A Presentation on Evil

A Tale of Two Poems

The intensity of love has long been an establishment in poetry: poets may use language and rhythm to twist meaning and to evoke a more personal outcry to the reader. However, on comparison, it becomes prevalent that not all love poems necessarily convey the same message to readers: love is a subject that is pure, abstract and differing; it is so wide in its ramifications that the poems can fall under extraordinarily different categories. Therefore, although “Havisham” and “The laboratory” both seem at a glance, to be about the ruthlessness of love, and about the corruption of goodwill towards evil, the protagonists are determined to accomplish their feats of evil in different natures: the unnamed narrator in “Havisham” is deranged, and is severely influenced by her lover’s abandonment, blames him dor leaving her, and consequently seeks the psychological benefits of the wish to kill. However, the woman in “The Laboratory” is more poised, more self-willed to achieve her aims: unlike the other woman, she is still young, determined, jealous of the woman who took her husband away, so that she strives to kill the other woman, and not her husband. Ultimately, it is the capability of the two women to enforce death from their love of their husbands that provides the startling difference.

At first, “Havisham” seems to be a mass of contradictions: the narrator aptly switches between different words, which are opposite to each other, so we could observe her undying love towards her lover, even through the hate that has left her bound to her bed over his betrayal: this is expressed, even from the first three words: “Beloved husband bastard”. Quickly, Ann Duffy is bringing us to two completely different points: this continues, as she prays for his death, “so hard I’ve green pebbles for eyes”. Clearly, the narrator is disintegrating, decaying into a being that lacks the will to live: she is still left behind at the moment of her marriage: she still wears the yellowing wedding dress, the good memory completely tainted, but still grasping onto it, still living in the past. But still, the love is shown yet again, as the reader is uncomfortably introduced to what may well be the narrator’s insanity: the narrator states that she sleeps comfortably on some nights, nights in which she hallucinates, and sees

“the lost body over me,
my fluent tongue in its mouth in its ear
then down till I suddenly bite awake”,

As this excerpt demonstrates, the narrator is still clinging onto the memory of her husband, although she herself also has a powerful desire to kill him, for a “long slow honeymoon” with the corpse. Ann Duffy is implying that love and hatred can sometimes be intertwined; while the narrator wishes her husband’s death, thinking him responsible for her present state, she also, paradoxically, cannot live without him.

In “The Laboratory”, the same fundamental concepts are present: In this more light-hearted poem, Browning expresses the coldness of the narrator, whose husband had left for another woman, underscoring the link between the poems. However, it is also clear that the woman in this poem is less dependent on her husband: she is jealous of the other woman, and wishes her demise, but witnesses the husband as less responsible: he was enticed away from her because she was the more beautiful; the narrator imagines, in a moment of fancy, that the two of them are laughing at her, in a tone of bitterness that implies that she now has no love towards her husband. There are more suggestions in the poem: the narrator takes action, to kill the woman who drives her husband away, instead of contemplating about the husband’ s death: she also wants both the husband and the wife to experience the ramifications of the wife’s death, ensuring that the chemist produces a poison that does not “spare her the pain/to let death be felt and proof remain”, so that the husband, undoubtedly shaken by the death, will “remember her dying face!” That was the entire point of her madness, as suggested by Browning, to condemn the husband’s actions, but to mainly create unimaginable suffering and havoc on the wife, who would undoubtedly die a slow death. It is for that that she reaps her wealth on the chemist, her willingness for human suffering turning into a profound sense of pleasure, as she looks forward to the next time she and her husband meet.

While both texts convey the desire to commit evil, the attitude of the two women are different and profound, not only because the women strive to kill different people involved in the relationship: the woman in “Havisham” desperately grasps on the memory of her husband, from wearing the wedding dress, and derives pleasure from both the wish to kill her husband, and also from his body, from his exterior, since she cannot forgive his soul, and blames him for leaving her, not the other woman: hence, she has no wish to kill the other woman in the poem. Conversely, the woman in “The Laboratory” is much younger, and is under the grasp of vengeance for her husband leaving her: it is, however, unlikely that she has any emotional feeling remaining: she understands that he left her simply because the other woman was more beautiful, and seeks to punish the other woman for enforcing the husband to leave, but still asks for his suffering.

