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 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?

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)