes. In Benfey’s words, they:

are not whodunits – we know right from the start who the murderer is. They are

closer to the genre now called thrillers, where the crime itself and the psychology

of the killer are more the focus than the question of who committed the crime. If

there is a mystery in these tales, it is the mystery of motive: not who did it but

why. (29)

The driving force behind the narrative is figuring out why the narrator behaves in the way

that they do and that led them to commit such violent acts. One of the dominant ideas

within “The Black Cat” is “the ways in which the murderer is a mystery to himself”

(Benfey 29). During the narrative, the narrator is retracing his steps so to speak. He even

takes the listener back to their earliest years, saying, “From my infancy I was noted for

the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so

conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions” (Poe 192). He retells the events

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of his life leading up to the crime in the hopes of discovering what caused him to commit

murder. This narrator immediately assures the readers that he is indeed sane. He says,

“Yet, mad am I not – and very surely do I not dream” (192). The speaker, “as Poe’s

unreliable narrators tend to do, ironically assures the reader of his sanity by saying that he

does not expect belief” (Dern 165). In order to put the listener at ease, the narrator

attempts to confirm that he is of sound mind by saying that he does not expect the reader

to believe him because he would be insane to expect that.

The details of the murders within “The Black Cat” are gruesome and in-depth.

Not only is there the maiming and later hanging of his beloved pet, Pluto, there is the

violent murder of his wife, and the meticulous description of hiding the evidence of that

crime. Here, there is a connection to the self-vexing which the narrator of “The Black

Cat” mentions. This very “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself” (194) is present

within both tales. Perversity within the human mind leads to the overwhelming desire to

“vex” and disturb the soul. The narrator includes vivid and somewhat gross details about

his crimes. Some of the descriptive phrases are: “deliberately cut one of its eyes from the

socket” (194), “buried the axe in her brain” (198), and “The corpse, already greatly

decayed and clotted with gore” (201). Within these descriptions, the narrator reveals to

his listener the more violent and graphic moments from his past. This evokes a much

stronger feeling of disgust and abhorrence for the narrator. While the murders themselves

are not the focal point of the tale nor does it exhibit perverseness, they are still important

enough for the narrator to include in his retelling of his story.

“The Black Cat” opens with an unusual and antithetical statement: “For the most

wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit

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belief” (Poe 192). The contrast of the words “wild” and “homely” is seemingly

contradictory. The effect of this opening sentence sets the story’s tone. According to “’A

Problem in Detection’: The Rhetoric of Murder in Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’” by John A.

Dern, “the effect of this opening contrast is narrative ambiguity with regard to ordinary

domestic life and that which opposes it” (166). It is a perversion of a classic domestic

tale. He continues, “My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly,

succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events” (192). However,

within this “homely” narrative, there are “wild” events which take place. The wildness of

this ordinary and plain setting and characters (a married couple with pets) is revealed as

the events unfold. Due to the influence of alcohol, this domestic happiness quickly

morphs into violence and unhappiness directed at both the narrator’s wife and his beloved

cat, Pluto. It is interesting to note that only Pluto is named within the story. It is

interesting to note that Pluto is the god of underworld. The cat’s name is therefore related

to death, punishment, judgement, and damnation. Perhaps this is to reflect that Pluto, not

the narrator, is the main feature of the tale. He is the one that receives the most violence

and maltreatment from the narrator, and without him, the narrator would not have

increasingly given into his perverse urges. It is with Pluto that the narrator first gives in to

his perverse desire to do harm. Before any harm comes to the wife, Pluto is the one that is

harmed when his eye is barbarically cut out by his owner. While there is definitely

violence against his wife, most of the narrator’s violent behavior is taken out against his

once-beloved pet, Pluto.

