Edgar Allan Poe Mental Illness Essay

The Psychology of Madness as seen in Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories (name in progress). Edgar Allan Poe was an author truly ahead of his time. The characters in his short stories, dismissed as mad at the time by his audience, have symptoms of mental illnesses and disorders that had not been labeled until at least one hundred years later. Arguably Poe’s well-known short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, features a narrator showcasing symptoms of illnesses like schizophrenia. This narrator shows signs of auditory and visual hallucinations, and delusions. This narrator claims to hear the heartbeat of the old man he killed just moments before. He also claims that police officers showed up soon after he hid the body, but this claim is highly unlikely to be true. While the narrator is talking with

This explains his main motivation to kill his beloved cat Pluto, which is the tipping point to his madness. He killed his cat just because he knew he could. He knew it was wrong, and he knew that he was doing something terrible, but still hung Pluto remorselessly just because he knew he was capable of doing it. The narrator also seemingly insists that what he did was reasonable or normal, that everyone “f[inds] [themselves] committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because [they] knows [they] should not?” (Poe, n.p.). The narrator of The Black Cat also shows symptoms of anti-social personality disorder. His lack of remorse and questionable behavior or relationships with his pets. He talks about how he loves animals and has loved them ever since he was a child, but had difficulty in connecting with other people. He only chooses to show kindness and allow his “kind” nature to “the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute” (Poe, n.p.). As critic John Cleman said, “his exceptional sweetness can find a reciprocating perfection of fidelity and kindness only in the mindless devotion of animals” (Cleman,