Edgar Allan Poe: Amateur Psychologist

According to Brett Zimmerman, the writings of Edgar Allan Poe are the printed remains of a “conscientious craftsman” (93), not a literary hack, and that belief animates all the critical work that Zimmerman has devoted to Poe. To be sure, this conviction is central to Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005), in which Zimmerman identifies the wide range of classical devices that Poe deployed in prose for calculated effects. The defense of Poe's literary sophistication continues in Edgar Allan Poe: Amateur Psychologist, but here, Zimmerman focuses on psychological portraiture rather than stylistic issues, arguing that Poe, in his fiction, evinces a deep knowledge of writings about the mind that were available to antebellum readers—in particular, works by phrenologists and alienists. Although critics have long recognized Poe's interest in the mind, especially its dysfunctions, as well as his use of psychological terms and ideas derived from nineteenth-century texts, Zimmerman breaks new ground by demonstrating how closely Poe's characterizations of mental reality tally with descriptions found in the specialist literature that he could have read. According to Zimmerman, those fictional portrayals evince the verisimilar aims of Poe, a writer who took pains to depict accurately the inner lives of characters while relying on the medical discourses at his disposal. The marvel is, Zimmerman suggests, that many of those depictions remain plausible, even though modern psychological theories were unknown to Poe.The first four chapters of the book are critical examinations of Poe's early engagements with the medical authorities of his day. Zimmerman opens with a study of “Berenice,” an 1835 tale in which Poe presents two cases of insanity, Egaeus's and Berenice's. Critics have long considered the troubled narrator Egaeus an unstable character, but Zimmerman sheds new light on Poe's portrayal of Egaeus, who suffers not only from monomania but also from somnambulism that was, for some antebellum alienists, indicative of psychosis. According to Zimmerman, Poe also suggests a psychosomatic origin for Berenice's catalepsy, a disorder that antebellum doctors associated with insanity. Citing works by nineteenth-century specialists such as Benjamin Rush and James Cowles Prichard, Zimmerman compellingly argues that “the details of Poe's tale of madness align perfectly with the medical literature” (31). Fascinated by the science of the mind, a discipline in its infancy during the 1830s, Poe was understandably intrigued by phrenology, which is the subject of the second chapter. To help contemporary readers understand that system, Zimmerman provides cranial charts and definitions for key phrenological terms, and he surveys Poe's use of such language in his works, showing that the writer's interest in phrenology was noteworthy. Many phrenologists used analyses of skull formations to make distinctions between racial groups, arguing that variations in head-shape signaled essential differences in intellectual and moral capacity. In Zimmerman's view, the social implications of phrenology complemented Poe's racism, reinforcing his interest in phrenological inquiry.Zimmerman argues that tales Poe wrote during the late 1830s mark the author as “a serious advocate for the pseudoscience” (73). Highlighting relevant physiognomic descriptions of characters in “Ligeia,” Chapter 3 suggests that Poe assigns a phrenological cause—a “diseased [faculty] of Ideality”—to the narrator's obsession with transcending worldly limits (73). Curiously, Zimmerman insists on interpreting the supernatural events of the tale as real occurrences rather than delusions, and he devotes more space to defending the narrator from charges of insanity, as a twenty-first-century psychiatrist would define the term, than to explaining how Poe's characterization relies on now-outmoded ideas derived from phrenology. In Chapter 4 Zimmerman does, however, provide a thorough analysis of phrenological material in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Like the narrator of “Ligeia,” Roderick Usher exhibits excessive Ideality—a term that actually appears in the tale; but according to Zimmerman, Poe's detailed descriptions of Roderick suggest that the tormented man has other overdeveloped organs identified by phrenologists, including those of Secretiveness, Marvelousness, and Amativeness. Poe indicates that “the eighteenth-century cure” for Roderick's mental distress (i.e., keeping company with healthy men) is inadequate, suggesting that what Roderick truly needs is removal from his ancestral home with its insalubrious atmosphere, just the sort of treatment that phrenologists recommended for unbalanced patients (92). Zimmerman also reads the tale itself as an allegory in which the head-shaped mansion resembles “a … phrenological bust” (101) and Madeline represents powerful sexual desire (i.e., Amativeness) that Roderick struggles to control. That “Ligeia” and “Usher” contain references to phrenology is old news, but Zimmerman makes a strong case that the phrenological knowledge of Poe was deeper than scholars have suggested it was.According to Zimmerman, Poe's confidence in the explanatory power of phrenology waned in the 1840s, when he published tales reliant on mental theories from the “mainstream” of antebellum psychiatric thought, an intellectual current that Zimmerman deems anti-phrenological but does not adequately define. These stories testify to Poe's abiding curiosity about the life of the mind. In Chapter 5, Zimmerman examines “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Masterfully analyzing the homicidal narrator's language, he argues that the killer exhibits symptoms of a condition that the antebellum specialist Prichard termed “misanthropical monomania” but that “modern psychology calls schizophrenia” (127). Zimmerman's pursuit of nineteenth-century diagnoses for the mental traumas suffered by Poe's characters continues in Chapter 6. Here, the narrator of “The Black Cat” receives critical scrutiny, and Zimmerman argues brilliantly that the root of the murderer's trouble is not alcohol abuse but religious fanaticism. Referring obsessively to sin and