The narrator of “The Black Cat” describes his “tenderness of heart” and “the

docility and humanity of his disposition” (192). He begins his life as a very kind and

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caring person with no signs of violent behavior. He makes the point to tell readers that he

was very fond of animals and “derived from it one of my principle sources of pleasure”

(192). According to Scott Peeples, “‘The Black Cat,’ for instance, exemplifies one of

Poe’s central out-of-place-and-time concerns, namely the imp of the perverse, the instinct

for self-destruction” (120). Self-destruction is central to “The Black Cat.” Not only does

the narrator commit murder, he furthers his destruction by condemning himself out of the

overwhelming urge to gloat to the police.

The narrator lists all of the pets he and his wife owned. Last on the list is a cat,

which he describes in great detail. Not only is this cat, Pluto, “a remarkably large and

beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree,” he was the

narrator’s “favorite pet and playmate” (193). For many years, their friendship remained

strong and healthy. However, “the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance” (193) had

greatly altered the narrator’s disposition, thus making him cruel and violent towards not

only his wife but his pets. Alcohol is blamed by the narrator for their change in

temperament and their increased anger. He states that, “through the instrumentality of the

Fiend Intemperance” (193), he was urged to commit violent acts against those that loved

him. Although he spared Pluto from his violence and ill temperament for a while, the

narrator recalls how, one night:

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 fiendish malevolence,

gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a

pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one

of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable

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 atrocity. (194)

Unlike all other violent acts committed by the narrator against his wife and his other pets,

this specific act stirs within him a great sense of shame. After the black cat recovered

from the incident:

He went about the house as usual, but, as might be expected, fled in extreme

terror at my approach. I had so much of my old heart left, as to be at first grieved

by this evident dislike on the part of a creature which had once so loved me. But

this feeling soon gave place to irritation. And then came, as if to my final and

irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. (194)

The impulse which drove the narrator to hang Pluto, not the hanging itself, is perverse.

Unlike murder, the spirit of perversity is an impulse which nearly every human

experiences. There are times when, even though we know something is wrong, we do it

anyway. However, this sense of shame and regret is very short-lived. The following day,

the narrator describes that they “experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse,

for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal

feeling, and the soul remained untouched” (194). They quickly move on from this violent

event with no more sadness or shame. The narrator is becoming consumed by the spirit of

the perverse. While this story is not centered around the murders themselves, the action

of the narrative is created by these violent actions. According to Benfey:

These are not so much stories of crime and detection as of crime and confession.

For Poe, crime itself is not intellectually compelling. The actual business of

murder is hurried through in both tales under discussion. In Poe’s fullest

exploration of the motiveless crime, “The Imp of the Perverse,” the crime takes

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 up almost no space at all. We don’t know till we are two-thirds of the way

through the largely essayistic text that we’re reading a crime story at all. (36)

While I agree that the crime itself is hurried through and it is not central to the stories,

“The Black Cat” spends much more time and the narrator provides many details to the

reader about his violent acts. The first major act of violence in “The Black Cat” comes

when the narrator removes one of Pluto’s eyes. The narrator has progressed from thinking

an angry thought all the way to indulging their impulse. He notes, “This spirit of

perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the

soul to vex itself – to offer violence to its own nature – to do wrong for the wrong’s sake

only – that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted

upon the unoffending brute” (194). The narrator describes his act in detail. The narrator’s

violence does not end with the partial blinding of his once beloved pet. The narrator fully

consummates his perversity when he takes the life of Pluto. As he recalls:

One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the

limb of a tree; - hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the

bitterest remorse at my heart; - hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and

because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; - hung it 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 – if such a thing were possible – even beyond the

reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God. (194-95)

By hanging his once beloved friend, the narrator is succumbing to perversity. He makes a

point to reinforce how much he knew it was wrong and how meaningless it was to do

such a terrible thing. In this moment, he has surrendered to the imp of the perverse. He

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wanted to hang the cat because it was a moral shortcoming and the cat had done nothing

to hurt him. The narrator seems to have murdered his beloved black cat due to the fact

that the cat loved him. This is a perverse motivation indeed. Perhaps the narrator’s

knowledge of the fact that the cat now feared him fed his perverse and violent nature,

thus leading him to commit the murderous act. Shortly after this terrible act, the narrator

finds another black cat which closely resembled Pluto in all ways but one: “this cat had a

large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the

breast” (196). The cat was even missing one of its eyes just as Pluto was after the narrator

brutishly removed it. Perhaps out of a slight tinge of guilt, the narrator allows the cat to

follow him home and become his new pet.

