The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Stories - Edgar Allan Poe (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Edgar Allan Poe’s

“The Tell-Tale Heart”
and Other Stories
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations:
“The Tell-Tale Heart” and Other Stories—New Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The tell-tale heart” and other stories / edited and with an
introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-388-2 (acid-free paper) 1. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849—
Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. Series.
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Grotesques and Arabesques 9

Daniel Hoffman
The Ironic Double in Poe’s

“The Cask of Amontillado” 31
Walter Stepp
A Feminist Rereading of
Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” 39
Gita Rajan
A Note on the Public and the Private

in Literature: The Literature of “Acting Out” 55
Henry Sussman
“Observe how healthily—how calmly

I can tell you the whole story”: Moral Insanity
and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” 69
Paige Matthey Bynum
Detective Fiction, Psychoanalysis,

and the Analytic Sublime 81
Shawn Rosenheim
vi Contents
Death and Its Moments:

The End of the Reader in History 105
Johann Pillai
Frantic Forensic Oratory:

Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” 143
Brett Zimmerman
House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe’s

“The Fall of the House of Usher” 159
John H. Timmerman
A Tale by Poe
Richard Kopley 173
Chronology 191
Contributors 195
Bibliography 197
Acknowledgments 201
Index 203
Editor’s Note
My notorious introduction brought upon me the wrath of the Poe Society,

but I admit that Poe is inescapable though a vicious stylist in all his work.
Critics however mostly delight in Poe, as do common readers, so I am
merely a voice in the wilderness. Daniel Hoffman generously admires all
the famous tales, while Walter Stepp studies the double in “The Cask of
Amontillado.”
A feminist reading of “The Tell-Tale Heart” is ventured by Gita Rajan,
after which Henry Sussman boldly gives us postmodernist Poe.
We return to the “moral insanity” of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Paige
Matthey Bynum, while Shawn Rosenheim shrewdly examines Poe as detec-
tive fiction.
Death and the reader are concerns for Johann Pillai, after which we
once more march onto “The Tell-Tale Heart” with Brett Zimmerman.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” is observed by John H. Timmerman,
while Richard Kopley then concludes this volume by interestingly tracing
“The Tell-Tale Heart”’s influence on Hawthorne.
vii
HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
Valéry, in a letter to Gide, asserted that “Poe is the only impeccable writer.
He was never mistaken.” If this judgment startles an American reader, it
is less remarkable than Baudelaire’s habit of making his morning prayers
to God and to Edgar Poe. If we add the devotion of Mallarmé to what he
called his master Poe’s “severe ideas,” then we have some sense of the scan-
dal of what might be called “French Poe,” perhaps as much a Gallic mystifi-
cation as “French Freud.” French Poe is less bizarre than French Freud, but
more puzzling, because its literary authority ought to be overwhelming, and
yet vanishes utterly when confronted by what Poe actually wrote. Here is
the second stanza of the impeccable writer’s celebrated lyric, “For Annie”:
Sadly, I know
I am shorn of my strength,
And no muscle I move
As I lie at full length—
But no matter!—I feel
I am better at length.
Though of a badness not to be believed, this is by no means unrepre-

sentative of Poe’s verse. Aldous Huxley charitably supposed that Baudelaire,
Mallarmé, and Valéry simply had no ear for English, and so just could not
hear Poe’s palpable vulgarity. Nothing even in Poe’s verse is so wickedly

Harold Bloom
funny as Huxley’s parody in which a grand Miltonic touchstone is trans-

muted into the mode of Poe’s “Ulalume.” First Milton, in Paradise Lost,
4.268–273:
Not that fair field

Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers
Her self a fairer flower by gloomy Dis
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world;
Next, Huxley’s Poe:
It was noon in the fair field of Enna,

When Proserpina gathering flowers—
Herself the most fragrant of flowers,
Was gathered away to Gehenna
By the Prince of Plutonian powers;
Was borne down the windings of Brenner
To the gloom of his amorous bowers—
Down the tortuous highway of Brenner
To the God’s agapemonous bowers.
What then did Baudelaire hear, what music of thought, when he read
the actual Poe of “Ulalume”?
Here once, through an alley Titanic,

Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul—
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll—
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek,
In the ultimate climes of the Pole—
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek,
In the realms of the Boreal Pole.
If this were Edward Lear, poet of “The Dong with the Luminous Nose”
or “The Jumblies,” one might not question Baudelaire and the other apostles
of French Poe. But the hard-driven Poe did not set out to write nonsense
verse. His desire was to be the American Coleridge or Byron or Shelley, and
his poetry, at its rare best, echoes those High Romantic forerunners with
some grace and a certain plangent urgency. Yet even “The City in the Sea”
Introduction
is a touch too close to Byron’s “Darkness,” while “Israfel” weakly revises

Shelley’s “To a Skylark.” Nineteenth-century American poetry is consider-
ably better than it is generally acknowledged to be. There are no other figures
comparable to Whitman and Dickinson, but at least the following are clearly
preferable to Poe, taking them chronologically: Bryant, Emerson, Longfel-
low, Whittier, Jones Very, Thoreau, Melville, Timrod, and Tuckerman. Poe
scrambles for twelfth place with Sidney Lanier; if this judgment seems harsh,
or too arithmetical, it is prompted by the continued French overvaluation of
Poe as lyricist. No reader who cares deeply for the best poetry written in
English can care greatly for Poe’s verse. Huxley’s accusation of vulgarity and
bad taste is just: “To the most sensitive and high-souled man in the world
we should find it hard to forgive, shall we say, the wearing of a diamond ring
on every finger. Poe does the equivalent of this in his poetry; we notice the
solecism and shudder.”
II
Whatever his early ambitions, Poe wrote relatively little verse; there are
scarcely a hundred pages of it in the remarkable new edition of his com-
plete writings, in two substantial volumes, published by the Library of
America. The bulk of his work is in tale-telling and criticism, with the
exception of the problematic Eureka: A Prose Poem, a hundred-page cos-
mology that I take to be Poe’s answer to Emerson’s Transcendental mani-
festo, Nature. Certainly Eureka is more of a literary achievement than Poe’s
verse, while the popularity and influence of the shorter tales has been and
remains immense. Whether either Eureka or the famous stories can sur-
vive authentic criticism is not clear, but nothing could remove the stories
from the canon anyway. They are a permanent element in Western liter-
ary culture, even though they are best read when we are very young. Poe’s
criticism has mixed repute, but in fact has never been made fully available
until the Library of America edition.
Poe’s survival raises perpetually the issue as to whether literary merit
and canonical status necessarily go together. I can think of no other Ameri-
can writer, down to this moment, at once so inevitable and so dubious. Mark
Twain catalogued Fenimore Cooper’s literary offenses, but all that he exu-
berantly listed are minor compared to Poe’s. Allen Tate, proclaiming Poe
“our cousin” in 1949, at the centenary of Poe’s death, remarked, “He has
several styles, and it is not possible to damn them all at once.” Uncritical
admirers of Poe should be asked to read his stories aloud (but only to them-
selves!). The association between the acting style of Vincent Price and the
styles of Poe is alas not gratuitous, and indeed is an instance of deep crying
out unto deep. Lest I be considered unfair by those devoted to Poe, I hasten
Harold Bloom
to quote him at his strongest as a storyteller. Here is the opening paragraph

of “William Wilson,” a tale admired by Dostoyevski and still central to the
great Western topos of the double:
Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair
page lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation.
This has already been too much an object for the scorn—for the
horror—for the detestation of my race. To the utter-most regions
of the globe have not indignant winds bruited its unparalleled
infamy? Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned!—to the earth
art thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden
aspirations?—and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not
hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven?
This rhetoric, including the rhetorical questions, is British Gothic

rather than German Gothic, Ossian or Monk Lewis rather than Tieck
or E. T. A. Hoffmann. Its palpable squalors require no commentary. The
critical question surely must be: how does “William Wilson” survive its
bad writing? Poe’s awful diction, whether here or in “The Fall of the House
of Usher” or “The Purloined Letter,” seems to demand the decent mask-
ing of a competent French translation. The tale somehow is stronger than
its telling, which is to say that Poe’s actual text does not matter. What
survives, despite Poe’s writing, are the psychological dynamics and mythic
reverberations of his stories about William Wilson and Roderick Usher.
Poe can only gain by a good translation, and scarcely loses if each reader
fully retells the stories to another. C.S. Lewis, defending the fantasies of
George Macdonald, formulated a curious principle that seems to me more
applicable to Poe than to Macdonald:
The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at times

