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nileshisdied · 6 years ago

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As Stuart Levine observes, “It is fair to say that in most of his stories which raise moral issues, Poe’s concern is focused elsewhere.” Edgar Poe: Seer and Craftsman (DeLand, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1972), p. 181.

In these and similar tales Poe’s interest centers on the processes of detection, leaving the moral issues of the crimes either largely unaddressed or curiously deflected.

Edward Davidson, for example, observes that “Poe removed all moral and religious considerations as far as possible from any social code or body of religious warrants.” Operating in a universe in which there is “no other god but the self as god,”4 each of the characters “in Poe’s moral inquiries is his own moral arbiter, lodged in a total moral anarchy. Society has invented law and justice, but these are mere illusion and exact no true penalty.”5 Similarly, Vincent Buranelli insists, “Poe does not touch morality. Although his aesthetic theory admits that goodness may be a by-product of art, he himself does not look for it. Sin and crime are absent from this part of the universe; and the terrible deeds that abound there are matters of psychology, not of ethics.”6

Thus, to deflect the significance of a crime from the social and moral to the psychological has a specific social and legal meaning, most apparent in the instance of an insanity defense. Such deflections, in fact, were a significant part of a controversy over the use of the insanity defense in the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly in the early 1840s. Three stories from this period—“The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), “The Black Cat” (1843), and “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845)—especially invite a reading in the context of the insanity-defense controversy because each of the three tales includes a self-defensive, insane murderer whose story is told within the processes of legal justice.7 The stories suggest that Poe��s narrowed focus on the aberrant psychology of the accused criminal, for whatever it owes to his aesthetic theory, general “otherworldliness,” and private demons, also has a locus in specific jurisprudential issues of his day. Poe’s familiarity with the scientific/medical accounts of insanity of his day has been well established,12 and his awareness of the issues of the insanity-defense controversy can be linked to two specific cases in which the defense was employed, both occurring in the environs of Philadelphia where Poe resided between 1838 and 1844, and both featuring the same attorney, Peter A. Browne, who “had distinguished himself … for his great subtilty and deep metaphysical research in the matter of insanity.”13 In the first of these, James Wood was acquitted on the grounds of insanity of the deliberate murder of his daughter. Lengthy accounts of the trial appeared daily in the Philadelphia Public Ledger from 24 to 30 March 1840, and a comment at its conclusion appearing in the 1 April 1840 issue of Alexander’s Weekly Messenger has been attributed to Poe.14 The importance of the Mercer case for Poe’s fiction, however, may be less its notoriety and lurid details than the fact that insanity was made the primary grounds of defense.18 A complete transcript of Browne’s opening remarks on the defense was printed on the front page of the 31 March 1843 issue of the Philadelphia Public Ledger. In light of the likelihood that Poe read them, Browne’s arguments are interesting and significant because they include a fairly thorough synopsis of the main legal, medical, and philosophical issues underlying the insanity defense. They also reflect the terms of the controversy surrounding its increased use. Thus, at the very least, Browne’s remarks provide a window on the public consciousness of the insanity defense—for both Poe and his readers—during the time in which “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Imp of the Perverse” were written and published.19

In “The Black Cat” this attempt at rational explanation also reveals a pattern of madness that in certain respects parallels the monomania in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In the narrator’s perception of the images of a cat on the wall of the burnt house and of a gallows on the breast of Pluto’s successor, both of which he interprets as signs of a demonic persecution, we may recognize elements of delusion.

Clearly there is an imbalance in the narrator’s makeup. His exceptional sweetness can find a reciprocating perfection of fidelity and kindness only in the mindless devotion of animals. Although no “wild beast” himself, the narrator ironically exhibits his monomania in attributing the values of both good and evil to the bestial. It is in this regard that the play of issues recognizable in the insanity-defense controversy becomes particularly interesting. The narrator, by his own account, is driven to his crimes by an irrational compulsion which he calls “the spirit of PERVERSENESS.” This spirit, “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,” is defined as a principle of negation, the “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 this “irresistible impulse” has nullified his will against the dictates of a still viable conscience is manifest when he hangs Pluto, as he says, “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 infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God” (p. 852).

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