As time went on, the narrator remarks, “At such times, although I longed to

destroy it with a blow, I was yet withheld from so doing, partly by a memory of my

former crime, but chiefly – let me confess it at once – by absolute dread of the beast”

(197). This new cat serves as a constant reminder of his terrible and perverse act. By

being confronted by this sort of doppelganger of Pluto, the narrator shifts back into the

mindset of perversity. With his guilt and continued gin-drinking, he begins to hate the

second cat. As time goes on, and the narrator’s abhorrence of the new cat grows, the

patch of white fur appears to the narrator in “the image of a hideous – of a ghastly thing –

of the GALLOWS! – oh mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime – of Agony

and of Death!” (197). This fantasy of seeing the gallows within the cat’s fur not only

foreshadows the narrator’s own execution by the hangman, it also reflects his growing

lack of sanity. He admits that, “Evil thoughts became my sole intimates – the darkest and

most evil of thoughts” (198). The narrator becomes furious with everything around him,

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including his wife who had endured plenty of abuse from her husband. Perhaps because

the wife tolerated his behavior, the narrator became irked and angry just as he did with

Pluto. Shortly after, the narrator recalls the day when he and his wife travel to the cellar:

The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong,

exasperated me to madness. Uplifting an axe, and forgetting, in my wrath, the

childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal

which, of course would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished.

But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded, by the interference,

into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried

the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan. (198)

The narrator takes more time to explain the sequence of events surrounding the murders.

He was goaded by his wife’s attempt to intercept the axe and prevent him from killing the

cat. While he still does not focus on these crimes themselves too much, he does provide

more information about what exactly happened. Unlike the descriptions of Pluto’s

blinding and hanging, the narrator does not spend very much time discussing the murder

of his wife. He only says that he buried an axe in her head and she fell down silently.

Dern argues that, “Pluto’s successor, ostensibly, was the catalyst for the narrator’s

murderous attack on his wife” (170). After all, the cat was the initial target for the axe. It

was only after the wife interfered that she became the victim. Without showing any sign

of remorse, the narrator sets to figuring out how to dispose of his wife’s body and conceal

his murderous act. Eventually the narrator concludes, “I determined to wall it up in the

cellar – as the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their victims”

(199). Once this is decided and the task is complete, the narrator does not give his murder

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a second thought. He seems content and satisfied with what he has done.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspect of this story is the supreme satisfaction

and security that the narrator experiences following his gruesome deeds. The narrator of

“The Black Cat” becomes satisfied and triumphant after his wife has been walled up

inside the cellar. He brags about how well he did in concealing the body. This

braggadocios behavior is what leads to his arrest. Had he remained quiet, he would have

evaded detection. Since Pluto’s successor is no longer present, the narrator relaxes and

admits, “It did not make its appearance during the night – and thus for one night at least,

since its introduction into the house, I soundly and tranquilly slept; aye, slept even with

the burden of murder upon my soul!” (199). The murder of his wife does not affect him

one bit, and so long as the cat stays away, he is incredibly content. He even admits, “The

guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little” (200). Had the narrator let the police leave

the cellar when they were satisfied, he never would have been arrested.

This confession is more perverse than the murders themselves because he

destroys his own life by speaking. According to Brown, one of Poe’s missions as a writer

is “to tell what cannot, or should not, be told” (197). In this case, it is the narrator who

tells what should not be revealed. In another fit of perversity, the narrator is beckoned to

reveal his terrible secrets. He is unable to remain quiet and secure in his life after murder,

and he blames the imp of the perverse for this downfall. Not only did it call him to

commit murder, it called him to behave in a braggy and overconfident way. This behavior

ultimately leads to his downfall.

