Heart of Darkness: Poe’s Primitive Perversity and Modern Horror Essay Example

has taken the place of the haunted mansion. He becomes the “monster,” the source of horror, evil and perversity. Consequently, anonymity shrouds the characters’ identities— no names, no background, not even the characters’ relationship is clear-cut. All the reader knows is that the murderer “loved the old man.

He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult” (Poe, 1986, p. 77)--an admission which makes the crime so the more diabolical, unjustified and irrational. As a result, the characters are inevitably (and somewhat necessarily) reduced to the dichotomy of murderer/ victim, even actor/object. The narrator himself strips the old man of identity (and humanity) in reducing him to his “Evil Eye” (Poe, 1986, p. 278). The victim has become for him an object of antagonism, a palette upon which he can create and assert his distorted and real self. The old man is a prey to be devoured, a pawn to be manipulated for him to affirm his sense of a triumphant, that is, able and doer self.

This is especially evident when he describes how “I could see nothing of the old man’s face person: for I had directed the ray, as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot” (p. 279). The narrator/murderer’s reductive view of the old man is symptomatic of his monomania and isolation. He is trapped in his own psyche (in the same way that the reader, whose only access to the truth is through him, is confined to his limited gaze). He has psychologically withdrawn from society, which could have regulated and suppressed his primal drive towards dominance and death.

The absence of mental space

pushes him inward and in contact with his “perverseness,” the natural unnatural ego. As Freud (1998) writes: ‘…this uncanny (i. e. perversity) is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression…. the uncanny (is)… something which ought to have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light” (p. 50). Madness is another pivotal element in the story. Interestingly, it functions as a catch-all element, performing a number of duplicitous and conflicting roles.

It makes and unmakes the rationale behind the crime, brands the narrator as evil at the same time dismisses him as “innocent,” a person who is not in control of his faculties. As mentioned above, the narrator’s madness bricks him up, in a sense buries him alive, within his consciousness. It severs and distorts his contact not only with other human beings (as in the case of the old man) but also with reality. However, it also triggers the opposite effect. For the narrator, his madness (though he will not call it as such) spells heightened sensitivity: “The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them….

I heard all things in the heaven and in the hell” (Poe, 1986, p. 277). Ironically, madness reconciles in the narrator the qualities of a sub-human and a superhuman. The former category applies to the narrator’s failure to perform the values expected of a “normal human”—the crime, a glaring transgression of society’s moral codes, is certain to qualify him so. On the one hand, the power (not to mention sense of fulfillment) the narrator derives in killing

the old man situates him above the scope of any social code.

The presence of a prey immediately categorizes him as the predator, the alpha male, the more powerful of the two. Poe offers a striking illustration of the narrator’s chilling lust for dominance: “… Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers—of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret dreams or thoughts” (1986, 278). The way madness facilitates the expression of the narrator’s inherent perversity makes it a form of liberation and epiphany.

Madness enables the narrator to define and express his primal, self, distorted it may be. In this case horror emerges on another level. It is not only the murder which triggers chills down the reader’s spine. What is also, and perhaps more horrifying, is eventual incongruity between the doer and the deed, his internal and external selves. The greater horror, it appears is that of the murderer himself, his tormented mind, made worse, rather ironically, by the accomplishment of the deed. The primal essence, once out will devour even the self that houses it. The murderer self-destructs.

His heightened sensitivity has contributed to his own undoing: “I found that the noise was not within my ears…. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty Go! —no, no! They heard! —they suspected—they knew! – they were making a mockery of my horror! ” (Poe, 1986, p. 282). The absence of an other-world in the story is crucial in that it reinforces

the sense of claustrophobia. Had there been an “outside,” a domain beyond the story’s “here and now,” the chance of survival and redemption for both victim and culprit would have been available. If the other-world is the source of horror, it also spells the end of it.

In gothic tales, horror occurs when natural boundaries are overstepped, when a class of creatures invades another physical and psychological camp. In Poe, as with modern horror, horror is nearer, more perceptible. Horror is human. In Poe, as Bloom (1998) puts it, “no longer does the external world threaten as much as the internal, and within that, the ineffable demands of the will” (p. 3). Poe is indeed a maverick of his time with the way his poetics and philosophy challenge and reform traditional horror, hence ushering a new period for the genre.

More importantly, Poe’s re-evaluation and re-definition of horror triggers and coincides with a rethinking not just of social values, but of the self as well. His privileging of the internal as opposed to the external re-shaped what used to be sacrosanct answers on questions about identity, personality and purpose. Poe’s ideas pave the way for a better, frightening it may be, understanding of horror, the result of which not only reader entertainment but perhaps, prevention, if not elimination the real-life materialization of horror.