Phrenology Symbol Analysis

Phrenology symbolizes humankind’s failure to grapple with the impulses that the narrator claims stems from the Imp of the Perverse—in other words, Poe uses phrenology to symbolize the shortcomings of science and religion, suggesting that human understanding is imperfect and incomplete. Now known as a form of pseudoscience, phrenology was based on the idea that the shape of the skull could lend insight regarding the contours of the brain and thus predict human behavior. It attained some popularity in the first half of the 1800s, when Poe was writing, but has since been thoroughly debunked as quackery, and indeed was actively used as a “scientific” basis for flat-out racism (it was particularly popular with the Nazis a century later).

Poe mentions phrenology six times in the first two paragraphs of “The Imp of the Perverse,” and it appears to be a stand-in for “rational” psychological sciences and even realms of religious inquiry that rely on rationality. As the narrator writes, “Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term.” This is a rather verbose way to suggest that if phrenology were perfect in its observations, it would have identified the Imp of the Perverse as part of human nature already. Human understanding is imperfect, however, and as such cannot account for irrational impulses such as the Imp. In this way, phrenology both acts as a stand-in for all explorations of human nature and also represents Poe’s sincere interrogation of how science at the time ignored darker and less rational aspects of psychology.