The narrator’s soul vexes itself when the police visit his home to search for his

missing wife. He describes this urge as “the rabid desire to say something” because “the

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glee at [his] heart was too strong to be restrained” (200). He must give into his perverse

impulses because he experiences a strong and overwhelming urge to fulfill them. As he

tapped the wall which concealed his wife’s corpse with a cane, there is a hellish sound

which answers him from within the wall. Once the police hear this, they set to excavating

whatever is sealed within:

The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the

eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of

fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose

informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up

within the tomb! (201)

The narrator is the one who gave into his perverse impulses and displayed arrogance and

braggadocio. He becomes one of the examples that the narrator of “The Imp of the

Perverse” might have used in the first part of his story.

The narrator of “The Imp of the Perverse” opens his account by discussing the

perversity that affects all of humanity. He goes into different examples of what this

impulse can do, and he defines what the perverse is. Every person is susceptible to this

impulse, and he spends most of his narrative discussing this element of the psyche. The

perverse is something that reflects the irrational impulse to do the very thing that

someone knows is wrong. It is the urge to do the wrong thing for the sole purpose of

committing wrong deeds. This imp of the perverse, as the narrator calls it, is real but

overlooked and ignored because the majority of psychologists, and phrenologists, focus

on the rational. However, as the narrator comes to reveal later on, man often acts

irrationally and follows the perverse impulse. The perverse is not something rare or

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difficult to understand; in fact, it is a natural impulse which thwarts the rational while

also being perfectly normal. Anyone and everyone has perverse impulses from time to

time.

In the first half of the story, the narrator outlines the progression of perverseness

within a human being, almost as if he is writing a nonfiction or scientific article on the

subject:

The speaker is aware that he displeases; he has every intention to please, he is

usually curt, precise, and clear; the most laconic and luminous language is

struggling for utterance upon his tongue, it is only with difficulty that he restrains

himself from giving it flow; he dreads and deprecates the anger of him whom he

addresses; 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, (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in

defiance of all consequences,) is indulged. (204)

First comes a thought to act on the anger, then comes a wish and then a desire to fulfill

that wish. From here, there comes a strong desire to indulge this idea which is in turn an

uncontrollable urge which must be indulged. As the narration of “The Imp of the

Perverse” explains, “We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we

grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably, we

remain. By slow degrees our sickness, and dizziness, and horror, become merged in a

cloud of unnamable feeling” (Poe 205). At first, someone’s reason and rationality tries to

stop them from jumping into the abyss. There is something so tempting about jumping

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because the very thought of giving into the desire is overwhelming. Because the rational

part of the mind tells them not to jump into the abyss, they must. Therefore, “because our

reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore, do we the more impetuously

approach it” (205). Both the narrator of “The Imp of the Perverse” and “The Black Cat”

are standing on this brink before they give into their perverse desires. Reason tells them

not to give in, but this only affirms that they must satisfy their wish. The narrator then

describes how strong perversity is and how irresistible this urge becomes. He says:

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. (203)

Through this impulse, there is a strong desire to reject wellness and reasonableness.

Perversity causes an aversion to one’s better sense of well-being and arouses intensely

antagonistic emotions within its victim.

It is finally revealed to the reader why the narrator spends so much time

discussing this impulse. He says, “I have said thus much, that in some measure I may

answer your question – that I may explain to you why I am here – that I may assign to

you something that shall have at least the faint aspect of a cause for my wearing these

fetters, and for my tenanting this cell of the condemned” (205-206). Unlike the narrator

of “The Black Cat,” who tells the readers immediately that he is awaiting execution, this

narrator tells his readers much later that he is condemned to death. This makes for a very

different reading experience as it is not clear why the narrator is so invested in exploring

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this perverse impulse of man. In “The Imp of the Perverse,” the details of the crime are

very limited. In fact, the murderer says, “But I need not vex you with impertinent details”

(206). To the speaker, there is no interest or intrigue behind the crime. For them, it is not

interesting or important. What matters to them is not the actual act of murder. However, it

is still important to discuss why the narrator commits his crime. The narrator says of his

crime, “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”

(206). The narrator deliberated for months before he chose on using a poisoned candle

which would murder his victim once it was lit; thus, the death was ruled by the coroner as

“Death by the visitation of God” (206). He spent a great deal of time and thought about

this to a great extent in order to avoid detection. The narrator had indeed carried out the

perfect crime. The only clear motivation for the murder that the narrator provides is

within his words, “Having inherited his estate, all went well with me for years” (206).

