The Tell-Tale Heart

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The Tell-Tale Heart

• Edgar Allen Poe

Two Versions 1, 2.
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Outline

• Differences between the two versions

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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.

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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?

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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?

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Is the narrator mad? Your answers

• A.
• The strange purpose of killing the old man
• His slow and patient action. (see par 3)
• His enjoying doing it. (par 4 sense of triumph ??
  par 6?)
• 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?

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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.

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One Interpretation Criminal Psychology

• Unclear Motivation A mysterious thriller, where
  the killers 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.

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More Symbolic/Psychoanalytic Interpretation

• Why are both the eye and the heart so
  important?
• The old mans 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."

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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.

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The narrators heart and the old mans

• 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.

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The Fathers 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
  fathers lack of power.

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His hearing ability what he hears

• The narrators hearing
• The disease had sharpened his senses not
  destroyed not dulled them. Above all was the
  sense of hearing acute"

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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)

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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.

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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

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Conclusion Self vs. the Social

• Truenervous--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)

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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? lt/pgtltpgt2. What are
  there so many capital letters throughout the
  whole story?

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Edgar Allan Poe

• An Artist with a
• Keen Awareness of
• Conflicting Desires or with Repressed Oedipal
  desire?

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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

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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.

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Allan the Women in Poes Life

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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)