Developing Insanity

     Edgar Allan Poe crafts the elements of fear, death, and madness to connect parallel themes in his stories. Although Poe’s stories contain limited variation, his works offer deep insight into his morbid writing style. Poe believed that fear was essential for the basic plot of a story because fear communicates emotion to the reader through tension and unfamiliarity. Although murder was seen as taboo in writings at the time, Poe did not limit his writing content for the moral preferences of the society of his age. The author used murder or the threat of death to bring forth fear’s vast power over the reader. As the narrator of each story drew closer to the time of executionary plans, the tension and fear of the one to be murdered grew exponentially, all while Poe brings the reader to sympathize with the narrator. Another common method of bringing fear into his writing was by strange sounds near the time of death. Typically, these sounds were the beating of a heart or the screech of some unknown door.
     Eyes emphasize an object of fear for the narrator in several of Poe’s tales. The speaker in the story is often fascinated with the eyes of another which eventually provokes the narrator’s fear. The most notable of these examples is the hated blue eyes of the old man in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and the cutting out of Pluto’s eye in “The Black Cat.” The body of many of Poe's stories has a deep undercurrent of fear which pervades each paragraph and progressively seeps into the reader’s consciousness.

     Through the stories, the narrator changes temperament from calm to angry, usually resulting in death. In “The Black Cat” a kind, gentle man in the beginning becomes an unrepentant murderer in the end.
     As fear manifests the emotions of the tales, death forms the substance and result of that fear. Poe emphasizes that death is inevitable and universal usually through the narrator's aside commentary to the reader. Another parallelism in these stories is that the narrator lives either alone or with a single companion who the narrator eventually kills. In “The Tale-Tell Heart” the narrator kills the old man whom he cares for, but while the murder is testified as being planned, the narrator seems to perform the method of suffocation without foresight. Similarly, the narrator’s wife who is murdered in “The Black Cat,” has an accidental death by the hands of the narrator, and her body is stowed behind the cellar wall. In “The Raven” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” the narrator lives by himself and performs the foul task of murder without worry of others’ notice.
     Poe attempts to give death a certain beauty and dismisses life shortly after to emphasize death’s destruction. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator shows extra concern before he actually murders, and the old man suspects nothing because the narrator is even kinder to the man than normal. As death approaches, the narrator’s mental condition falters to present Poe’s bloody, methodical murders.
     As Poe advances through his writing, the narrator, who once appeared fearful and angry, is increasingly presented as mad via vehement announcements, repeating details, repetitive habits, and the seeking of protection in enclosed rooms.
     The narrator gradually descends from debatable sanity to the maelstrom of madness. While presented as unstable in the beginning of most of the stories, the narrator slides downward in a spiral of insanity and quickly becomes believably mad. Both in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator specifically claims his sanity in the narrative prologue and tells his story to prove it. Throughout the story, the narrator rejects his deteriorating state and protests that he is not mad and was fully aware of his actions while relying on the proof of his clever and cautious disposals of the victim. Although the narrator insists on his sanity, Poe presents contradictory evidence and reveals the true madness.
     The narrator interprets his behavior from his own opinion in “The Black Cat” by his fearful fascination with the cat’s seemingly supernatural abilities, but the narrator interprets his behavior from others’ opinions in “The Tell-Tale Heart” when protesting his insanity in the introduction of the story. The narrator in “The Black Cat” notices his own behavioral downgrade through the treatment of his wife and pets. However, the speaker accuses the police for mocking his agitation at the sound of the beating heart in “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