guilt, the narrator falls into delusions that Zimmerman associates with “the culture of religious revivalism” that flourished in antebellum America (144). The emotional excess portrayed in “The Black Cat” resembles the dangerous religious enthusiasm described in the works of alienists. Another mental disorder—taphephobia-induced catalepsy—is the subject of Chapter 7. Rejecting the idea that “The Premature Burial” is an elaborate trick similar to the hoaxes in which Poe often indulged, Zimmerman maintains that the story is “a fairly detailed and sophisticated psychological study,” a sober depiction of psychic turmoil and its terrors (167). Significantly, the narrator's recovery involves intense exposure to what he most fears (i.e., being buried alive), a process that prefigures the flooding therapy developed during the twentieth century. For Zimmerman, such anticipations bear witness to Poe's remarkable insights into inner life, many of which retain their relevance.The turn away from phrenology is evident in other Poe tales from the 1840s. In Chapter 8, Zimmerman focuses on “The Imp of the Perverse,” in which Poe faults phrenologists who cannot account for the “impulsive insanity” (178) discernible in human experience and identified by antebellum experts such as Forbes Winslow. For Poe, such madness reveals itself in the destructive fancies people entertain while gazing down from precipices, and Zimmerman argues that Poe's descriptions of that experience anticipate twenty-first-century insights into “the high place phenomenon” (172). Chapter 9 also demonstrates Poe's engagement with matters psychological. According to Zimmerman, “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” which dramatizes an asylum revolt, is more than a general critique of reformism. The treatments administered there represent the therapeutic approach recommended by Francois Pinel and his American followers, doctors troubled by the use of violence to control those deemed insane. Zimmerman argues that Poe's language evinces impressive knowledge about the Pinel school and related psychiatric writings. In fact, the teapot reference that Poe makes in the story has, as Zimmerman points out, a striking analogue in an 1844 medical treatise written by Amariah Brigham, a Pennsylvania doctor whose work Poe may have studied. In the final chapter, Zimmerman presents additional evidence of Poe's willingness to critique the phrenological system. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe posits the existence of an analytical faculty missing from a list of mental organs complied by phrenologists, proposing, in lieu of that long list, a model of that mind featuring only three faculties: Intellect, Taste, and Moral Sense. Zimmerman finds the source for this tripartite model in the works of Lord Kames, an eighteenth-century philosopher, not a mental health specialist, so one struggles to see how “Murders” shows Poe's profound knowledge of antebellum psychiatry.There are some general problems with the argument laid out in Zimmerman's book. He acknowledges that Poe's writings display his abiding interest in matters psychological, but Zimmerman focuses on fictional texts, offering no analysis of Poe's poems, some of which feature powerful portrayals of mental trauma and delusion. Works like “The Raven” and “Ulalume” certainly deserve scrutiny in a book written to divulge the true extent of Poe's psychological interests. Preoccupation with the tales also keeps Zimmerman from investigating “The Literati of New York City,” in which Poe used phrenological terms used to shore up assessments of fellow writers, as Edward Hungerford noted in his 1930 essay “Poe and Phrenology.” Published serially in 1846, the “Literati” sketches appeared years after the premiere of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the point at which Zimmerman detects a change in Poe's thinking about phrenology. In short, the shift thesis proposed by Zimmerman seems weak to the extent that he ignores Poe's nonfictional texts. Another problem is Zimmerman's use of the term “mainstream” to describe alienists at odds with phrenologists. During the nineteenth century, psychiatry had not crystalized into a discipline, so the lines separating different modes of psychological inquiry at that time were less distinct than Zimmerman suggests when he assumes the existence of a “mainstream” approach. For this reason, it is unclear exactly what system Poe would have embraced after the rejection of phrenology that Zimmerman attributes to him. In addition, Zimmerman overextends himself by discussing not only the antebellum context for Poe's descriptions of mental distress but also the relationship between those depictions and present-day psychological insights; and shifting between the past and the present, Zimmerman does not focus his critical energies on examining a sufficiently specified topic.Against these problems stand the strengths of the book. Juxtaposing excerpts from works by nineteenth-century physicians and passages from Poe tales, Zimmerman makes a compelling case that Poe stayed abreast of developments in the emerging science of mental health, and those textual pairings also help readers appreciate the descriptive detail that marks Poe's literary renderings of madness. Such evidence indicates that Poe knew what he was doing when he put pen to paper. In addition, Zimmerman's remarks on the predictive power of Poe's characterizations is significant—even if the argument loses focus when Zimmerman ventures outside the antebellum context of Poe's fiction. Observing how closely some maladies described in works by Poe correspond to diagnostic reports written by present-day specialists, Zimmerman highlights Poe's observational talents, which are remarkable to the extent that they helped the writer create troubled characters who retain, despite their age, immediacy and plausibility. One wishes that Zimmerman had further developed his interpretations of tales such as “The Cask of Amontillado” and “Thou Art the Man,” readings that he curiously buries in appendices, but Edgar Allan Poe: Amateur Psychologist is a powerful corrective to the false notion that Poe lacked literary skill.

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