Mental Disorder in E. A. Poe’s Prose

Mental Disorder in E. A. Poe’s Prose

In my essay, I will discuss mental disorder as a significant theme in the prose of Edgar Allan Poe. For these purposes, I have chosen three of his short stories: “The Fall of the House of Usher” (published in 1839), “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” (both published in 1843) with the chief focus on the first one. I have chosen them for they all handle the theme in question, yet each one of them in a different manner. The main body of the essay is divided into three parts, in which I will compare and contrast these three short stories discussing: first the characters of the stories affected by the mental disorder and its nature; then the pattern of the plot; and last the role of the narrator.

The reason I have chosen the three discussed short stories is that they share a common story pattern - a character suffering from a developing mental disease[1] who is eventually led to commit a murder of a close person and through this deed brought to his doom. Yet, the particularities of this pattern differ with each of the stories, and thus provide a rich overview for the purposes of the study. First, I will focus on the affected character and the nature of his condition. The main character of “The Black Cat” is clearly a man. His name is unknown. However, the reader learns to know a reasonable amount of information about his background. When he was a child he used to like animals above anything and he kept this affection for them until his adulthood. For that period of his life, he also attributed to himself “tenderness of heart[2]”. He married a woman who was kind, patient and shared the love for animals with him and together they took care of various pets. Among these pets, one has a privileged position, a cat named Pluto, so that the main character speaks of friendship and regard. The disease he suffers from is clearly alcoholism, for he first states that “my disease grew upon me - for what disease is like Alcohol[3],” and then, throughout the story, he refers to his drinking: “returning home, much intoxicated,” “soon drowned in wine all memory.” Of the main character of “The Tell-Tale Heart” the reader learns almost nothing – neither the gender (it may be assumed that he is a man as other Poe’s main characters), nor the name, and the only thing the reader learns is that he had close relationship to “the old man,” most likely his father. The disease he claims to have is “the over-acuteness of the senses[4],” hearing in particular. Most is known about the main character of “The Fall of the house of Usher”, a young man Roderick Usher. He is the last living male descendant of an ancient family. He is not married and he shares the manor to which his family has been bound with his twin sister, Madeline - “tenderly beloved sister” and “his sole companion for long years” as the narrator depicts her[5]. The disease he suffers from is also described in greater detail than in case of the previous short stories; the reader first learns general information that “the writer [Usher] spoke of acute bodily illness - of a mental disorder which oppressed him,” and then details when Ushers describes the nature of his condition stating that he has “suffered much from morbid acuteness of the senses[6].” Also, the way Roderick speaks is compared to a “lost drunkard or the irreclaimable eater of opium. The only thing the affected characters have in common is a beloved person (the wife and the cat, the father and the sister); this common aspect shall prove significant later when I will discuss the story pattern. In addition, there are more aspects shared always by two short stories out of three; the over-acuteness of senses as a mental disease, alcoholism (whether confessed as in case of the man in “The Black Cat” or suggested as at Roderick Usher) or the lack of names in case of “the Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”. As for the latter, some light may be shed on this fact later when I will discuss the narrator.

Second, I will discuss the plots of the three short stories and explain my claim that all of them share a common pattern. As I clarified above, the main character of “The Black Cat” is an alcoholic. As the result of this condition, he “grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others[7];” in other words, a gradual change of temper takes place. The way the plot develops is likewise gradual; the man under the influence of his changing temper first rips the eye of his favourite cat, then hangs it on the tree, then finds himself a new cat, which he gradually begins to hate, and last (after an unsuccessful attempt to kill the second cat) he murders his wife in affect. He bricks the corpse in a wall and feels relieved and self-confident, but in the end, his crime is exposed for he accidentally bricked the cat as well and its scream “utterly anomalous and inhuman” betrays the whereabouts of the corpse. In case of the significantly shorter “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the main protagonist states that a vulture-like eye of the old man irritated him to that extent that he “by degrees - very gradually - […] made up [his] mind to take the life of the old man.” He then describes a gradual process of entering the old man’s room at night in secrecy for a period of one week until, at last, the latter woke up, opened his vulture-like eye, and thus gave the main character the stimulus to commit the murder. After the murder, he hides the body under the floor, feels relieved and self-confident, but in the end (after he seats police inspectors in the very room where the old man’s corpse is hidden) he starts hearing a sound resembling one of a beating heart from underneath the floor, which eventually drives him to confession. In contrast to the previous two characters, Roderick in “The Fall of the House of Usher” does not undergo a gradual change; though a change is noted by the narrator when he describes his face stating that “in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these [Usher’s] features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much a change that I doubted to whom I spoke[8].” The turning point comes when the reader learns that Madeline (who too suffered from a disease - “a settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person and […] affections of a partially cataleptical character[9]”) has died and Roderick lays her body in a coffin into the family tomb. After that “an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of [Roderick]; “he shows the signs of nervousness and terror. In the end, the reader finds out that Roderick buried Madeline alive; she (after a few days) broke out of her coffin and comes back to Roderick who cannot stand it and dies. As shown above, a significant regularity may be found in the plot patterns of the three discussed short stories: the mental disorder as the initial state, its development resolving in the murder of a beloved person (even though in “The House of Usher” the reader is led to believe that Madeline died a natural death, Roderick in the end confesses to having heard “her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin[10]”), which returns back to them and proves to be their doom - Roderick dies instantly, the man in “The Black Cat” opens the story with the statement “to-morrow I die[11]” and the main character of “The Tell-Tale Heart” is an accused murderer, so the reader may assume that he is to be executed. In addition to this, there is one element which deserves a singular comment - paranoia as the climax of the mental disorder of the main characters. The main character of the “Tell-Tale Heart” first speaks of waking up with terror in the middle of the night, and then he starts hearing the watch-like sound which reminds him of human heartbeat. In case of the man from “The Black Cat” and Roderick Usher, the paranoia they develop is underlined by the use of omens which foreshadow the development of the story. In “The Black Cat,” it is first the image of a cat burned on the wall of the main character’s house, and then the shape of the gallows which he believes to see in the mark of white her of his second cat. As regards “The Fall of the House of Usher,” it is the parallel of Roderick with his mansion, whereas it is stated right at the beginning of the narrative that “’House of Usher’ [was] an appellation which seemed to include […] both the family and the family mansion[12].” Roderick himself then attributes certain sentience to the stones of the house and its surroundings. In the beginning, there is a fissure on the house’s wall which in the end “rapidly widened” and caused the crumbling of the whole building - in parallel to Madeline’s breaking out of the tomb which led to the death of Roderick’s. In a more immediate sense, Roderick’s paranoia lies in his hearing of Madeline’s movements as discussed above, which also more corresponds to his condition - the acuteness of senses. In case of all the characters, their at the first glance irrational fears come true, in which I find the most significant horror element of these stories.

