The Tell-Tale Heart

Edgar Allen Poe

Two Versions: 1, 2.
Outline
 Differences between the two versions
the two versions
Version (1) (ours version 2)
 Art is long and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave. Longfellow.
 If, still, you think me mad, you will think so no longer
when I describe the wise precautions I took for the
concealment of the body. The night waned, and I
worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I
dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the
arms and the legs. I then took up three planks from
the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all
between the scantlings.
Starting Questions
 The narrator: Is the narrator a man or a
woman? Is he mad? Why is the distinction
between madness and acute hearing ability
important for him? Why does the narrator
speak to “you”?
 The narrator and the old man:
 How are the two related? Why does the former
want to kill the latter?
 How does the narrator do it?
 What makes him confess at the end? What does
the title mean? Whose heartbeat does he hear?
The narrator: Your
Interpretation
 Yours: A man – freakier if it is a woman.
 Kate: More likely a man, since he is a
servant (but not a maid); he has the power to
throw the bed on the man; (later) the two are
like double or father and son.
 Yours: 1) imagines it; 2) Finally the narrator
still couldn't fight the sense of guilt that
groaned in his mind and drove him crazy.
 Kate: Why does he tell the story if he is
already driven mad?
Is the narrator mad? Your
answers
A.
1. The strange purpose of killing the old man
2. His slow and patient action. (see par 3)
3. His enjoying doing it. (par 4 sense of triumph  par 6?)
4. His not feeling guilty (?)
B.
Some mental problems. For example, his hallucination,
“EVIL EYES” and his description of heartbeat “A LOW,
DULL, QUICK SOUND--MUCH SUCH A SOUND AS A
WATCH MAKES WHEN ENVELOPED IN COTTON” In
the end, I think that the killer has some consciences so
that he admits his evil deed out of guilt, which is the only
right thing he has done!
Kate: What kind of madness?
Motivation
 I think the disease was not an real disease(?);
however, it is the feeling that coming from the old
man's eyes which makes the man suffered and
decided to kill the old man.
 par 2 Quote: “Object there was none. Passion there
was none… One of his eyes resembled that of a
vulture -- a pale blue eye with a film over it.
Whenever it fell upon me my blood ran cold, and so
by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to
take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of
the eye for ever.”
One Interpretation –Criminal
Psychology
 Unclear Motivation: A mysterious thriller,
where the killer’s motivation is not clearly
explained.
 Process Shown: Instead, we witness both
his action and the working of a criminal mind
from nervous but rational scheming to
contradictory feelings of sympathy and
triumph to finally the heart wins over and he
owns up his crime.
More Symbolic/Psychoanalytic
Interpretation
 Why are both the “eye” and the heart so important?
 The old man’s eye  poses a threat to the “I”
narrator
 par 2 -- "Object there was none. Passion there was
none . . . It was his eye! . . .pale blue eye, with a film over
it.“
 Called Evil Eye Has to do the work when the eye is open
 The narrator  use the ray to kill the eye
 Climax: “It was open — wide, wide open — and I grew
furious as I gazed upon it."
The Eye and “I” narrator
 Visual Perception:
 pleasurable; rational
 “I” being formed in the mirror stage the sense of
self = our perception.
 Induces fantasy  one basis for filmic theories on
spectatorship. …
 The narrator resists being frightened (or
immobilized) by the eye.  “Never before that
night had I felt the extent of my own powers, of my
sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of
triumph.”
The narrator’s heart and the
old man’s
 The narrator gets furious when hearing the heart
beat because it is his own too. (He is always
nervous.)
 The two are doubles: like mirror image (opposite but
alike in an uncanny way)
 e.g. (par 6) He was still sitting up in the bed,
listening; just as I have done night after night
hearkening to the death watches in the wall.
 (par 7) I knew the sound well.
 Ending: The narrator sits on top of the old man, so
the heartbeat could be beneath him or inside him.
The “Father’s” Eye & “I”
narrator
 Eye – a sign/sublimation of phallic power (e.g.
Oedipus’ blinding himself // self-castration)
 The narrator with castration complex and Oedipus
complex
 e.g. (par 3) It took me an hour to place my whole
head within the opening so far that I could see him
as he lay upon his bed.
 Entrance into the primal scene: contradiction
between fear of castration and hatred of the “father’s”
lack of power.
His hearing ability & what he hears
 The narrator’s hearing:
 The disease “had sharpened [his] senses —
not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all
was the sense of hearing acute"
His hearing abilities & what he
hears
 “a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes
when enveloped in cotton"
 -- hallucination; his own heart beat  sense of guilt;
 -- the old man's heart, first heard in fact and then imagined
to be heard;
 -- that of deathwatch beetles (see p. 46 par 2) -- called so
because “it emits a sound resembling the ticking of a watch,
supposed to predict the death of some one of the family in
the house in which it is heard" (qtd Reilly)
His hearing abilities & what he
hears
 par 8) You mistake for madness is but over-
acuteness of the senses?
 Whatever he actually hears, it shows that he
is gradually dissociated from reality.
Conclusion: What kind of
“madness”?
 Reilly: paranoid schizophrenia.
 Two sides of the narrator:
 "very, very dreadfully nervous," impulsive;
 Careful, understanding and scheming; (e.g. p. 45)
 Self-justifying all the way through
 Claims that he is not mad;
 Feels “power” and “triumph” on the eighth night;
 Gets the support of Death
 Calls the policemen villains; besides guilt, his
agony of being laughed at drives him to confess
Conclusion: Self vs. the Social
 “True—nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous I had
been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”
 It is still his sense/delusion of the overpowering
“social” (paternal eye) that brings him to first kill, to
confess to the police himself and then tell the story
to “you.”

 The old man is not the only representative of social

authorities. (neighbors, the policemen, God, Death)
Your Questions
 still can not tell why the speaker suddenly
wanted to admit the crime?
 why the speaker hate the old man so
fiercely??
 1. Why the language is low-leveled? Is there
any other purpose? Does it mean that she is
not well-educated, as a murderer? </p><p>2.
What are there so many capital letters
throughout the whole story?
 Edgar Allan Poe
An Artist with a
Keen Awareness of
Conflicting Desires or with
Repressed Oedipal desire?
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849)
 born in Boston in 1809, to parents who were
actors;
 was orphaned at about age three because
Father disappeared when he was 18 months
old and his Pretty and childlike mother died of
consumption a year later;
 was reared as a foster child by John Allan, a
wealthy merchant of Richmond, Virginia
Edgar Allan Poe
 married his fourteen-year-old first cousin,
Virginia Clemm, whose long, lingering illness
with tuberculosis rendered a normal marriage
impossible. Her death in 1847 was a trauma
from which Poe may not have recovered.
 suffered from fits of deep depression, which
alcohol relieved; he was hypersensitive,
excitable, and subject to extreme responses
in situations of stress.
Allan & the Women in Poe’s
Life

The Gothic: an Introduction
 The Gothic novel “springs forth rather
suddenly as the increasing preoccupation
with individual consciousness that begins in
the early 18th century.”
 Characters may be flat, but “the emotions of
these characters are externalized […] their
deepest passions and fears are literalized as
other characters, supernatural phenomena,
and even inanimate objects” (source)