The narrator chose to murder his victim for a monetary gain and to improve his own life.

However, this wellness that lasted for several years comes to an end due to the narrator’s

perverse urge to speak about his success in delivering the perfect murder. The narrator

asserts that he is “one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse” (206).

Much like the narrator of “The Black Cat,” he is condemned to death because he

followed his perverse urges. Had he not experienced the perverse urge to confess, he

never would have been caught.

The narrator in “The Imp of the Perverse” rests secure in his safety and his

success in getting away with murder. Once his victim’s death by a poisoned candle goes

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undetected by the coroner, the narrator notes, “It is inconceivable how rich a sentiment of

satisfaction arose in my bosom as I reflected upon my absolute security” (206). However,

as time passes on, the narrator becomes increasingly aware of the need to tell others about

fulfilling his flawless murder plan. The narrator cannot keep quiet because he is

compelled by the perverse impulse to speak. As the narrator of “The Imp of the Perverse”

says, his own conscience “vexed” him with “a haunting and harassing thought. It

harassed because it haunted” (206). He seems to feel an overwhelming compulsion to

further solidify his safety and security. Even though he had already eluded the law and

avoided detection or suspicion, his perverse impulse to confess leads to his downfall. He

begins to reassure himself by repeating the phrase “I am safe” (Poe 207) perpetually. The

climax of the story is where the narrator confesses. He recalls:

One day, whilst sauntering along the streets, I arrested myself in the act of

murmuring, half aloud, these customary syllables. In a fit of petulance, I

remodelled them thus: - ‘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 into my heart. I had had some experience in these fits of perversity,

(whose nature I have been at some trouble to explain,) 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. 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

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 overwhelmed me with new terror, for, alas! I well, too still quickened my pace. I

bounded like a madman through the thoroughfares. At length, the populace took

the alarm, and pursued me. I felt then the consummation of my fate. (206-207).

The narrator’s deeply buried secret sprang forward from his conscience and into the

public for all to hear. By his own doing, he sealed his fate of death by execution. This

clearly leads to his arrest, and his own mind betrayed him by compelling him to speak.

Unlike his murder, this act of confessing represents the imp of perversity. The narrator’s

overwhelming urge to solidify his safety resulted in his outward voicing of his guilt in a

fit of perversity. He is now consigned “to the hangman and to hell” (207) by speaking of

his crime. The irony of this situation is that, had he remained quiet, he would have

evaded execution for the rest of his life. This is what makes the confession so perverse.

His own words unraveled his safety. The narrator of “The Imp of the Perverse” ends the

tale, asking, “To-day I wear these chains, and am here! To-morrow I shall be fetterless! –

but where?” (207). This haunting realization that he will die tomorrow leads the narrator

to question where he will end up. There is an uncertain and frightening aspect of

perversity which leads people into danger and, in some cases, death.

In “The Imp of the Perverse,” and “The Black Cat,” the murders as well as the

confessions of the murderers marks the perversity within each tale. Had they remained

silent, they would have never been arrested and currently be awaiting their execution.

