On Justification of Madness in the Tell Tale Heart and Black Cat

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On justification of Madness in the Tell-Tale Heart and Black Cat Madness is the abnormal behavior according to the sane, the violation of norms according to the society and the declining mental health according to science, but what actually madness is? Is it something objective? The endeavors of the people who tried to bring a change in the society were usually considered madness. Herein, I am going to cite a few examples to show my stance that madness is not the same thing for the madman. Let me cite the example of the man from “Black Cat” and the man from “The Tell-Tale Heart”. The resemblance in both these cases is the madness of the protagonists which is also shown by the sentence structure; for example “very dreadfully nervous I had been and am” and “Yet, mad am I not” represent the disorder of subject and verb. But “the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or not the loftiest intelligence…” The first point which comes into my mind, reading the stories, is assertion which is a human instinct. All the human beings try to say what they believe. So, the dislike for the “vulture eye” and “the cat” made them assert that they were not insane. To try to end the evil for the betterment of the society is another human attribute. The “black cat” and the “eye” were evil signs according to the protagonists; therefore, they tried to put a check on them by killing them. If we take madness as the decline in mental health, we can’t say both these protagonists were mad because all their senses were working properly even acutely. So their madness, in this case, is the hypersensitivity and hyperactivity of their nerves. Edgar Allan Poe says: “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing.” If we take this statement, the “wise precautions” taken by the protagonist of “the tell-tale Heart” to hide the corpse justify his madness. The protagonist had no feeling of
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