L a j t a i Á d á m : P o e ’ s P o i s o n o u s P o c k e t k n i v e s | 1

Lajtai Ádám

American Literature and Culture II.

19 October 2011

Poe’s Poisonous Pocketknives

To some of the most fanatic and most creative Poe fans the question may arise: could I

reproduce the great Edgar’s works? And if the answer is yes, then how? We might assume

that Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most recognizable authors and poets not only of his age but

of the whole modern literature, but still we would face numerous difficulties in trying to

imitate his writing. Also, placing him into a certain style or literary movement would give us

some really tough hours. Poe can be considered either a Romantic or Gothic writer but we

could find a number of arguments and counterarguments for this matter. Poe, in fact,

reinterpreted the whole Gothic horror style and created a unique, distinct brew of Gothic

fiction, Romanticism and his own gloomy mind. On the basis of A Cask of Amontillado and

The Tell-Tale Heart, we can deduct that despite the uniqueness of Poe’s works there are some

recurring elements in Poe’s short-stories. Generally, if anyone wanted to write a Poesque

short story, here are the ingredients: a fine case of murder, a big spoonful of madness and a

pinch of revenge.

Despite Edgar Allan Poe being one of the inventors of detective fiction, the Cask of

Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart are not about detection but the process of the murder.

The former one goes about an Italian named Montresor, who tells how he killed his ’friend’

Fortunato while he was illuminated. Montresor plans to commit the perfect murder ("I must

not only punish, but punish with impunity. ”(Poe 360)), and seemingly succeeds in that, but

scholars like Thomas Pribek, Walter Stepp, J. Gerald Kennedy, Charles May, G.R. Thompson

and Scott Peeples argue that Montresor has failed to commit the perfect crime because he has

suffered the pangs of remorse. (Baraban 47-48) The other short-story, The Tell-Tale Heart

ends with investigation of a premeditated, willful murder committed by the narrator. He

slaughters a friendly, old man because he is somewhat irritated by his ’vulture-eye’, the shriek

of the old man is heard by the neighbours, and when the police come to investigate, the

murderer confesses his deed. Whilst telling us how he has executed this felony, he ”protests

his sanity rather than his innocence”. (Robinson 1):

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„If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise

precautions I took for the concealment of the body.” (Poe 280)

A big spoonful of madness is the element that adds spice to the story or gives the

narrator intention to commit the murder in the first place. In my opinion this is the main

aspect in which Poe totally differs from the traditional Gothic fiction. If I had to associate

Poe’s tales with some great Hollywood movies, I would certainly think of psychological

thrillers like the Silence of the Lambs, The Shining or Psycho. In the case of traditional Gothic

stories, the horror films Frankenstein, Night of the Living Dead or A Nightmare on Elm Street

pop into my mind. Edgar Allan Poe was much more into the psychological aspects of murder

and terror: it is not the setting or a scary monster, but the narrator’s loony and homicidal mind

that gives us goosebumps. In A Cask of Amontillado, our narrator and murderer, Montesor

seemingly never goes mad, he commits the crime totally willfully, but he does not show any

signs of having gone nuts. Well, of course, we couldn’t call a man, who buries his ’friend’

alive, completely reasonable and sensible. The penultimate sentence („For the half of a

century no mortal has disturbed them” (Poe 366), however, tells me how deeply affected his

mind is by this deed and the remorse, as he is still thinking (in fact writing) about this plot that

happened half a century ago. I reckon that despite the calmness Montresor shows, he has

been haunted by these thoughts ever since he left his friend to fate. In The Tell-Tale Heart we

meet an unnamed narrator, a complete lunatic with a knack for murder. While Montresor at

least had a motive for the murder (Fortunato’s constant insults), our loony in The Tell-Tale

Heart has none. Our assassin shows a clear aberration for the old man’s ’vulture-eye’ but still

he cannot name any lucid reason to kill the man.

„Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never

wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it

was his eye! Yes, it was this!” (Poe 277)

What is more, he convinces himself of his ’right’ to murder the subordinate man. (Similarly to

the killer in The Black Cat, who finds a ’logical’ explanation for the cat-like image on his

wall.) Wisely enough, he premeditates the murder and plans everything accordingly – this is

also why he distinguishes himself from a madman, as he doesn’t commit the crime because of

’the spur of the moment’. After slaughtering the vulture-eyed old man, the insanity and the

remorse overcomes the narrators mind, and unlike Montresor in A Cask of Amontillado our

murderer is caught by the police, as he gives himself away due to the growing feeling of

remorse.

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And what more exciting motive could we find to kill a fellow, if not revenge? Revenge

has always been among the conventions of the Gothic genre, however the idea of vengeance

is not the invention of the Gothic literary tradition. We only have to go back to the 16th-

century England, to a playwright named William Shakespeare. To just name some of his most

prominent works, whose plots are induced by revenge, we could say Hamlet, Julius Caesar or

Macbeth. For instance, the great Horace Walpole, the ’inventor’ of Gothic fiction also

admittedly drew upon Shakespeare’s works when writing the Castle of Otranto. In the Preface

to the Castle of Otranto he wrote:

„That great master of nature, Shakespeare, was the model I copied. Let me ask if

his tragedies of Hamlet and Julius Cæsar would not lose a considerable share of

their spirit and wonderful beauties, if the humour of the grave- diggers, the

fooleries of Polonius, and the clumsy jests of the Roman citizens, were omitted, or

vested in heroics?” (Walpole 10)

A Cask of Amontillado beautifully exemplifies this topos: the murderer, Montresor plans to

kill his friend as he has been offended too many times by Fortunato. Now at least, he had an

’intelligent’ motive to kill Fortunato. In Tell-Tale Heart however, there is no clear-cut hint

that the protagonist wants to get even with the old man (or the eye). Despite the lack of

vengeance in the murder, the killer’s mind and the old man’s ghost gets revenged on the

narrator, as our killer goes mad and confesses everything to the police.

After reading and successfully analyzing the Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale

Heart, we should now be assured that there was something truly peculiar about Edgar Allan

Poe. Nowadays thousands of books are published with a plot similar to Poe’s: a desparate

murderer who inexplicably kills people; but I reckon that in the mid-19th century few people

had the guts to publish a story as astounding as A Cask of Amontillado or Tell-Tale Heart. Poe

was a pioneer in psychoanalysis and used his superb ability to uncover his homicidal

protagonists’ mind and soul. Scanning through the 19th-century literature, we may find that

some of the greatest have been influenced by Poe’s unique style. The great Fyodor

Dostoevsky was admittedly fascinated by Poe’s talent, and we may see the influence in his

magnum opus Crime and Punishment: the Poesque inner conflict of Raskolnikov and the case

of unintelligible murder. (Frank 102) I also presume that the „Shakespeare of ballads”, János

Arany also read and cherished Poe’s works. Or could it be a mere coincidence that two poets

of this magnitude wrote poems that dealt with insanity as a consequence of murder? (Vörös

Rébék, A Wales-i Bárdok, Ágnes Asszony, V. László) Nontheless, it can’t be a coincidence that

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many of the greatest poets have taken the glorious venture to translate his works into their

languages, it is fairly enough to think about Mihály Babits and Charles Baudelaire in this

respect. In my opinion, no one could walk past and ignore Poe’s legacy, it is either hatred,

amazement or fascination, but some so far unknown feelings are due to be induced in the

uninitiated readers’ hearts.

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WORKS CITED

Baraban, Elena V. "The Motive for Murder in "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe." Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature. Washington: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 2004. 47-62. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays and Reviews. Ed. David D. Galloway. London: Penguin 2003, 544 p. Print.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Gamer (Penguin Classics). London: Penguin 2001. 144 p. Print.

E. Arthur, Robinson. „Poe’s "The Tell-Tale Heart."” Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1965. 369-378. Print.

Frank, Frederick S. and Anthony Magistrale. The Poe Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997