The Black Cat Analysis: Is it Evil?

Madness and impending doom both seem to merge together into the narrator of “The Black Cat”, as he tries to hold back his sanity after committing the murder of his cat and of his wife. The short story itself is therefore a digression of unbiblical and inhuman rage, as Poe writes with such fervour and power that the very definition of evil is questioned, suggesting that the narrator, due to his insanity, cannot be categorised under its reaching boundaries, as in both circumstances the narrator is clearly not in possession of his senses; Poe seems to be implying that there should be a distinct dividing line between both evil and lunacy.

The first signals of the narrator’s wavering mind is seen briefly at the beginning of the story, as he introduces the reader personally. This serves for the reader to observe his diseased mind, and to form a connection with the narrator as they begin to get some indication of his madness. The opening paragraph seems to form part of the narrator’s confession: the narrator is unburdening his soul, releasing his troubles and revealing how they led to his breakdown. even if his “very senses reject their own evidence”, as he is drawn into the mists of imagination; he is plainly insane at this moment. Furthermore, the narrator stresses that  the occurences were “mere household events”; however they have still haunted him. Following this thread, the reader would discover that the narrator had plainly made a harrowing connotation out of the fire after he had killed his cat, and when the burn marks on the walls resembled that of a cat’s.

Another piece of the puzzle becomes evident when Poe implies that the narrator’s own madness had stemmed from his sudden alcoholism habit. The narrator is firstly seen as a happy and carefree man, “tender of heart”, and who was fond of animals, a feeling shared by his wife. However, this fleeting moment of happiness was soon overturned as soon as the narrator mentions the beginning of his alcoholism: through “the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance”, the narrator was seen to be morose, irritable and violent towards his wife and his pets when under the influence of drink. This led to a perverted sense of reality, of which led to his assault on Pluto, his beloved cat, when he cut out one of its eyes. From the reactions afterwards, it is clear that the narrator fully remonstrates this act, and names it an “damnable atrocity”, an random act of violence that was spurred not necessarily by the narrator’s own cold-bloodiness, but by his moment of relapse from alcohol.

The narrator’s descent into madness, not evil,  continues to a greater extent after assaulting Pluto: The narrator describes the overwhelming guilt he felt, and his sadness as he watches his life fall apart, soon inevitably showing a desirable feeling to kill the cat altogether, out of “perverseness”, likely spurred on by his unwillingness to bury his grief. The consequences of the action made his attitudes to the new cat more sensible: the narrator believes that his own guilt had returned, in the form of the other cat, and would haunt him for all eternity. It is then not evil, but the narrator’s own plaguing remorse, that made him visualise the mark of a hangman’s noose on the back of the other cat (of which he cannot bring himself to digress), and which made his intenseness hatred towards the cat. The last act to unhinge the narrator, then, was his wife’s murder, when she attempted to protect the cat from her husband’s lunacy. Then, the narrator truly loses his grasp, and, using his flawed reasoning, attempts to conceal the body, not realising that he had also walled up the cat until it was much too late.

Throughout both murders, it should not suffice to state that the narrator’s motives were really brought about by evil: the narrator was first under the influence of alcohol, then afterwards the victim of his scalding guilt. Furthermore, it should be remembered that the narrator was a kind and a happy person, along with a wife whose “disposition was not uncongenial with (his) own”, and that he felt almost at peace after he disposed of the other cat. The other cat was itself a representation of his guilt, hence of his heightened lunacy.

My Opinion On Evil

While most people have an intuitive knowledge of evil, as seen in most popular film franchises and novels, evil cannot be represented in reality by two-dimensional villains from James Bond. This is because all the plots for extortion, demonic adsorption are all conducted by subjects who are unreal, who do not fit into the image of what the world really is, who cannot really, as it seems, to feel any other emotion.

The fact is, therefore, that the actual definition, or the concept, is broad and vague: along with changes in the attitudes of society, the concept of evil gradually changed also: It is now accepted that the slave market was evil, that drugs, once used as a form of relaxation, is an “evil” substance, while the view from centuries ago may have been that the above acts were legal and even normal; evil is thus a relative term, a term that does not define its boundaries; as an example, phrases such as “more evil” lacks not only sensibility but also, to a degree, meaning: how can you be more evil? Thus, the meaning of evil actually has some basis on society.