fumbling. . . . But this does not quite dispose of him even for
the literary critic. What he does best is fantasy—fantasy that
hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in
my opinion, he does better than any man. The critical problem
with which we are confronted is whether this art—the art of
mythmaking—is a species of the literary art. The objection to so
classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in words at
all. We all agree that the story of Balder is a great myth, a thing of
inexhaustible value. But of whose version—whose words—are we
thinking when we say this?
(George Macdonald, An Anthology)
Introduction
Lewis replies that he is not thinking of anyone’s words, but of a par-

ticular pattern of events. Of course that means Lewis is thinking of his own
words. He goes so far as to remember
when I first heard the story of Kafka’s Castle related in conversation

and afterwards read the book for myself. The reading added nothing.
I had already received the myth, which was all that mattered.
Clearly mistaken about Kafka, Lewis was certainly correct about Mac-
donald’s Lilith, and I think the insight is valid for Poe’s stories. Myths mat-
ter because we prefer them in our own words, and so Poe’s diction scarcely
distracts us from our retelling, to ourselves, his bizarre myths. There is a
dreadful universalism pervading Poe’s weird tales. The Freudian reductions
of Marie Bonaparte pioneered at converting Poe’s universalism into the psy-
choanalytical universalism, but Poe is himself so reductive that the Freud-
ian translations are in his case merely redundant. Poe authentically frightens
children, and the fright can be a kind of trauma. I remember reading Poe’s
tales and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, each for the first time, when I was about 10.
Dracula I shrugged off (at least until I confronted Bela Lugosi murmuring: “I
never drink—wine!”) but Poe induced nasty and repetitious nightmares that
linger even now. Myth may be only what the Polish aphorist Stanislaw Lec
once called it, “gossip grown old,” but then Poe would have to be called a very
vivid gossip, though not often a very eloquent one.
III
Poe is an inescapable writer, but not a good one. He is, except perhaps for
Mark Twain, the most popular of all American authors. The experience of
reading Poe’s stories out loud to oneself is not aesthetically very satisfying.
Greatly improved by translation (even into English), Poe’s tales have tran-
scended their palpable flaws in style and diction. As editor of this volume,
I am acutely conscious that I am in the critical minority with regard to
Poe. Having just reread four of his most famous stories— “The Fall of the
House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The
Pit and the Pendulum”—I find myself challenged to account for the gap
between Poe’s worldwide influence and the literary inadequacy of even his
best work.
Mythopoeic power in the great Romantics—Blake and Shelley among
them—is accompanied by astonishing eloquence. No one—not even a skep-
tic like me—can deny Poe’s strength and fecundity as a mythmaker. The
mythic force of Poe’s tales, even of his dreadful poems, remains undimin-
ished. Try retelling “The Fall of the House of Usher” to a friend (if you can
Harold Bloom
find one who hasn’t read it, or seen a film version!), and I think it likely that
you may improve upon the original. The exact words of the story scarcely
matter, and yet the fable persists, and continues to enchant millions around
the globe. I cannot think of any other author who writes so abominably, and
yet is so clearly destined to go on being canonical.
Harry Levin, 50 years ago, observed that Poe’s writing “smells of the
thesaurus.” That was a kind judgment, since Poe’s synonyms rarely are appro-
priate for one another. Poe’s partisans excuse him by arguing that he was
always in a hurry because of financial pressures, but I doubt that more leisure
would have improved his style. I quote, utterly at random, from “The Fall of
the House of Usher,” and again I urge that you read this out loud to yourself,
since that forces one to slow down and listen:
I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment—

that of looking down the tarn—had been to deepen the first
singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness
of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so
term it?—served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I
have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having
terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that,
when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image
in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy—a fancy so
ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force
of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my
imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and
domain there hung an atmosphere which had no affinity with the
air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and
the gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapour,
dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.
That “pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible,

