"Love and Death, Don't You Mess, With My Heart"

     While I hate to be the one to point out a negativity when it comes to love, one of the strongest themes I noticed in the Edgar Allan Poe stories we read was the connection between love and violence. Now I'm not saying that this has to be a romantic sort of love, but that it is a strong connection of the heart to someone else that caused the decay into violence in this case.
     In the tales "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," there seems to be a progression in events that lead the narrator's love to become a feeling that leads them to acts of violence, which both result in death. In "Black Cat," the narrator begins by confessing "my tenderness of the heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them." This begins his basis of love which defined his later love in life for animals and having many pets. When he was older, he also had many pets with his wife and among getting the black cat, his "favourite pet and playmate," his love for the cat replaced his love for all of the animals equally. This led to him to make his pets "feel the change in my disposition. I not only neglected, but ill-used them." Then, the night his love for the cat was replaced by his love for alcohol, he "grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of it's eyes from the socket!" Sure, he was taken over by the alcohol which clouded his judgment, but the act of causing pain, the thirst for bloodshed caused his love for the before to turn into a new passion for violence. His natural urges to be a predator took hold after getting a first taste, which made him finish off the cat because "I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offense; hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin," so he had to get rid of the former love to make room for the new. He had to destroy it from his life. The same happened with the doppelganger cat. The memory from his old love had not been purged so when his new love for violence tried to outdo his love for the cat, he ended up accidentally killing his wife, which could be argued would happen eventually since she had been a previous love. Basically when his inner savage nature came out, it took over because it had been supressed for so long and the narrator needed to indulge it, and honestly, enjoyed watching and causing the pain in the end.
     In "The Tell Tale Heart," the narrator also constantly reminds the reader how calm, precise, cautious, and sane he was during the sins he committed. Though he lived with this other man and claimed "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire," for some reason that he cannot even morally describe, he slowly plotted the man's death. The narrator came to the conclusion that "it was not the old man who vexed me, but this Evil Eye." The old man had an eye that "resembled that if a vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees--very gradually--I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever." It is said that the eye is like a window to the soul and vice versa, so perhaps the narrator felt the old man's eye could see the evil within him and it caused those realized evils to take hold of him out of paranoia in the end. Again, his love and caring for the old man was corrupted by his need to destroy what was preventing him from contentment. The way he committed the crime and how calm he was with the police at first after the deed was done, shows that he did take pleasure and satisfaction in the bad deed.
     The horrific deeds done and questionable loss of sanity in these men reminded me a lot of our class discussions on morality, mainly how morality was created by man. I feel this was possibly to contain our natural animal urges inside a more rule bound human being. A way to separate ourselves from the darkness that we know lies inside of us. There is a quote by Samuel Johnson that goes, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." I feel that the pressures of life morals and love along with the desires man pushes down inside himself caused them to snap. I don't think it's so much that they went completely insane, but more like their real inner desires became to much to hold back and so they took over the outside man full of worldly morals and became too overwhelming. Much like our conversation in class on mental illnesses, I do wonder if outbreaks such as the ones in these tales as well as real life mental cases are really just caused by our natural animal instincts and wants resurfacing or the pressures of society to keep them repressed.
     These beastly tendencies and the way the men witnessed things that felt real but were never verified to actually be true felt similar to the horror stories of Lycanthropy. Now I will be the first to admit my obsessive interest in wolves and werewolves from films to folklore to the actual root and stem of these fantasies. It may sound silly at first, but Lycanthropy is a very serious and very real mental illness. In the scientific research and lore book, "The Book of Were-Wolves(1865)" by Sabine Baring-Gould it's found that "It was not till the close of the Middle Ages that Lycanthropy was recognized as a disease." This disease takes on not only mental effects, but can take physical ones as well. "Among the ancients this kind of insanity went by the names of Lycanthropy, Kuanthropy, or Boanthropy, because those afflicted with it believed themselves to be turned into wolves, dogs, or cows.It makes the person psychologically believe they are turning into a monster, an actual beast that goes about doing horrible things. These thoughts can become so controlling over the person that it can physically alter their hormones and body, including excessive hair growth, which adds to their thoughts of becoming a beast, as well as fever and anger issues. While the exact cause of such an absurd psychological disorder hasn't been pin pointed, "the propensity, however, exists in different degrees. In some it is manifest simply as indifference to suffering, in others it appears as simple pleasure in seeing killed, and in others again it is dominant as an irresistible desire to torture and destroy." The most common acts committed in these cases are murder, rape, and cannibalism. A better known historic account of Lycanthropy involved a man named Jean Grenier. During the 1600's in southwest France several children went missing and a young girl was attacked. Jean Grenier confessed to these acts in court saying "the charge of Marguerite Poirier is correct. My intention was to have killed and devoured her, but she kept me off with a stick." "When questioned touching the children, whom he said he had killed and eaten as a wolf, he allowed that he had once entered an empty house on the way between S. Coutras and S. Anlaye, in a small village, the name of which he did not remember, and had found a child asleep in its cradle; and as no one was within to hinder him, he dragged the baby out of its cradle, carried it into the garden, leaped the hedge, and devoured as much of it as satisfied his hunger. What remained he had given to a wolf." Grenier claimed he had sold his soul to become the wolf. His disease which caused him to have the urge to kill and not control himself are much like the narrators in Poe's tales because "startling though the assertion may be, it is a matter of fact, that man, naturally, in common with other carnivora, is actuated by an impulse to kill, and by a love of destroying life." After Grenier's first taste of misdeeds, his psychological disorder drove him to commit more out of the enjoyment and love for pain just like the narrator's who could not stop their urges to continue watching others suffer by their hand.

Sadly the video wouldn't come up so I had to only post the links. But these clips are from the film, "The 10th Kingdom," one of my favourite films. It's a scene where the character 'Wolf' is on trial for doing bad, wolfy things. I thought it was the perfect mock trial representation of how I felt Grenier's trial went. Unfortunately the scene was cut on YouTube...... So start watching at 4:15 then go to part 2 (although I personally recommend watching the entire movie haha).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgvf6rIDSZg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEgSHOjVoKM&feature=related

     Poe has delved inside the human soul and heart to tell all sides of what humans are capable of, even when their sanity is intact, though questionable. He has created macabre romance in showing that love comes in many forms, it all just depends on what our natural animal hearts really desires deep down when we let ourselves abandon morals and act purely for our own strange ideas, and scarier yet, realities.

"Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright." -The Wolfman(1941)


 Baring-Gould, Sabine. The Book of Were-Wolves. 1st ed. New York: Cosimo Classics, 1865. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Tales. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.