The Imp Of The Perverse The Tell

The Imp Of The Perverse, The Tell Tale Heart Essay, Research Paper

The Imp in us All

“The Imp is taken to be a self destructive force present in all of us but with important difference in each person according to the power of will and morality”. (Edwards 162) Those important differences both connect and individualize the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Imp of the Perverse, The Tell Tale Heart, and William Wilson all demonstrate Poe’s fascination and exploration with inner conflict and torturer. These short stories deal with the same issue but present it in different ways by making the characters vary when describing their will and their morality. Hawthorne punctuates this fact through his famous character Reverend Dimmesdale from the Scarlet Letter. He demonstrates that even a man made with extremely high moral fabric can be tortured with inner conflict and agony. All of the characters possess some hidden secret that has taken root in their soul either consciously, or subconsciously, and grows until it can not be contained within the human person. It has to find a way out, and it is that desire that drives the characters to apparent insanity. The main characters from The Imp of the Perverse, The Tell Tale Heart, and William Wilson along with Reverend Dimmesdale all struggled with varying degrees of inner conflict after committing their own personal sin.

The one character that displays the least amount of morality is from, The Imp of the Perverse. His inner struggle deals with revealing his secret on the basis that we are urged to do things that are either unsafe to ourselves or wrong for our best interest. The narrator describes this impulse in an extremely confident manner by appealing to logic,

I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to it’s prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong’s sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse-elementary. (Poe-163)

Doing wrong for wrong’s sake is both a motive and excuse in this tale. The narrator commits his sin by following this sort of logic but he is eventually betrayed by it. The perverse impulse to always do the wrong thing is the disease in which this character is plagued. He is not a moral man; he is both selfish, and greedy, and acts only to bring himself pleasure or peace of mind. His lack of morality prevented him from even thinking about the murder he had committed for years. He enjoyed the fact that he had gotten away with the crime and received many things from the murdered mans estate. “For a very long period of time I was accustomed to revel in this sentiment. It afforded me real delight than all the mere worldly advantages accruing from my sin”. (Poe-166) However as with all of the characters that will be investigated the voice of the conscience started to make itself heard. Quietly at first it began to make him question his safety, “I would perpetually catch myself pondering upon my security, and repeating, in a low under-tone, the phrase, ‘I am safe.’” (Poe-166) The inner struggle that began with that thought will torment the character until the truth is revealed. The years of living with the secret allowed it to gain strength, and voice, until it emerged, “The long-imprisoned secret burst forth from my soul”. (Poe-167) Betrayed by his own logic of thought the man relates the story form his prison cell. The climax is common to both Poe and Hawthorne. When the inner struggle concludes the man is not the apparent winner. However the struggle is worse then any punishment that they might receive.

The second character of Poe’s is the narrator from The Tell-Tale Heart. The story is similar to The Imp of Perverse in many ways. The main characters both murder an innocent older man in their sleep and seemingly get away with. They both want to tell their story and they both are driven close to insanity until they are forced to tell the truth. Stephen Peithman states, “Typically, Poe’s narrator is mad yet lucid-and not merely in order to tell the tale. It is this insistent lucidity that tips off the reader to his insanity”.(Kesterson-78) With the stories being so similar it is imperative for Poe to create subtle differences that make the two tales able to stand on their own. The inner struggle of this second character develops much more quickly in this story. His whole torment happens within one day of the actual murder. This would lead the reader to believe that this man is one of weaker will and with more morality then the previously mentioned character. In fact the man hears the beating of the heart before he actually kills the old man, “the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant. The old man’s terror must have been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment!-do you mark me well”.(Poe-137) The beating of the heart continues after the murder and it is then that Poe investigates another aspect of inner struggle. By making the police come to scene the man is forced into immediate confrontation. Even though he is sure that there was no trace of the sin committed, his mental torture was so agonizing, and apparent, he found it impossible to maintain his secret any longer. Poe uses th