The Perverse Philosophy of Edgar Allen Poe

Several of Edgar Allen Poe\u27s short tales mislead the reader into believing perversity to be a sort of horrifying primordial impulse, or the self-justification of insane men who have committed atrocities. In The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrators attempt to vindicate themselves from guilt by invoking the force of an elemental thought and its determinative compulsion to evil. They rationalize their behavior to evade the charge of madness. This philosophical presentation focuses on The Imp of the Perverse, Poe\u27s boldest drama of a murderer\u27s rationalization. The narrator directly defends himself, not necessarily from the crime but from the charge of mental illness, and he appeals to phrenology and Enlightenment science to make his case. Poe\u27s readers, ourselves members of the you or the jury, are led on startled and disgusted by a mysterious and dangerously evil force to view perversity as an anomaly in an otherwise judicious moral system. I think, however, that this is something of a trick. I argue that Poe renders the judgment of Enlightenment law - and so the judgment of the reader himself - truly perverse. Human wisdom postures toward control, whereas perversity as the events of the story show is the tool of a transcendent moral cycle