While the general thinking is that evil is doing something sadistic that has the potential to harm others. However, beneath the surface, more questions exist: can we really classify those who cannot incorporate our values into their way of thinking as evil? People such as sociopaths, psychopaths, for example, do not fit into our present of image of society, and may lack a moral compass and any feelings of guilt: they may think differently from others; from their perspective, murder may suggest something apart from evil, and we often annotate them to be insane, not “evil”.

Furthermore,  there are some scenarios in which the person alleged to have done evil is incapable of not performing the task. This may be defined as people who are forced to evil, or people who are malevolent by nature. In these cases, by analysis, people had no free will, or were under the influence of a greater power than themselves. A good example could be the Holocaust: while the present world had looked back to the mass killings of the Jewish with prevalent disgust, the question remains as to if the Nazi soldiers, even the citizens themselves, could be seen as “evil”: It was likely that not only they were encouraged and manipulated by government officials to conduct the killings and to report any traitors to Nazi Germany, but the pivotal factor was a fear of any foreigners who could have been spies, and hatred of the Jewish.

In both cases above, it is prevalent there are evidently still some irregularities over whether the acts should be considered as evil: as stated, it is my opinion that they should not be. However, the idea that psychopaths who murder or rape their victims should be described as evil is still a viable option today: most people would think psychopaths or the Nazis as evil.

Confucius’ Quote

In line with Confucius’ quote, which had stemmed centuries: “He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger”, the action of learning and thinking are definably different, and obtaining one without the other notably leads to different fallacies in education. The difference is due to an inconsistency in the ideas. To learn is to require and to gain information with studying: we are told a fact, yet we do not evaluate it to such a high standard. That is, we remember the wording of the fact, we are able to dictate it; people learn quickly enough that fire is harmful to their bodies, yet it is helpful for warmth and light. On the other hand, thinking constitutes something that may be resonantly different, we apply logic to make an informed and processed judgement and to ask questions, in which all avenues are thoroughly explored. Learning is not necessarily applied. In with the previous example: humans think about the properties of fire, and process the fact, to link it with other ideas to discover why it gives out warmth; while they have learned that fire does burn skin, thinking demands a logical analysis of what was learnt.

So, Confucius’ intent behind the quote eventually becomes clear: it is stated that anyone who just recalls information and facts, but is not able to rationally think it out, is in trouble, that is, if rational thinking and reasoning is not incorporated with learning, it is possible that full understanding is not achieved. We know the effects of electricity, how it is unstable to be standing under a tree during a storm, or how it is unwise to carry metal objects in the storm. However, without thinking, we cannot connect the dots, and evaluate as to why the above is true; thought processes are not applied, and the person is consequently lost in their own confusion; it is knowledge that carrying a metal object during lightning is unwise, but we cannot understand why it is, we cannot reason that it has something to do with the composition of sub-atomic particles, and the properties of metals.  This has some connections in education: students know that if they do not know why a statement is true, then they cannot adequately understand.

Alternatively, if someone thinks, but does not learn, then Confucius states that the person is in great danger. From analysis, a possible definition could be that if someone does indeed know the answers to questions from rational thinking, that is they reach a valid conclusion, the worst event would be that they do not learn it: they do not study, so their ideas are not actually based on valid facts, on valid research; it is wild, untamed and could be disastrous. For example, in the times of the bubonic plague, it was common to believe that the disease itself was created from bad smells, or from invisible demons that infested the unlucky person. Now, this was taken as a fact in the thirteenth century, but the problem was that it was not wholly based on facts; microscopes weren’t around to confirm the presence of bacteria on the plague fleas, which then spread to rats. Without this valuable piece of information, people were limited to observation, which led eventually to the formation of such theories, scorned by present medicine.

The tunnel

Well, now I’d done it; It took a lot of reasoning and perhaps incredible bouts of stupidity, but the consequences of not doing it will have far outweighed the benefits.

