Introduction
Reality and appearance are different, although they tend to be interpreted as the same, as people perceive reality with their senses and form its appearance in their minds. Two short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Black Cat, have something similar, and both are connected with this dilemma. They both are extremely grim, talking about brutal murders and showing that reality often differs from people’s representations of it. The dark romanticism subgenre can be used to describe and analyze these stories. They represent and show aggressive and mad desires, usually suppressed by the personality, but they are unleashed against others in these stories.
The Appearance
Appearance represents reality in the human mind: what one thinks reality is. It is built based on human perception and senses and, therefore, depends on how one’s senses work. In his stories, Poe “addressed compelling philosophical, cultural, psychological, and scientific issues: the place of irrationality, violence, and repression in human consciousness and social institutions” (Levine 607). Therefore, they often describe various deviations from social norms, revealing how people can have destructive desires inside their minds that are disconnected from reality.
In both short stories, the narrative is built based on the unnamed main characters’ perception of reality from their points of view. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the main hero starts to hear strange voices and feel the closeness to hell and heaven after the disease, although it seems similar to madness. He emphasizes that “the disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in heaven and the earth. I heard many things in hell” (Levine 666). His perception of reality is twisted, based chiefly on strange voices and images, which can probably lead to irrational and wrong deeds.
In The Black Cat, changes were more prominent and radical, altering the character’s inner world and reactions. The narrator admits that his “general temperament and character—through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance-had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse. I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others” (Levine 671).
Thus, in the beginning, Poe shows that the character will probably do many wrong deeds, unable to distinguish reality from his twisted and unhealthy fantasies. Dark romanticism is a sub-genre that describes the irrational and its deepest desires, usually grim and fearful. Both novels can be characterized by revealing the characters’ twisted inner world, where the mask of a good, moral citizen hides the whole swarm of destructive desires and ideas.
The Reality
Unlike appearance, reality consists of events between various actors, such as people or animals. In his writings, Poe explored “the tug and pull of the material and corporeal; the terrifying dimensions of one’s mind,” describing how actual reality and one’s representation may differ (Levine 607). It is the objective set of actors and events between them, and humans can’t perceive it directly. Therefore, people can only rely on their senses and reality’s representation, and if they are twisted due to aggressive unconscious desires, connections with reality are lost, and they can do wrong deeds.
Problems Due to a Lack of Interconnections
When one’s interconnections between appearance and reality weaken, it usually leads to serious problems, and both short stories emphasize it, as their main heroes commit atrocious crimes. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator kills an old man to escape his “vulture eye,” where he sees danger, and then tries to conceal his deeds (Levine 666). In The Black Cat, atrocities are much more terrible, as the narrator, losing sanity, cynically kills his cat Pluto, conceals the body, and continues his life as if nothing happened. Then kills another cat after some time, which is similar to Pluto, and his wife who tried to stop him.
Both stories have some mysticism in them, as events unfold in a way that both narrators eventually become punished for their crimes. In The Tell-Tale Heart, he cannot resist voices in his head and ultimately admits to his crime. In The Black Cat, the whole series of events begins when the narrator sees a large, horrible black cat. This image is connected with everything happening to him, to the moment when the police arrested him.
Conclusion
Short stories The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat show how their main characters’ appearances of reality disconnect from reality, leading to them losing their minds and committing atrocities. Edgar Allan Poe explores the differences between people’s representation of reality and reality itself, revealing how suppressed, dark desires can twist one’s personality. Reading them makes one feel many negative feelings, and the setting seems more like a nightmare than a reality.
Additionally, if abstracted from these atrocities, one can see different layers of meaning, as each event is connected with some images in the narrators’ minds. Strange voices in The Tell-Tale Heart and a black cat-like beast in The Black Cat are examples that can be connected with the narrator’s madness. Both images seem to be twistedly associated with reality, linking various aspects of the narrators’ reality representations. All that together creates a feeling of dark magic, typical of dark romanticism in Poe’s stories.
Work Cites
Levine, Robert S. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 10th ed., Norton, 2022.