-It was so important because it was a landmark case, it was known for being the crime of the century, the first trial by media and the first to be dominated by forensic science.…
In the story “The Tell Tale Heart”, Poe shows that the narrator in the short story kills the old man because of his “vulture” eyes admits that he is ill “…Yes, I have been very ill…”. Tries to prove that he is sane but fails completely.…
His most well know works showcased his depression, in both The Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat he showed how his sadness had driven him to insanity. In both these stories, the unnamed narrator, Poe says that he has an unexplainable hatred toward something in The Tell Tale Heart he when contemplating why he wanted the old man dead he stated “He had the eye of a vulture -- a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold” this shows that the narrator is not mentally stable as he wants to kill a man just because of the way his eye…
The story begins with the declaration, “TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? . . . Hearken! And observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.” Notice how the author made sure to give very little detail on the story’s background, except that the narrator had an obsession with the old man’s deformed eye. (“One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold . . .”) which made it difficult to pin point an exact audience, to whom he could have been talking to, that is until we realize that we don’t know anything about the relationship between the old man and the narrator, although it can be presumed that the younger man is a nephew tasked with caring for his aging uncle, or, possibly, a servant whose mental state has diminished by virtue of his daily exposure to the old man’s eye. Poe chose not to provide those details as he also, doesn’t provide us with who he’s speaking with. But the only thing we receive is how the narrator has continuous references to his mental state (“Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me”). Which is why the audience is led to believe that the reason he is describing is crime in such great detail is because he’s trying to convince his psychiatrist of his…
He takes the negative approach of things, which I say is based from his childhood. As it says in this quote by Poe, "I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity," it seems that he always had seen the negative of things in life instead of positive. As Poe made for his character to obsess over the eye and the heartbeat, I feel that he used a lot of through his negative approach. There is a possibility that he could have used the obsession that he has on his negative and bad childhood and put it into a story, giving the man something to obsess and go insane over. Though Poe didn't go as insane as the man in the story and killed someone, he's definitely not as sane as he could be. He had a different perspective on life, and it wasn't a wrong kind of perspective but it was just not the normal one that you wouldn't normally hear about. Another quote from Poe, "I do not suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it." This quote really makes me think what it was to see life in his shoes. Another reason why his stories were so different and so interesting because he took what he was feeling and put it in book…
After carefully examining Edgar Allan Poe’s conditions, I have come to the conclusion that Poe fell victim to a gang engaging in cooping and later died of alcohol poisoning. The Smithsonian Magazine states that Poe had a high intolerance to alcohol, so the reward given to him by the gang members likely influenced his death. Not only was cooping a popular practice in Baltimore at the time, Poe was found wandering about the streets near a voting poll where cooping was practiced. He was wearing second hand clothes, which were meant to pose as a disguise. As stated by the University of Maryland, Poe had a long history with the abuse of alcohol and opiate drugs, but he hadn't consumed any alcohol within six months before his death. Knowing his…
To begin with, the use of insanity in Poe’s works is a prominent indication of the disintegrating reality experienced by the characters. Consequently, this characteristic of insanity foreshadows the emergence of original unity by destroying the psychological state of the character as well as his or her physical surroundings. To clarify, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick is the individual that experiences insanity in the highest degree throughout the story and the concept of Destructive Transcendence materializes. Edgar Allan Poe created Roderick to be incapable of distinguishing between imagination and reality which illustrates his…
This absurdity can be seen when the caretaker, everynight at midnight, would go inside the elderly man’s room to watch for the vulture eye to open while he slept, “Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in”(Poe 1). In this statement, the caretaker would slowly, to not disturb or wake the old man, thrust his head inside the bedroom to watch as he slept. The caretaker clearly shows a dark side of his personality from this action, and further progresses this through believing his action of watching someone sleep to be something funny and even amusing. In addition, the caretaker, after dismembering the corpse and hiding it, allows three officers to enter his house. Even though, the caretaker had just suffocated the elderly man, he decides to pull chairs up for the officers before realizing the beat from the old man’s heart could be heard, “It was a low, dull, quick sound--much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton” (Poe 3). The body of the elderly man was stone cold dead according to the caretaker, and had even been torn apart after that. Therefore, the beating of the old man’s heart was merely in the caretakers head, showing signs that the caretakers mind had most certainly turned into a crazy, mush of…
