The Imp of the Perverse

In “The Imp of the Perverse,” the motif of the abyss elaborates on the theme of the Interplay of Creation and Destruction. The discussion of the abyss appears in the narrator’s second illustration of perverseness. It symbolizes annihilation, specifically death by suicide. Poe examines the relationship between the mind’s fascination with self-destruction and its urge to undergo a creative process through the narrator’s description of a person staring into an abyss from a clifftop. The fear of death and instinct for self-preservation create sensations of “sickness and dizziness and horror” (6).

These sensations materialize into an idea of death that both delights and horrifies the thinker. This phenomenon of thoughts made material parallels the creative process, in which imaginings of the mind are transformed into a work of art that may delight or horrify its audience. The person standing before the abyss represents both an individual contemplating death and an artist before creation. The narrator emphasizes that while reason deters us, we humans feel compelled to plunge and be destroyed precisely because we have imagined it. Using this Gothic imagery, Poe transforms an abstract fear of death into an allegory of humanity’s perverse delight in the macabre.

The motif of phrenology serves to support Poe’s critique of pure scientific rationalism as the only way of knowing. Though the narrator’s criticism of phrenology is not the one that would ultimately prevail historically, it does suggest that phrenology is fundamentally not scientific. However, it does so paradoxically, suggesting that phrenology is too wedded to its own conceptions of order and reason to account for the frequent Irrationality and Perverseness of humankind. Because they assume that the human mind operates according to logical principles, the narrator says, phrenologists overlook evidence of how humans actually think and act: “It would have been wiser, it would have been safer to classify, (if classify we must), upon the basis of what man usually or occasionally did, and was always occasionally doing” (2).    

Nevertheless, while Poe knew a great deal about phrenology and wrote about it both critically and imaginatively, the story’s purpose is not to give a rational argument regarding the limitations of the popular pseudoscience. Rather, the story uses phrenology—an exciting subject for readers at the time—and the narrator’s knowledge of the subject to establish the narrator’s credibility. It’s essential for Poe’s narrator to appeal to readers so as to illuminate the similarities between themselves and the murderer and sharpen the story’s eventual terror.