Soul, Symbol, and Irony in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart"

Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart appeared a decade after Gogol's Diary of a Madman in Russia and twenty years before Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, whose protagonist essentially became the archetypal anti-hero of modern literature. Between the American and the Russian stands the whole continent of Europe, and it stands to reason that while literary characters on both sides of the continent were "going mad," something within Europe must have been happening to promote this change. This paper analyzes Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart and shows how it reflects — through character, symbol, and irony — the mania of the Romantic and Enlightenment age in which it was rooted.

Poe, likewise, was born into a world that had rejected its Christian and scholastic roots in favor of a Protestant and skeptical view of life and God. The founding fathers were Deists, building a country not on Christ but on principles that could only work so long as men remained good. As Poe reveals in The Tell-Tale Heart, just because one's mind works — that is, is principled — does not mean the soul is in order. When the soul dies, the mind begins to unravel, just as Shakespeare showed in Macbeth. And as Plato himself proposed: "If the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul" (Kyziridis 43).

Poe's own life is as full of melancholy and darkness as his many tales and poems. Born in Boston, his life kept mainly to the Eastern Coast — he died in Baltimore. His mother died when he was still young, and his father had abandoned the family. Edgar was taken in by the Allans, who had their own problems that caused friction between Edgar and his foster father, but who did for a time provide a roof over his head. He made an attempt at university but had to leave for lack of funds, having received an allowance yet also accumulated a number of debts. He attempted a military career, first under a false name and then under his real name at West Point, but again he did not fit in well and arranged to leave through court martial (Meyers 32; Hecker 54).

Poe then attempted to earn his way in the world solely by means of publishing. For this reason he felt compelled to pander to the tastes of the reading public — tastes that were Gothic, Romantic, and inclined to the macabre. Poe gave them what they wanted. When his very young wife died, Poe himself seemed to withdraw into a world of madness; he was found just before his death raving in the streets.

Poe's life seems, in one sense, to be reflected in his stories — but his stories are also, in a different sense, reflections of a society going to pieces all around him. Napoleon had attempted to conquer the world, the Romantic poets had attempted to elevate the Word, and Utopia was becoming an increasingly sought-after dream. The morality of the old world — in which truth was associated with reason, intellect, and universals — was being dismantled by naturalism and empiricism. Rousseau embodied the new philosophy: self-will was the new ideal, not selflessness.

Writers were addressing this phenomenon on both sides of Europe, where these ideas were essentially born. Hawthorne reflected the essential nature of man in his stories at around the same time Poe was reflecting mankind in a much more Gothic manner. Hawthorne exposed the lie at the heart of Puritanism. Gogol and Dostoevsky, on the other side of Europe in Russia, were exposing the lie at the heart of Romanticism. Notes from Underground is a novel in which the anti-hero embodies all the premises of naturalism yet rejects such a philosophy in view of its inevitable consequences, which he himself reveals through his actions.

Furthermore, changes in society were rapidly occurring, generating a kind of split in the psyche of people around the world. Societies were becoming increasingly modern — industry was changing the face of nature, the very nature that had just decades before been upheld as the light in the darkness. That light was now being disintegrated by the railroad, by manufacturing, and by corporations that were even then showing signs of dominance. The old-world mores that had developed out of old-world religion were being set aside now that the religion itself had been rejected. Religious liberty was giving way to irreligion, and irreligion was giving way to man-made forms of control, whether through the strictures of secret societies or vice.

As Robert Spiller notes, "Poe wrote at a time when America was producing more real and alleged transcendental geniuses than maturely wrought poems or stories" (342). The desire was there, but the steps were not. Despite everything, the nineteenth century was witnessing an overthrow of reason and philosophy and found itself hard-pressed to fill the void. The Gothic was one way of satisfying the public: it reflected the horror taking place beneath the veneer of polite society. It also pointed to the reality that horror is what happens when man forgets his place in the universe — a place that, as Poe insisted, had something to do with the soul.

The window to the soul is the eye — as Shakespeare tells us — and it is the old man's "vulture-like eye" that consumes the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart. Either the eye reveals to the narrator something awful and hideous in the soul of the old man, or he fears the eye can see into his own soul and he is afraid of what it will find there — namely, that he himself is corrupt. In any case, he calls it an "Evil Eye," though it is evil not for any reason the narrator can name but only because it seems like the eye of a bird of prey. In other words, the window to the soul is a reminder of death, and the narrator responds by attempting to kill death.

The narrator is also obsessed with truth. "True!" is the first word out of his mouth as he begins the story. He means to show that he is not insane but quite the reverse — rational and clear-minded. To a degree he is. But where it is revealed that he is neither is when he puts into action his plan of murder — not of the old man, but of the "Evil Eye," the window to the soul and the truth of the mystery of man. The narrator's insanity is revealed in the fact that he wants to kill death, which he finds represented in the old man's gaze.

Of course, one cannot kill death. But the old world believed that death could be overcome through Christ. The new world, having rejected Christ in favor of a Deity, could still yearn for life after death but no longer had a means to achieve it, for Resurrection was a promise given precisely by Christ. Poe's America was essentially split down the middle: on one hand it wanted to believe in the promises of Christ, and on the other it wanted to assure itself of life everlasting on its own terms — terms that were simply natural. Of supernatural grace it wanted none.

Thus we see the madness develop in Poe's characters, and in The Tell-Tale Heart no less. Poe attempts to explain the actions of the narrator by appealing to the motive of Shakespeare's Iago, which another writer identified as "motiveless malignancy" (Ruhl), but we may suspect that Poe's narrator is truly concerned more with the meaning of the eye symbol than with revenge, which is accordingly an obsession of Iago.

The symbol of the eye recurs throughout Poe's many tales. Like the probing eye of the old man in The Tell-Tale Heart, the very house of Usher has eyes: "vacant eye-like windows" (1st par.) that admit no light and cast no intelligence — only a sense of foreboding and dread. For the narrator of that story, the house is both a window into the soul of Roderick and a reflection of the schizophrenia from which Roderick appears to suffer.