Last, I will discuss the role of the narrator when handling the theme. In all the stories, the first person narrator is used. While in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator is the direct participant on the chain of events as well as the sufferer of the mental disorder, the narrator in “The Fall of the House of Usher” presents himself only as friend to Roderick Usher and works only as a mediator. As it was mentioned in the previous paragraph, the affected characters of “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are nameless; this may be due to the fact that they correspond to the persona of the narrator. In case of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the narrator (although a participant of the story, Roderick is the character affected by mental disorder) also does not reveal his own identity. The use of such indefinite (in the terms of personal identity) narrators enables the reader closer identification with them. The reader might thus expect to experience the story from the perspective of a mentally unstable person in case of the first two, and one of an unaffected observer in case of the last one. However, as the story of “The Fall of the House of Usher” develops, the narrator speaks of being affected by the environment in which the story takes place, “the bewildering furniture of this room” and Roderick himself when the he states that “his [Usher‘s] condition terrified […] infected me.” At the last night at Usher’s mansion, “an irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and […] there sat upon my [the narrator‘s] very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm[13].” Therefore, it may be stated that Poe’s narrator (and thus the reader as well), even as a mere observer, cannot escape the experience of mental disorder. In these stories where focus is set on mentally disturbed characters, the narrator also serves as the link with reason. However unlikely this may sound in case of “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” where the narrator is one with the affected character, it should be taken into consideration how the narrative is presented. In both cases, the narrator rejects madness: in the opening of “The Black Cat” he states “mad I am not[14]” and in “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator keeps denying madness throughout the whole story. Furthermore, the events are presented with logic and reasoning which contradicts the concept of insanity. In case of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the narrator figures as the sane counterpart to mentally unstable Roderick, and even when he (as I mentioned above) starts to feel affected by the place, he looks for logical reasons of his anxiety - especially in the end, when he reads “Mad Trist” to Roderick and hears sounds parallel to the story he is reading, he considers it “coincidence alone which had arrested [his] attention.” Still, in the end, as I already stated when I discussed paranoia, the logic is beaten - the first murderer is convicted by the walled up cat, the second by the heartbeat of the dead man, and Roderick by his sister who after a few days of lying in the coffin and few years of apathy found enough strength to break herself out and haunt her brother.

To conclude, it may be stated that common pattern of the use of the theme of mental disorder has indeed been found in the three discussed short stories. The initial condition of all the three affected characters underwent certain development which resulted in paranoia. They all caused death of a close person (whether on purpose, in rage or by accident), and this deed then turned against them and led into fulfilment of their fears and eventually to their doom. The narrator functions as a link between the sanity of the reader and the insanity the story handles. In the end, the latter prevails, in which the horror aspect of the stories may be found.

Bibliography:

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” An Exploration of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe. 15 May. 2009 < http://www.poestories.com/text.php?file=blackcat>.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” An Exploration of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe. 15 May. 2009 < http://www.poestories.com/text.php?file=blackcat>.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” An Exploration of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe. 15 May. 2009 .

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[1] with the word “disease“, I mean the description of a condition provided by Poe rather than proper medical description
[2] Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat,” An Exploration of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe, 15 May. 2009 .
[3] Poe, “The Black Cat.”
[4] Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” An Exploration of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe, 15 May. 2009 .
[5] Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” An Exploration of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe, 15 May. 2009 .
[6] Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
[7] Poe, “The Black Cat.”
[8] Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
[9] Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
[10] Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
[11] Poe, “The Black Cat.”
[12] Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
[13] Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
[14] Poe, “The Black Cat.”

Bibliography: Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” An Exploration of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe. 15 May. 2009 < http://www.poestories.com/text.php?file=blackcat>. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” An Exploration of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe. 15 May. 2009 < http://www.poestories.com/text.php?file=blackcat>. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” An Exploration of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe. 15 May. 2009 . [2] Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat,” An Exploration of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe, 15 May. 2009 . [5] Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” An Exploration of Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe, 15 May. 2009 .