Blog #6

Question 1:

In “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, Poe seems to use his writings to unleash his repressed feelings of darkness and death. Poe has experienced a large amount of death throughout his life with his family and loved ones, so he was probably angry for losing everyone that he cared for and being able to write about death and killing innocent people was his way to release his anger. In the story “The Tell-Tale Heart” the character feels that he must get rid of an evil eye, which belongs to an apparently blind old man. When the character ends up killing the old man he instantly feels relief, but after a while he begins to feel guilty and tells on himself, suggesting that even though he felt temporarily relieved from his actions, the secret that he was trying to hold made him feel worse, and it felt better for him to just tell on himself.

Question 2:

After doing some research on Edgar Allan Poe, I definitely think that his personal life influenced his writings, as well as the events in both “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”.
Edgar Allan Poe was born to Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe and David Poe Jr. David Poe Jr. was supposed to inherit money from his wealthy father, David Poe Sr. but because David Jr. decided to pursue a career in acting with his wife, Elizabeth, his father abandoned David, because he preferred that David Jr. become a lawyer instead. David Poe Jr. did not have any acting skills and was not a very good actor so it was hard for him to find work and he became very depressed and turned to alcohol. After a while David Poe Jr. abandoned his wife and three children when Edgar Allen Poe was just an infant. Elizabeth, Edgar’s mother took any role that she could get on stage, but died a few months after Davis Jr. left from tuberculosis. According to reports on the death of Edgar’s mother, all three of her children were found laying next to her dead body. The living conditions of the family were very poor; they lived in a very cold and drafty boarding room, and slept on a pile of straw on the floor.
All three of the children were separated and sent to live in different locations. Thereafter, practically everyone that Edgar grew to be fond of died from tuberculosis, including the wife of a Richmond importer that took him in as a child. Edgar married his 13 year old cousin Virginia, but she became very ill with tuberculosis, causing her to hemorrhage, and Poe became deeply depressed because of her condition. Virginia began to waste away, losing lots of weight at the age of sixteen. When Virginia was 20 years old she was sitting at a piano singing and trying to entertain her husband when a vein in her neck burst causing blood to pour from her mouth, she died ten days later. Poe was distraught and died several years later from his addiction to alcohol and opiates.
I think that Poe’s experiences with his loved ones and witnessing such violent deaths has to do with his dark writings. A lot of his experiences seems to be scenes from horror movies. As I read through Poe’s biography, it seemed that he had more bad life experiences than good ones, which explains why he writes about killing people and death in both stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado”.

Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe: a Literary Reference to His Life and WorkFacts on File Library of American Literature
by Sova, Dawn B.Publication: New York Facts on File, Inc., 2007.