The Tell-Tale Heart

1. The Tell-Tale Heart Edgar Allen Poe Two Versions: 1, 2.

2. Outline • Differences between the two versions

3. 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.

4. 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?

5. 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?

6. 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?

7. 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.”

8. 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.

9. 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."

10. 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.”

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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"

14. 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)

15. 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.

16. 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

17. 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)

18. 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?

19. Edgar Allan Poe An Artist with a Keen Awareness of Conflicting Desires or with Repressed Oedipal desire?

20. 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

21. 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.

22. Allan & the Women in Poe’s Life

23. 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)