. . . Mr. Poe is at once the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works who has written in America. It may be that we should qualify our remark a little, and say that he might be, rather than that he always is, for he seems sometimes to mistake his phial of prussic-acid for his inkstand.” — (James Russell Lowell, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Graham’s Magazine, February 1845.) Although he was heavily criticized, many seemed to view him as genius. “That perfection of horror which abounds in his writings, has been unjustly attributed to some moral defect in the man. But I perceive not why the competent critic should fall into this error. Of all authors, ancient or modern, Poe has given us the least of himself in his works. He wrote as an artist. He intuitively saw what Schiller has so well expressed, that it is an universal phenomenon of our nature that the mournful, the fearful, even the horrible, allures with irresistible…
The protagonists from Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories are usually insane people with revenge and murder in their mind. Firstly, they deny insanity and try to hide it. Secondly, always seek revenge without giving proper explanation as to why. Finally, they always seek out their revenge by committing a murder, proving that denying insanity is the easiest way to prove to be insane.…
(TH) In Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, the protagonist Blanche Dubois goes insane. (A1) At the beginning of the play, Blanche depends on alcohol but wants to hide it. (A2) According to the narrator, “she springs up and crosses to it, and removes a whiskey bottle. She pours a half tumbler at the sink” (18). (A3) In this citation, alcohol is used because Blanche Dubois uses alcohol to distract herself from reality and to retreat further into a world of fantasy, so this habit of hers is often hidden. (B1) (TR) In addition to her alcohol habit, Blanche does not want to be alone because of all the deaths that happened. (B2) In Blanche words, “I want to be near you, got to be with somebody, I can’t be alone” (23)! (B3) These words that Blanche says is the first hint of her madness. (B4) Also with this Blanche states, “funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but…
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” has received wide praise for its accurate depiction of madness and the symptoms attributed to mental breakdowns (Shumaker 1985). While these symptoms may seem obvious from today’s psychological perspective, Gilman was writing at the close of the 19th century when the discipline of psychology was still emerging out of a rudimentary psychiatric approach to treating the mentally ill. Though doctors have attempted to write about the treatment of insanity since ancient Greece, the history of madness has most often been characterized by a series of popular images, images that may have stunted the development of a medical model of mental illness: as a wild irrationality, an imaginative and corrupt gothic horror, a violent cruelty that must be confined in asylums, and lastly as a mere nervous disorder. The critic Annette Kolodny suggests that contemporary readers of Gilman’s story most likely learned how to follow her fictional representation of mental breakdown by reading the earlier stories of Edgar Allen Poe (Shumaker 1985), and indeed we can locate these strata of historical representations in both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” But where Poe’s depictions seem to confirm negative – and thus not therapeutically useful – stereotypes of madness, Gilman tempers her representations through the emerging psychological model, which allowed her to articulate a new image anticipating the 20th century hope of curing mental diseases through psychological expression.…
Inspiring the famous novels and movies we know today, the Gothic first occurred during the Romantic Period in the early eighteenth century. Before making its appearance in literature, the style was shown through different English architectures, by the work of visionaries such as Horace Walpole. After purchasing Strawberry Hill in 1740, Walpole began remodeling the estate into what he described as “Gothick” manner. Adding towers, battlements, arched doors and windows, the mansion quickly became influential as people came from all over the country to visit and get inspiration on gothicizing their own homes.…
The theme for this short story is guilt, the guilt the narrator feels after taking the old man’s eye and eventually his life is what causes him to feeling he has to reassure himself he is sane, and to confessing to his crime. The narrator feels he must rid the old man of his eye for no other reason than that of his eye. So the narrator “undid the lantern cautiously-oh, so cautiously-I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye” (440). The narrator continued to do this for eight nights, until on the eighth night he was able to successfully liberate the old man from his eye which “chilled the very marrow in [the narrators] bones” (441). After the narrator is able to free the eye from the old man is when the guilt kicked in, and Poe used the symbol of the old man’s heart beating to signify the narrator’s guilt. “Now I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart” (441).…
Firstly, the narrator views himself as an ordinary person, who is nowhere near insane. According to the text, it states, “…I had been and am, but why will you say that I am mad? The disease has sharpened my senses-not destroyed not dulled them,”(Poe 294). The narrator does not find himself crazy for murdering the old man and finds his actions to be normal. Along with that, the narrator thinks of himself for being very wise. For example, “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded with what caution-with what foresight-with what dissimulation I went to work!”(Poe 295). He found himself very clever for devising a plan with such precise steps and how he made sure to have no trace of blood left behind. As you can see, the narrator views himself as a normal person who is not crazy.…