O'Brien Poe Blog

Edgar Allen Poe’s approach to showing the natural depravity of man takes on a different tact than the Puritan approach to ideas of savagery because of a very basic difference: while the Puritans view savagery as emanating from the wilderness and the inhabitants therein, Poe’s view has that same savagery coming out of the civilized world. His protagonists are always male, often upper- to middle-class, happily married, well off, but with a kind of bottled resentment. This same resentment is brought to the surface and erupts into violence. That violence is often used against animals or women.

            Poe sees violence as being a natural aspect of man, but often the impetus for this savage behavior is an animal of some kind. Even the titles of some of his works, “The Raven,” “The Black Cat,” are named for animals that become central to the narrative. In “The Raven,” the narrator describes the bird appearing to him on a windowsill: “In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.” When confronted with nature, the narrator is initially taken with it. The raven is “stately” and tied to “days of yore.” This is clearly an important bird. At the same time, much like the cat in “The Black Cat,” the raven is an ill omen. While black cats are known as symbols of bad luck in general, the raven is specifically linked to death.

The other major theme in both works is that the reasons these encounters with a non-human element bring out such negative response is never explained. The narrator in “The Black Cat” sums the situation up best: “This dread was not exactly a dread of physical evil - and yet I should be at a loss how otherwise to define it.” This is a man who wants to hurt things and he does not know why. The shift in emotions is inexplicable even to the person experiencing it. And he does not even limit himself to a singular social ill: the character progresses from abusive to a drunkard to finally being a murderer. “Ligeia” has a narrator who becomes an opium addict who hates his second wife, a hatred described as “belonging more to demon than to man.” The case could be made that the savagery expressed in these stories is pre-cultural, possibly even pre-human, but that falls apart to because there are no instances of female characters in these stories taking on a darker outlook, though that might have more to do with Poe’s issues with women. The great difference between the Puritans and Poe is that Poe acknowledges an innate evil in man. The natural world can bring it out, but it is not a source of evil.