Edgar Allen Poe\'s the Tell-Tale Heart

¶ … Tell-Tale Heart

As the class notes say, "Romanticism or Romantic movement is predominantly pre-occupied with Imagination -- an escape from the world of reality/pain. Poe's story, "The Tell-Tale Heart," ignores Romantic styles of fiction popular during his day.

Instead, Poe leaves romantic literary notions of escape behind and instead leads us into a Gothic trap from which there will be no escape -- the tortured mind of someone driven by madness to commit a murder. Since the story takes place entirely within the narrator's mind, we experience the mental anguish of the murderer as he becomes more and more overwhelmed by the setting -- his maddened brain. Just as the narrator has no escape from his dark fate, the reader is given no pretense that the story will resolve in anything but in dark and horrible actions.

The narrator of the story senses that he is trapped within his own mind, and tries to present his mental illness as a strength (Pritchard, PAGE). He tells the reader that the disease has sharpened his senses. As he tells his story, he draws us into a dark and melodramatic world viewed through the lens of his madness, and keeps us there with gothic images of an evil eye and a plot whose twists are interpreted through the narrator's distorted perceptions. This drawing inward instead of reaching out is one thing demonstrating the gothic nature of the story. A romantic story would have reached outward and offered some release from the building tension. Poe's gothic handling of this story, however, is unrelenting. We have entered a world of terror, and there is no way to escape.

Viewing himself as not mad but gifted, the narrator determines that the old man's "evil eye" must be destroyed. Believing he is being quite clever, he says, "With what foresight, with what dissimulation, I went to work!" He keeps his dark, gothic focus as he becomes more and more alarmed about the eye. The image of the eye being evil is interesting, because just as the man's cloudy eye is blind, the narrator is blind to his own dark intentions. He imagines that the old man's eye can see through him. It seems likely that the old man realizes that the narrator intends to kill him, because he remains alert for some minutes after hearing just one transient sound as the narrator enters his room. The reader now feels the old man's terror even though the story remains entirely within the narrator's mind, thus expanding the gothic terror.

Then Poe expands the gothic feeling to the setting itself by having the narrator hide body parts under the floorboards. When the police come, because of a report of a scream in the night, he leads the officers all over the house believing they are completely unaware of his crime, increasing the relentless feeling of terror once again.

The narrator is comfortable until he starts to hear his heart beginning to pound. He believes it to be the heart of the old man hidden under the floorboards, and he believes that everyone can hear it. His fractured mind has revealed his crime in spite of his best efforts. His heart has told the tale.