The Imp of the Perverse

Poe’s work is valued for its contributions to the American Gothic genre of literature and its insight into the dark impulses of the mind. Both of these elements are exemplified in “The Imp of the Perverse.” Within a suspenseful narrative structure, Poe presents a darkly Romantic treatment of imagination to evoke terror in his reader. The human fear of Irrationality and Perverseness is conveyed through the story’s use of abstract proofs.

The tension and terror of this Gothic tale are repeatedly and paradoxically evoked through acts of self-reflection. Poe creates an intelligent, articulate, and self-reflective narrator who is ultimately limited by his own biases. He engages in intellectual reflection without illumination in an attempt to understand his violent and self-destructive behavior. His complex abstract theory of “perverseness,” which he himself has coined, increases the credibility of his claim that science and philosophy have overlooked what he has discovered. He finds flaws with popular scientific theories of his time, such as phrenology. His arguments are articulated elegantly through parallelisms:

The idea of it has never occurred to us, simply because of its supererogation. We saw no need of the impulse—for the propensity. We could not perceive its necessity. We could not understand, that is to say, we could not have understood, had the notion of this primum mobile ever obtruded itself;—we could not have understood in what manner it might be made to further the objects of humanity, either temporal or eternal (1).

The specificity of the narrator’s discussion indicates his personal experience of this propensity while leaving the reader in suspense as to where the narrative is leading.

The Gothic element of suspense is one way that Poe conveys the paradoxes of the mind. The story’s limited first-person point of view means the reader is forced to rely on one-sided testimony. The mood of uncertainty and dread builds, coming to a climax when the narrator reveals that he is a condemned murderer. The narrator’s concern about being judged as “insane” manipulates and shapes the narrative. He fears that the reader “with the rabble, [would] have fancied [him] mad” had he not built up his intricately logical argument before the revelation (8). Ironically, as readers realize the narrator is unreliable, they doubt his ability to apply reason, coming to the conclusion he tries so hard to prevent.

The structure of the story, which starts as an abstract discussion of human irrationality and ends with a personal account of self-betrayal, engages the analytical and emotive faculties of the reader. Poe employs Romantic imagery and a Gothic atmosphere of dread to incite the reader’s terror and awe. The narrator delineates three examples of the perverse, from deliberately annoying a listener to procrastinating completing an important task, finally culminating in the urge to jump from a clifftop. As each progressive example has increasingly severe consequences, the atmosphere of anxiety intensifies. The peak of obsessive impulse is depicted as the narrator declares, “We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss” (6). The use of the pronoun “we” heightens narrative tension as readers are invited to imagine themselves in this scenario. The narrator’s word choice also deliberately implicates the reader, implying that the impulse of the perverse is universal. Gothic symbolism is used, as the urge toward annihilation is ominously compared to a “cloud of unnameable feeling” (6).

Poe explores Irrationality and Perverseness by emphasizing the counterintuitive nature of this compulsion, which is personified as “far more terrible than any genius or demon of a tale” (6). The paradoxical nature of perverseness, in which people desire their own destruction, is accentuated in the narrator’s description of “the fierceness of the delight of its horror” (6). The juxtaposition of “delight” and “horror” captures the sensation of pleasure and pain combined. Poe emphasizes the Interplay of Creation and Destruction as the human imagination becomes a self-destructive force.

In the second part of the story, the irony of the narrator’s self-betrayal is revealed as the narrator’s increasingly melodramatic account exposes his psychological imbalance. The narrator, initially characterized by high intellect and rationality, is no longer able to describe his experience in cool, rational prose. The power his irrational impulse to confess has over his reason is exposed through the symbolic supernatural description of the “Imp of the Perverse.” Even though the narrator is aware that the Imp is not real, he dramatizes its physical materialization, first as the ghost of his victim and then as a violent “invisible fiend” who strikes the narrator “with his broad palm upon the back” (13). The dramatic description of the moment as a “nightmare of the soul” (conveys the narrator’s terror (12). Significantly, when he recounts the moment he publicly confessed to his crime, he admits rejecting rationalism altogether, stating that “to think, in [his] situation, was to be lost” (13).

Poe’s exploration of Self-Punishment and Irrationality and Perverseness suggests that the narrator’s suppression of his troubled thoughts ultimately leads to his downfall. The narrator interprets the mysterious or “unknowable” aspects of himself as dark, immoral, or evil in nature. Instead of identifying his fantasy of murder as a part of his psyche that he need not act on, he labels the impulse as dangerous and attempts to separate himself from it. The narrator believes that he “perpetrates” his dark impulses because “[he] feel[s] that [he] should not” (3). This misinterpretation of thoughts as immoral gives them the power to overwhelm the narrator.