     Meticulous attention rivets the speaker to his victim’s emotions and the potential discovery of the body. Poe has the narrator plan ahead in “The Cask of Amontillado” by storing supplies in the cellar with which to murder his enemy and flawlessly execute the crime. The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” cleverly disposes of the body without blood or dust’s revealing the fate or location of the victim. Lastly, in “The Black Cat” the narrator disposes of the debris from the wall and repaints the wall to hide all recent disturbance.
     Poe’s most emphatic revelation of the narrator’s insanity comes from the character’s indistinguishability between the physical world and the world of the mind. The speaker cannot overcome the fact that his delirious imagination corrupts the data of the senses. The narrator constantly twitches uncomfortably with small, terrified movements while talking or mumbling to himself repetitiously.
     The speaker hears and sees nonexistent things which only assist in his appearing mad to the reader. The narrator believes that the cat, Pluto, is a witch in animal form in “The Black Cat,” and in “The Raven” the speaker believes the carrion bird is actually conversing with him. The loud beating of a dead man’s heart concludes that the speaker of “The Tell-Tale Heart” imagines unreal possibilities.
     Edgar Allan Poe has striking similarities in his work that link the topics of his tales together. Each story creates its own world of insanity while remaining united with reality enough to stir nightmarish fear within the reader.

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Agatha Tyche

Rhodes Hard Change

     Everything man has ever created has been from this earth. The value of our creations depends upon the skill of creation and the cost of the material which is dependent on its usefulness and scarcity. Through human history, gemstones have proven valuable for both reasons being difficult to find and procure and widely applicable. Of all the gems, diamonds capture the modern mind most severely, but the unbreakable, clear crystal's first use was to sharpen stone weapons to keep mankind alive.
     Diamond mining was underway in India by the 300s B.C. and were traded throughout the world for millenia. By the 1700s Indian mine production faltered and encouraged travelers to seek mines elsewhere - something never done before. By 1725 Brazil became the new producer of the world's diamonds and continued producing under 50,000 carats a year. By 1870 Brazil's production had plateaued at 200,000 carats annually. In 1866 a 21 carat diamond was discovered in a stream bed in South Africa and created a mining boom that continued through the last three centuries. In the first ten years after mining began in South Africa, global production doubled, and by 1882 more diamonds had entered the market than had existed for 2,000 years.
   An asthmatic teenager from England who traveled to South Africa for his health in  1871 and, leaving his brother's cotton farm, realized the potential from these new, enormously productive mines. Combining small mining rights he had purchased with a friend over the years, he established, De Beers Mining Company in 1880. By 1888 he had purchased Kimberly Central Diamond Mining Company for $25 million. A few years later De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd controlled 90% of global diamond production.

     With diamond production escalating faster than market demands, prices crashed, but Rhodes, a clever businessman, used his dominance of the production market to secure escalated sales prices through so release of stockpiled reserves. His production and reserve monopoly made this strategy successful in controlling the market and effectively established a vertical monopoly as Rockefeller achieved with oil production in America in the same period.
     Aside from his business accomplishments, Rhodes gained several political offices of the Cape Colony in South Africa. An extremely motivated imperialist, Rhodes pushed for northern expansion into the interior and created tension with native tribes, Boers, and other imperialist powers including Portugal, Germany, and Belguim. His press northward to control the mineral rights of Africa's interior was a significant motivator to the 1884 Berlin Conference, the "Scramble for Africa" that drew boundaries on African lands for European empires.
     A political businessman of extreme wealth, Rhodes used his effectively unlimited mineral rights to expand British influence northward, and he sought to establish a Red Line railroad from Cape Town, South Africa to Cairo, Egypt to connect the continents lands. Though unsuccessful with his imperialist goals, his other successes made him a made of wealth and renown. At his death in 1902 his will donated much of his money to established the Rhodes scholarship which allowed promising Germans, Americans, and British opportunity to study at Oxford University "regardless of race" effectively opening the scholarship to native Africans in the decades to follow.
     Buried in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) Rhodes's legacy has soured over the century. His De Beers mines have lost the absolute monopoly of the market, the British Empire has relinquished her African colonies, and his political history is now seen as oppressive and racist. None the less, Rhodes started from nothing and used his own skill, ingenuity, and opportunities to become one of the most successful businessmen in the late nineteenth century and a testament to the driving energy of the British Empire.


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Agatha Tyche