Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart: Virtuoso Unity of Effect and Terror

Virtuoso Power and Synthesis. Among Poe's most famous and anthologized stories, "The Tell-Tale Heart" displays a virtuoso power and synthesis: Achieving an unparalleled unity of effect, the story conveys an immediacy of feeling quite breathtaking as we witness a psychotic individual's mental unraveling before our eyes. As a performance piece or dramatic monologue, Poe's story surpasses Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" for sheer dynamic verbal energy in the pursuit of mad terror.

The Murderer's Motive and the Evil Eye. Told by an anonymous first-person narrator, "The Tell-Tale Heart" recounts, from a confessed murderer's viewpoint, his motive in killing an old man who had done him no direct harm. The narrator blames the old man's eye: "I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold . . . . It was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye." Folklore ascribes the evil eye to a form of envy, while others claim that some people can bestow a curse on victims by the malevolent gaze of their magical, Gorgon-like eye. The story alternates between images related to sight, to visual penetration, and those related to sound, culminating in the terrible ostinato (stubborn or obstinate beating) of the dead, dismembered old man's heart beneath the floorboards. The minute details of the plan of the crime dominate the remainder of the story, and it is within these images that we find some revelation of character.

All the while protesting his sanity and the clarity of his mind, the narrator delineates a terrible fixation and propensity for evil in himself. "I was never kinder to the old man during the whole week before I killed him." A symbolic seven nights the narrator spends perfecting his entry, his own form of penetration, into the old man's closet, utilizing "a dark lantern . . . how cunningly I thrust it in!" Each night, the narrator "looked in upon him as he slept." Resemblances to Shakespeare's Macbeth, a Poe specialty, seem apt: "Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, / That my keen knife see not the wound it makes" (1.5.57–59). Or equally apt is Lady Macbeth's suggestion of what might be exacted upon the sleeping king's person: "What cannot you and I perform upon / Th'unguarded Duncan?" (1.7.79–80).

Several times, the murderous narrator in Poe describes his sympathy, his likeness to the old man. In his terror at an unidentified night sound, the old man cries out, "Who's there?" and remains alert. "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." Then the narrator describes "the groan of mortal terror," the "low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe" that rises from the old man. "I knew the sound well. . . . I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart."

The Crime and the Heartbeat. Pity mixed with perverse pleasure achieved by domination provide the ghastly alchemy of the tale. Persistently denying that "madness" drove him on, the narrator ascribes his fascination with the vulture eye and an "over-acuteness of the sense," a neurasthenia, as the causes of his malice. As he carefully details his preparations for stalking and murdering the old man, a pride of individualism suffuses his language, and he opens his dark lantern upon the eye to cast by preternatural instinct a "simple, dim ray" compared to "the thread of a spider" upon "the damned spot." The old man's unfocused terror, his palpably beating heart, becomes audible: that "low, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too." The narrator calls the heart-beat "a hellish tattoo" that grows ever louder as the death watch proceeds into "the dead hour of the night." We must assume the narrator smothers the old man, having "dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him." By the time the old man has been dismembered and buried in the floor, the narrator can bask in "the end of these labors" with what he calls "the wild audacity of my perfect triumph."

The Confession and the Irony of Guilt. What remains to gather in the ghoulish ironies of the tale. Of course, like Lady Macbeth, the narrator has not eradicated "the damned spot" at all, and as she will, he will suffer its eternal resistance "Out, damned spot, out I say! . . . Yet who would have thought the old man / To have had so much blood in him?" (5.7.37, 41–42). The transfer of the visual eye to the aural torment of the heartbeat, "a ringing in my ears," suggests the violation of the cult of Orpheus, whose first law is "Shed no blood." As Oedipus does in the Sphinx myth, whose failure to achieve self-knowledge and understand his own life leads to tragic death, Poe's narrator strangles the old man, but he cannot account for the "reason" behind his apparent madness, the riddle of his murderous fixation. He remains an enigma to himself and an object of horror to us. Ultimately in a paroxysm of despair and guilt, the possessed narrator "foams" at the police, like a mad dog, reminiscent of the "Hellhound" in Macbeth (5.8.4) who turns to face his death. Pointing to 20th-century literature's interest in the motive force of humiliation, it is the fear of mockery that consumes him and forces his confession: "Anything was more tolerable than derision!"

For Discussion or Writing.
1.Compare Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" to Walt Whitman's "The Sleepers," a poem both the late poet-scholar Milton Kessler and his prime acolyte, Camille Paglia, call "ghoulish" in its thematic implication that the penetrating eye of the poet can molest the sleeping souls of America. Are both these poems finally about the naive trust of Americans and their ignorance of the evil in the hearts of human beings?

2. Compare Poe's focus on the old man's eye with Coleridge's use of the transfixing eye in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." There the "bright" and "glittering" eye of the mariner holds fast the wedding guest while the mariner recounts his tale of betrayal and apocalyptic visions.

3. See whether you can explain why the narrator breaks down as he does in the presence of the police. What exactly is the source of the "derision" that he fears? Can you connect that fear to his obsession with the old man's eye?