Poe's Short Stories

Perhaps the most dominant characteristic of the Romantic movement was the rejection of the rational and the intellectual in favor of the intuitive and the emotional. In his critical theories and through his art, Poe emphasized that didactic and intellectual elements had no place in art. The subject matter of art should deal with the emotions, and the greatest art was that which had a direct effect on the emotions. The intellectual and the didactic was for sermons and treatises, whereas the emotions were the sole province of art; after all, Poe reasoned, man felt and sensed things before he thought about them. Even Poe's most intellectual characters, such as M. Dupin ("The Purloined Letter," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," etc.), rely more on intuition than on rationality. As one examines M. Dupin, Poe's famous detective, one notes that he solves his crimes by intuitively placing himself in the mind of the criminal. Throughout Poe's works, his characters are usually dominated by their emotions. This concept explains much of the seemingly erratic behavior of the characters in all of the stories. Roderick Usher's emotions are overwrought; Ligeia and the narrator of that story both exist in the world of emotions; the behaviors of the narrators of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat" are not rational; in "The Cask of Amontillado," the hatred of Montresor exceeds all rational explanations. Throughout Poe's fiction, much of the behavior of his characters must be viewed and can be explained best in terms of the Romantic period in which he wrote.