The Edgar Allan Poe's The Imp of the Perverse Fanlisting

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Edgar Allan Poe's The Imp of the Perverse

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"The Imp of the Perverse" is a short story that begins as an essay written by 19th century American author and critic Edgar Allan Poe. It discusses the narrator's self-destructive impulses, embodied as the Imp of the Perverse. The narrator describes this spirit as the agent that tempts a person to do things "merely because we feel we should not."

Poe spends the majority of the text introducing his theory of "The Imp of the Perverse," though it is unclear if he created the term or not. Through the voice of his unnamed narrator, Poe describes perverseness as a sort of primitive sentiment overlooked by phrenology and moralists. It is a sense without motive, he says, that causes a person to behave in a way that they should not. For example:

"We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss - we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is the shrink away from the danger. Unaccountably we remain... it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height... for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it."

"The Imp of the Perverse" is less about plot and more about theory. It has been suggested that Poe wrote it to justify his own actions of self-torment and self-destruction. Poe's theory of the Imp of the Perverse may also be an early notion of the subconscious and repression which would not be fully theorized until Sigmund Freud. Many of Poe's characters display a failure to resist the Imp of the Perverse - including the murderer in "The Black Cat."

Source: Wikipedia.org

Poe Society of Baltimore
The Poe Decoder

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