Madness and murder in the works of Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract: The first time I came in contact with the works of Edgar Allan Poe must
have been around 10 years ago through an audio-book at the library. I
borrowed the book because of the terrifying picture of “The Black Cat” on
the cover just to find that the stories on the tapes were far more
terrifying than that picture. Since then I’ve read several lousy horror
books and seen many awful horror movies. Usually, they just leave me asking
myself why I make these lamentable decisions, and what it is that I am
trying to obtain. I’ve started to realise that it’s probably the feeling of
hearing those ghastly grim and ancient Poe stories for the first time
that’s been my motive. In this essay I’m going to focus on the themes of
madness and murder in Edgar Allan Poe’s work as these themes are present in
many of his most powerful tales. It’s also a very significant part of his
works as these are the stories that earned him his famously bad reputation.
It can be argued that Poe himself purposely assisted in giving himself this
reputation with the belief that it could make more people interested in his
works and so increase the sales of his books. Even if this could have been
the case, it’s hard to neglect that in Poe’s case it’s particularly easy to
find a good number of parallels between the author and the art, and these
parallels seem most obvious in his horror stories. The first chapter of
this essay is therefore a short biography of Edgar Allan Poe’s life. In the
second chapter I’m going to discuss the role of the dead girl that appears
in several of Poe’s horror stories. In the third chapter I’m going to look
at Poe’s murder stories and examine the impulses that lead to these hideous
acts and in the fourth chapter I’m going to discuss Poe’s interest in
blurring the line between dream and reality in his works.