The Science of Psychopathy and Poe's “The Man of the Crowd”

Abstract

Poe's “The Man of the Crowd” illustrates the paranoia afflicting London's urban populations in a period of mass immigration and urbanization. As the story begins, the narrator sits in a café observing people walk by. While classifying the mostly degenerate amalgamation of people into a taxonomized catalog, he identifies “a decrepid [sic] old man,” who immediately captures his attention, prompting a daylong pursuit. In the end, the narrator concludes that the man is “the type and genius of deep crime.” Criticism on this story often focuses on this flâneur, but when broadened to include the crowd, a “psychopathic crowd structure” is revealed. Similarly, Vicki Hester and Emily Seger's analysis of Poe's “The Black Cat” suggests that the narrator's behavior is consistent with current forensic research on psychopathy. Yet, for “The Man of the Crowd,” Steven Fink identifies the flâneur as the author's version of the legendary Wandering Jew. However, when readers juxtapose the evolutionary history of psychopathy from the nineteenth century to today, alongside the political and social conditions of the nineteenth-century crowd, the paranoia and fear embedded in modern city life reveals otherwise. A breeding ground of mass suspicion between individuals—beyond the narrator and old man—is a psychopathic crowd structure in which everyone is “a man of the crowd.” And despite psychology's rapid evolution in the past century, the psychopath in our world remains nearly as elusive as in Poe's.