As the sun sank towards the horizon, casting long and numerous shadows on the greyness of the concrete floor, the trees above whistled and scraped and the shadows they casted also bristled and shook, almost like the actions of an insane man who felt that he had been wronged by the world. I found myself focusing intensely on the brightness of the light and its golden tinge, desperately restraining myself to look inside the dark yawning mouth of the tunnel, which spanned the hill, having been drilled through the mountain. However, it had been claimed by ruin, by years of misuse and decay, so that it was unsupported and so no longer safe. To prevent members of the community from entering, the council had decided that the sides of the tunnel would be blocked with concrete, so that entrance would be impossible. However, according to various newspaper reports at the time, the council had backed out of its proposal, and the blockage was never finished; and because of an accident in the tunnel, some of the workers had been crushed to death, under the strain of the heavy rocks which fell from the ceiling, their cries of despair and mortality echoing off the stone walls and reverberating out.

Out into the loneliness.

Again, I resisted the urge to look behind me, to be enveloped by the darkness, for it to make me its own; all my nerves were on edge and I felt panicked, nauseated by the pricking feeling on the back of my neck. My legs were exposed to the bitterly cold air from the tunnel’s core (like the breaths of a living being), and I had trouble forming rational thoughts; any thought turned to screams and howls to run, to leave, to abandon the entrance, as the tunnel was now a place of death and abandonment.

A cold whisper of air whirred around my jacket, stirring up a lone leaf that had fallen off a branch, making it spin, slowly at first, then rapidly faster, as it rose into the air, spiralling in the darkening sky; a piece of rope, twisted around a thin branch, swivelled around and around unceasingly, as the wind slowed: twisting and twisting.

Funny, I thought suddenly; the rope did not match the place it was in: it seemed like someone had deliberately draped it around the branch, and tied a thick knot at the end, securing it on the branch, so the end swayed in the wind, as if it was played upon by invisible hands and fingers. A thick, strong rope… a hangman’s noose???

The crack of a nearby (bottle? can?) pierced the air like the sound of a bullet, and I started, as my legs started to shake uncontrollably, unceasingly, along with my hands. The sound of my heart quickened and intensified, until the beating was almost unbearable; it deadened any outside sound, and it almost deafened me, filling my thoughts, making me inhuman: Thump, thump, thump…

“Dissemble no more! Tear up the planks! It is the beating of his hideous heart!”

…thump…thump…thump…

This is all a prank, I thought hopefully, as I resisted the urge to scream, to a (deserted?) area where no one will be able to hear me: The bullies at school knew that there was no threat in the tunnels, and so they are now playing tricks on me to scare me into running away from their dare, just because I refused to give them my lunch money!

But, in my heart of hearts, I knew this to be false. It was, however, interesting that I could still think of hope when in the midst of despair and doom.

From the surrounding landscape, or from the heart of the tunnel itself, a slow, steady scrape had started to overlap the silence of the night, slowly, slowly intensifying into a continuous sound that approached my position…

There was something watching me.

The workers are coming to seal the tunnel now…

slowly, slowly, slowly…

I tried desperately to open my mouth to scream.

But there was nobody to hear me.

(nobody????!)

thump… thump…scrape……………………………………………………………………..

No!

an icy hand gripped my heart. Time to go, I thought quickly; I could barely see the road from which I came from, but I had a torch. Slowly, my hand reached into the pocket, slowly fumbled around in its depths, and found some calmness in the coolness of the metal covering.  I gripped the torch like a flaming baton, as I stumbled around the mountain, crying softly to myself. I didn’t care whether the bullies gave me hell the next day; I just wanted to leave.

He had been going for the boy.

As Tony Gallor slowly scraped out of the mouth of the tunnel, his mouth bleeding and a horrible gash on his shoulder, he knew that he would have to walk all the way home, all the way out of the mountain, past the train station, since he did not bring a ticket, and into his house in the suburbs, a distance that would be hell on foot, especially when his left leg was injured; that bicycle crash had been a bad one, and he was forced to spend the night in the depths of the tunnel. And guess what? That boy had the cheek to leave before he even told him the time!

