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Edgar Allan PoeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Romanticism, which spread to the US from Europe, dominated the American literary scene from the 1820s to the end of the Civil War and the rise of Realism. Reacting against the strict rationalism of the Age of Reason, Romantic texts focused on the importance of imagination, creativity, and emotions. Romantic writers were interested in the relationship of the inner mind to its external reality and used vivid sensory descriptions of nature or physical elements to convey an individual’s emotional state. The Romantic exploration of emotionality emphasized human fallibility and self-destructive impulses. Gothic literature and Dark Romanticism are closely related in their exploration of the darker aspects of the psyche, addressing feelings of guilt, apprehension, and fear. Poe’s fiction combines Romantic and Gothic elements.
Dark Romanticism’s use of vivid sensory description and focus on intense and destructive human emotions serves Poe’s poetic principles or purpose for writing. In Poe’s literary criticism, he emphasizes that didacticism, or moral lessons, have no place in art. In his own work, he applies a technique called the “unity of effect,” in which the writer’s primary purpose is to incite a particular emotional response in the reader. “The Imp of the Perverse,” like many of Poe’s stories, incites fear in the reader through an atmosphere of Gothic terror.
To evoke this terror, Poe crafts unbalanced narrators with a “limited comprehension of their own problems and states of mind” who are “victims of their own self-torturing obsessions” (Gargano, James W. “The Question of Poe’s Narrators.” College English, vol. 25, no. 3, 1963, pp. 177-183). In “The Imp of the Perverse,” the narrator’s eloquence and intellect, signaled through his technical vocabulary and rational arguments, are at odds with the irrational actions he describes. Readers are in the grip of an unbalanced yet disturbingly relatable narrator, causing them to question their own values and perception of reality.
Phrenology was the study of the contours of the skull as indicative of a person’s abilities and characteristics. Human traits, including criminal tendencies, were viewed as innate from birth. At the same time, phrenologists argued that an individual’s knowledge of their propensities could help them overcome less-desirable traits. This theory enjoyed popular American appeal in the first half of the 19th century but became discredited and deemed a “pseudoscience” in the mid-1800s. Poe, who was fascinated by the mysteries of the human mind, wrote about phrenology in both his nonfiction essays and his fiction from 1835 until close to his death. In his 1836 report entitled “Phrenology and the Moral Influence of Phrenology,” Poe reports the US lecture tour and writings of Johann Spurzheim, a German physician and phrenologist. Spurzheim was a great popularizer of pseudoscience in America, and, according to Poe, he once gained 500 converts to phrenology in a single lecture. In the same report, Poe reveals his familiarity with phrenological terminology and praises Spurzheim’s “sensible and necessary” observation that having a particular “propensity,” such as “combativeness,” does not “acquit us of responsibility” for our actions. Instead, because humans have free will, “we are accountable to God” for the “perversion of our faculties” (Poe, Edgar Allan. “Review of Phrenology and the Moral Influence of Phrenology.” The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe—Vol. VIII: Literary Criticism Part 1, edited by J. A. Harrison, Society of English and French Literature, 1902, pp. 252-55).
In “The Imp of the Perverse,” Poe presents phrenology in a less favorable way, possibly reflecting the changing view of the practice as quackery rather than science. The narrator applies phrenological assessment to his own unwise and irrational impulses but finds its methodology useless in explaining his behavior. He challenges the “Spurzheimites” (followers of Spurzheim) idea that all dark impulses can be explained by the phrenological trait of “combativeness.” The narrator argues that the instinct for self-preservation, or the desire to defend oneself that lies at the root of combativeness, is overridden by perverseness. He believes that his empirical experience reveals the limits of phrenological theory, as “perversity” is a purely self-destructive impulse. The narrator also suggests that the perverse impulse is impossible to overcome and, therefore, limits an individual’s free will and capacity to change.
By Edgar Allan Poe