Evil's Connections with Poe

       Edgar Allen Poe wrote what is now a very famous American short story in 1843. "The Tell-Tale Heart", narrated by the main character, told the story of this man murdering an older man. He explained that he was not a madman, and he claimed to not have anything against the man, except his eye. "He had the eye of 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" (Poe 1). The main character explained his strategies for watching the man, treating him kindly, and, later, murdering him. He stalked around proudly as police officers came to investigate the scream, but he finally confessed as he believed to hear the pounding of the old man's heart thudding throughout the house.  

       Poe connects the romantic ideas of nature with those of the supernatural similarly in "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Raven". In "The Tell-Tale Heart", the man believed that the old man's eye was evil because it looked like that of a vulture and wasn't like other people's eyes. He gave himself the responsibility to destroy the evil living amongst him. This connection of bird-like things with supernatural evil is found in both; the raven presented a symbol of evil to the man in "The Raven", while the old man's vulture-like eye was seen as a source of evil to be removed from existence.

Do the police officers ever actually hear the heart beating, or is it just the man's conscience?

Romanticism and "The Raven"

       Edgar Allen Poe tells the story of a man's rekindled vivid sorrow in his poem, "The Raven". The man seemed to have lost his loved maiden, Lenore. He says, "Vainly I had tried to borrow/ From my books surcease of sorrow-- sorrow for the lost Lenore --/ For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore --/ Nameless here for evermore" (Poe 1). The man took to books and sleeping for distraction until he heard tapping on his door and window. He found that a raven was the source of the noise and contemplated the significance of the event. By the end of the poem, the man believed that the raven was sent by God or knew of his maiden, Lenore. He's angered and sorrowful because he asked if Lenore was in heaven, to which the raven answered, "Nevermore," and it continued to sit at his window and haunt him.

       Poe showed Romantic thought on nature and the supernatural's relation to each other in this poem. As the man contemplates the significance of the raven at his door in the fifteenth stanza, the air became denser, and he thought that it was due to some supernatural connection that the raven had. At first, he thought God and angels had sent the raven, but he veered later towards being sent by the devil. The man said of the bird, "Prophet!...thing of evil!.../ Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore" (Poe 3). This was a change from good to evil, yet the man doesn't question a relation between the bird and the supernatural. This is much like Romantic thought of nature, which was believed to point to an impersonal God and the supernatural world. The man never fully understood the purpose of the raven's coming to him, which counteracts Enlightenment thought, but he knew that a supernatural, which couldn't be fully known, existed.

Is there more significance to Lenore than just a name used in the poem?

"Rip Van Winkle" and Self-Incurred Tutelage

       Washington Irving wrote "Rip Van Winkle" during the early publishing period of his literary career. He writes the story saying that he found in the room of a man, Diedrich Knickerbocker, who had recently disappeared. This makes the short story satirical because it builds on the idea of a men who suddenly go missing. Before the Revolutionary War, Rip Van Winkle helped and cared for everyone in town, except his family. Rip Van Winkle's wife often drove him into such a state that he left the house. When his wife followed him to his asylum, he left to hunt in the woods. There he met a strange man with liquor, who took him nearby to a place where other strange people were playing nine pegs. Van Winkle began drinking the liquor, only to pass out and not wake up for eighteen years. The story ends with him returning to town and explaining who he is; he learns that his sleep lasted eighteen years and during that time his wife died and America is free from Britain's rule. Rip Van Winkle was now free to live and converse with townspeople as he pleased, instead of taking orders from his wife or from Britain.  

       The story and form of "Rip Van Winkle" remind me a lot of what Alexis de Toqueville wrote about in Democracy in America and Immanuel Kant's "What is Enlightenment?". Irving's short story is an example of bold, short American literature that presents social chaos, which Alexis de Toqueville told of American literature. The main character, Rip Van Winkle, portrays some self-incurred tutelage and later tries to force others into bonding themselves with his opinions. Rip Van Winkle faces social tutelage due to the way he treats his family and their response to it, especially Dame Van Winkle. He's forced to spend his time outside of the house, "the only side which, in truth, belongs to a henpecked husband" because he dislikes working his farm and caring for his family (Irving 939). His wife even drove him from conversing with friends outside of an inn. After sleeping for eighteen years, Rip was free of any social tutelage caused by his wife or the British. Instead of basking in freedom with the next generation, he tried to force them to believe his story verbatim and to believe what he knew about the strange, almost magical men that drugged him. Both Kant and Toqueville warn against using others' opinions verbatim instead of a person's own because the cycle of self-incurred tutelage then continues. 

Did Irving write as being Diedrich Knickerbocker in all or others of his works, or was it just in "Rip Van Winkle"?