Their crimes would have been undetected and unknown had they not followed their

perverse impulses. However, what makes these short stories all the more compelling and

puzzling is why the narrators confess. Reading “The Black Cat” with “The Imp of the

Perverse” as an outline of sorts illuminates the many ways in which the two tales are

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interconnected. While there are a few slight differences (the method of murder, the mode

of confession), these two tales center around the spirit of perversity and the

overwhelming impulse of the soul to vex itself. The perverse functions as something like

an innate, self-vexing form of Freud’s theory of the uncanny. After all, it too is

simultaneously “homely” and unfamiliar. Also, like the uncanny, the perverse impulse is

scary in the sense that it abandons rationality and reason, and it can impact any and

everyone. The perverse is a part of who we are as humans but it is also part of what

destroys us. The narrator of “The Imp of the Perverse” warns his readers that no one is

exempt from experiencing fits of perversity, and while its affect varies from person to

person, we are all prone to doing wrong for wrong’s sake.

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 VI. CONCLUSION

Given Poe’s status as one of the most well-known and beloved American writers

to emerge from the nineteenth century, it is no surprise that there have been countless

interpretations and readings of his tales. The wide range of his works spans from love

poems like “Annabel Lee” to detective stories like “The Purloined Letter.” However,

perhaps his most popular style of writing arguably lies in the grotesque, horrifying, and

disarming tales that stir fear and anxiety within his readers. Certainly, there is much more

to Poe than these types of stories. Nonetheless, I am most drawn to these particular works

that focus on murder and terror. Maybe this is due to the fact that these types of stories

were read to me before bed as a child, or maybe it is due to the way Poe explores the

complexity of the human mind and the often irrational behavior of man. Either way, there

is something about tales such as “The Black Cat” and “The Masque of the Red Death”

that call out to me and so many others.

The previous chapters have explored the presence of the uncanny as well as

perversity within some of Poe’s most famous short stories. Through this lens, I have

offered my readings of these five tales with the goal of discovering a relationship

between Poe, perversity, and the uncanny. Between the five short stories, there are

similar elements that connect them. For example, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,”

and “The Man of the Crowd,” especially, there is a sense of intellectual uncertainty

experienced by the narrators. Behind this unknowability and uncertainty lies Freud’s

theory of the uncanny. When someone is unsure of their own minds and thoughts, they

begin to doubt their reality. In “The Man of the Crowd,” there is something familiar

about the pursued man to the narrator, but he is never sure what it is about the man that

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bothers him so much. As it turned out, the narrator saw himself in the man he stalked,

although he never admits this or even realizes it himself. While one pursues an

unreadable man throughout the streets of London to no avail, and the other spends time at

a gloomy and haunting estate that greatly affects his psyche, neither of them receive the

answers that they seek. Instead, they are left wondering what it was that was real and

what was not. The uncanniness of death is relevant to several of the tales and is another

connecting element. In fact, death is present in all of the selected stories except “The Man

of the Crowd” (and even there, the narrator seems to fear that the mysterious figure is

some kind of criminal, possibly a cut-throat). No matter what form death takes (the Red

Death, the reanimation of Madeline Usher, the murder of Pluto and the narrator’s wife, or

death by a poisoned candle), it comes for all in due time. Poe uses his characters and

narratives to remind his readers of the transience of life, which is a somewhat terrifying

reminder.

Along with death, the perverse impulse is another universal factor within these

short stories. Doing something wrong because it is wrong does not only affect the

narrators in “The Black Cat,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” and “The Fall of the House of

Usher.” It affects all of humanity to varying degrees. It could be said that these fictional

characters serve as a warning to the readers that they, too, could fall victim to this spirit

of perversity in a detrimental way. Not many people will make self-incriminating

confessions or hang their beloved pet in fits of perversity; however, it is a startling

reminder that any and every one experiences the perverse urge to behave irrationally and

without fear of consequences just to do what is wrong.

Throughout this thesis, it has been a goal of mine to incorporate psychoanalytic

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elements in my readings of Poe’s enigmatic and terrifying short stories. To explore the

complexity of the human mind through the fictional characters was another. Despite the

differences that exist between the five tales, there lies these important connections I have

previously mentioned. Reading Poe’s works through the lens of Freud’s “The ‘Uncanny’”

and with Poe’s own definition of perversity in mind, there emerge these real-life lessons

that can serve as gentle reminders to the reader that they are susceptible to perversity as

well as uncanny moments.

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