The Yellow Wallpaper analysis

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a psychological horror story that expresses the fragmented reality and the thoughts of a deranged mind, and how the fantasy in our minds can at times overwhelm reality. Written in a diary format, the narrative manages to evoke a sense of dread and anticipation as the narrator and her husband rent a house that was up to three miles from the village, to a room with a strange, yellow wallpaper. However, under John’s harsh guidelines not to exercise any creative thoughts, she writes a secret diary and begins her obsession with the wallpaper. Eventually, as the narrator’s logic and reasoning disintegrates, she imagines a woman creeping about under the wallpaper, whose pattern started to resemble the bars of a cage . Her subsequent delusions and her slow descent into mania highlights the question of fantasy and reality, and how, at times, they are indistinguishable.

From the beginning of the narrative, the story alone feels uneasy when it is discovered that the narrator has a romantic and naive mind that does not seem to fit her facade. This is not only through how her husband, John, isolates her from society and consequently reality, but also through the query as to why he would do this in the first place. At first, we see that John is unusually overreactive and protective of the narrator, such as forbidding her to think about her condition, moving house just because of the narrator’s condition, and treating her as if she was a child “‘What is it, little girl?’ he said. ‘Don’t go walking about like that-you’ll get cold.” However, it is only when the narrator expresses her reactions to the room she was in that John’s behaviour seems to make more sense: the narrator describes, in her fantasy, how the room could have been a nursery, as it had barred windows, “for little children”, and from the “rings and things in the walls”, which was covered with torn wallpaper. However, she fails to realise the reality: that the room could also have been used to house a mental patient.

The narrator’s state of mind becomes more prevalent and startling when she begins to develop a profound interest in the yellow wallpaper, of which she is disgusted at first:”the colour is repellant, almost revolting: a smouldering, unclean yellow”. However, after noticing the wallpaper, the narrator’s diary entries starts to focus more on it, especially the “pattern”, as the narrator tries, in vain, to find a pattern for the stripes on the wallpaper, a pattern that evidently does not exist. She then delves deeper into fantasy as she begins to imagine a woman creeping about the wallpaper, trying to escape from the lines, which starts to resemble the bars of a cage, although she does not realise that the woman’s predicament symbolises her own: she was also, in a sense, trapped, isolated, and unable to escape both the house and continually unable to escape her own fantasy. The narrator’s deranged mind becomes clearer when she discovers a smooch in the wallpaper, going around the entire room, “round and round and round”, failing to see that the smooches were made by her clothes rubbing against the wall, even when she saw yellow stains on the clothes.

Through the diary entries of a narrator who is not sane, Gilman delivers a chilling message to her readers about the distinct line between reality and fantasy, and what would happen if we delve too deeply into our fantasies and consequently lose control of our ability to return to reality. There is a very thin line between the two, Gilman seems to be implying, and sometimes it is possible for someone to lose control of their sanity and therefore their lives, as they continually draw back from society.

The curious meeting

Was it an illusion?

The diamond

It had been an overcast morning. As the wind howled its ferocity to the world and the dried leaves scuttled like hunched spiders across the road, I yawned, and put another sugar lump in my coffee. It was going to be another tiring day, if the previous ones are anything to go by; there had been an increasing interest in the theft of the Johnston diamond in our local museum. While the was apparently impossible, it had been done, and the media had been relentlessly digging up new news articles: “Security guard in total shock; could it be him?” and, today, “Mystery apparently unsolvable”. It therefore had been hard this week in the local police to keep the media and the public at bay. And today was going to be no different; as my chief, Dermot Clark, explained to me yesterday.

“Farnham, we cannot take this any further to the media; who knows what they could make up with the extra information!” he had said. I pity him; he had been devoid of any sleep since the theft.

Two days ago, at seven thirty in the night, a security guard in the museum had heard breaking glass, and seconds later the ringing of an alarm. He had rushed there as fast as he could, but the diamond had already been stolen, prised out of a shattered glass casing. The entire lack of suspects was baffling: since the guard told us that he had locked all the doors and windows, and there was a shattered glass pane found right next to the exhibit the next morning, the mystery was how exactly the thief managed to get through locked doors and windows to reach the exhibit.

Today, I was heading to the police station to meet up with the chief. He had apparently got hold of a suspect that had been what he described over the telephone as in an “excited state”. The police station was a one-storey brick building, with a tall wooden fence encompassing it on three sides except the front, where a driveway led up steeply towards the garage. What bothered me was that although the house was partly bordered, there was nothing to stop someone from going around the house form the front, as the only door was one that was easily opened, with no lock. As I entered, the chief led me to a small interrogation room positioned facing towards the fence. There was a window partly open; but the blinds were drawn and the high fence prevented anyone overhearing the conversation. I could see that the chief was excited; his eyes practically sparkled as he led me to a chair. The witness was brought in. She was Joanna Richardson, the accountant living just across me; however, with a recent workplace scandal, she was close to being in debt. With the preliminary questions complete, she began her statement.

“Well, I was on my way to a restaurant (It was Friday, after all). I left my house at five-thirty, and took the main road, which led past the museum. It was nearing night when I approached the museum, and it was dark; the streetlights did little to make people see where they are going. Anyway, I was past it when a car swerved violently across the road, and came towards me.”

“Where were you at the time?” I asked.

“Just slightly past the museum, almost to the intersection. Then, as it swerved towards me, I saw his face-“

“Whose?” I asked.

Then, suddenly, a shot rang out. It was astonishingly loud, and narrowly missed Joanna. I believe that we were all in shock for a moment. Joanna was trembling, repeating the words “someone took aim at me” over and over, her face blanched of all colour. Then, slowly, The chief got up, and strode over to the window. He spent some time attempting to raise the blinds. When he did, the culprit was gone. All that was left was a revolver.

A still loaded revolver that was still smoking.

“Well,” the chief remarked, “it seems to be over.”

After obtaining the name of the person that Joanna saw on the night of the crime, and noticing that a) the person had the same make of revolver that had been used to take a shot at that had gone missing in the past week b) that he had a motive for the crime and c) he was near the police station when Joanna had been shot at, apparently visiting a friend, Henry Forbes was immediately arrested, without any questions being raised as to the fact that the gun had been missing the previous week. Joanna had now retired back home with her husband, a smug and incorrigible man that always seemed to know secretly your problems, and would hold them upon everybody else, threatening you with it. All in all, I did not trust him. And the crime did not make sense.

“But, Chief,” I objected, “Forbes’s maid stated that almost everybody in town knew that he had a revolver, and that it was kept in an in securable place”.

“Well, that has little bearing on the case. But, since we have time, why don’t you explain your objections to the arrest to me?”

Seeing an opportunity to express myself, I hastily rushed into the act.

“First,” I started, “why didn’t Forbes shoot Joanna dead?”

“What do you mean?” said the chief, puzzled.

“Well, after realising that the first shot had missed, why didn’t he shoot at her again? There were plenty of shots left, and there would be ample time, since we were stunned immediately afterwards. Secondly, why leave the revolver at the scene of the crime, which would inevitably lead us directly to him?”

“Well, you heard what he said: It was common knowledge in town, and that he could have thought that it would lead nowhere.”

“Yes,” I said, “but surely it would be better to take it with him? That way, the identity of the murderer could be even more well-hidden.”

I could see that the chief was starting to accept my observations. Encouraged by this, I continued:

“Therefore, since Forbes revolver was found at the scene of the crime, he was not responsible. And I was particularly mystified by Joanna’s remark, “Someone took aim at me”.”

“Why?”

“Well, if she knew that Forbes was a likely murderer, would it be more likely that she said “he” instead of “someone”?”

“You mean-“

“Yes, ” I said. “Joanna was lying in the fact that she saw Forbes, or anyone at all, although Forbes was driving to the shops at the time, at a place near the museum. And the fact that the shot missed her, prompting no other shots from the gunman given that he still had plenty of time, I think that we could say that she could be guilty. After all, she claimed that she was outside on the day of the theft on five-thirty, thus giving her plenty of time to run, take a taxi or some faster way of transportation to the museum; even walking would get you there before dark. She then goes in, hiding in some obscure location, perhaps the lavatory, until the museum closes. Then she comes out, steals the diamond, then smashes the window and escapes into the night. She would sell it later to pay off her debts.”

“Impossible,” said the chief.

“No, it is particularly possible. Remember that we have not questioned her husband, and that we do not know where he was when there was an apparent attempt on Joanna’s life. He could have stolen the revolver a week ago, when they were preparing for the theft together; they might have also kept themselves informed of Forbes’s actions, so as to incriminate him since he was also in a debt, but a much larger one that had to be repaid at a sooner date.”