and leaden-hued” could be marketed as Essence of Poe, if we bottled it. We
would do equally well had Poe written: “pestilent and mystic Roderick Usher,
dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued,” since poor Roderick is
only a vapour, but then so is the entire story. Critics agitate themselves as to
whether the Lady Madeline Usher is a vampire, or whether she and Roderick
have indulged a taste for incest. Everyone in Poe is more or less a vampire,
but characters in Poe, particularly the Ushers, hardly seem robust enough to
make love. When the undead Madeline “with a low moaning cry, fell heavily
inward upon the person of her brother,” that may well have been both their
initial and final physical contact, more than sufficient to destroy them both.
Introduction
Their relationship is as vaporous as the rest of the story, including its narra-
tor, himself very dim.
Still, however I scoff, “The Fall of the House of Usher” persists. Where
does one locate its mythic appeal? Poe achieves the universality of nightmare,
and that is certainly an attainment, though not necessarily a literary one. We
have other authors who have given us peculiarly American nightmares, but
only Poe’s phantasmagorias export equally well to France and to Russia, to
Singapore and to Sumatra. Nightmares are Poe’s staple: he frightens chil-
dren, who discover dreadful intimacies in his worst imaginings. Murderer
and victim alike are equally ghastly in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask
of Amontillado.” I remember, as a child, being badly upset by both stories,
and frightened out of sleep by the egregiously horrible “The Pit and the Pen-
dulum.” Myths of victimage, of being buried alive, of houses falling in upon
one, have been more than myths throughout history, and are peculiarly dis-
turbing in our post-Holocaust world. Something primordial in Poe tapped
into a universal anguish. Perhaps it is just as well that he wrote so badly; his
myths are effective enough to render his readers vulnerable to even his weak-
est imaginings. I at least would not want a stronger Poe.
DANIEL HOFFMAN
Grotesques and Arabesques
‘O f my country and of my family I have little to say,’ says the narrator of

‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’ The teller of ‘Berenice’ confesses, ‘My baptismal
name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not mention,’ while Poe in ‘A Tale
of the Ragged Mountains,’ writes of his chief character, ‘Of his family I
could obtain no satisfactory account.’
These anonymous and unfamilied heroes can of course be explained
away as the self-projections of their orphaned and disinherited author. Yet
this does not sufficiently account for the denial to so many of his characters
of a patrimony or a name. Knowing Poe, knowing the underlying consis-
tency of all of his work (I italicize the phrase, as he would have done), is
there not likely a philosophical necessity for certain of his characters to step
into our consciousness as though unsired? I thought perhaps Poe kept this
reason out of sight in some subterranean chamber, entombed like so many
of the victims in his tales, allowing it to work upon us only indirectly as he
says allegory best operates. Then, quite by chance—like Monsieur Dupin
or the husband of Ligeia or the narrator of ‘The Raven’—plucking from
the bookshelf of an obscure library (it was the Reference Room in the
collections of the Royal Borough of Kensington, in Horton Street, W.8)
a volume of unworldly lore, I came, in Porphyry’s On the Life of Plotinos,
upon the following curious passage:
From Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, pp. 205–232. © 1972 by Daniel Hoffman.

10 Daniel Hoffman
Plotinos, the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed

of being in the body.
So deeply rooted was this feeling that he could never be
induced to tell of his ancestry, his parentage, or his birthplace.
Birthplace, parentage, ancestry—these are the attributes of body. To

the soul they are inessential accidents. And the direction of Poe’s mind, the
thrust of his imagination is—may I restate the obvious?—away from the
body and toward the spirit, away from the ‘dull realities’ of this world, toward
the transcendent consciousness on ‘a far happier star.’ His protagonists are
all attempting to get out of the clotted condition of their own materiality,
to cross the barrier between the perceptible sensual world and that which
lies beyond it. And so they undertake hazardous voyages, either into the
stratosphere or to the moon; or by descending into dungeons and vaults in
the earth; or down maelstroms in the sea toward the center of the very world.
Others cross the bourne between our life and another by breaking through
the barrier of silence and speaking from beyond the grave. Some achieve
this posthumous eloquence as the result of a mesmerical suspension of mor-
tality; some, consuming inordinate amounts of laudanum, take the trip on
drugs. Still others have already arrived at the desired condition of immaterial
existence and speak to one another, in ‘Colloquies’ and ‘Conversations,’ as
disembodied shades.
But for those Poe stories in which the characters are still alive, it may be
inessential, indeed distracting, to establish a recognizable place as the locus
of the action, as it is to provide the participants with a realistic station in life
or a family. How many of Poe’s tales (bar ‘The Gold Bug’ and ‘A Tale of the
Ragged Mountains’) can be said to take place in the South, or for that mat-
ter in the United States, or, by the evidence of their texts, in the nineteenth
century? Still, I do not propose that all of his fictions are suspended in time
and unfixed in locus. In many both place and time are indeed specific. These
on inspection prove to be either his detection tales (which most concertedly
of his serious fictions do explore a real world), or his grotesques. Satire, the
prevailing grotesque tone, is for Poe a lower exercise of the imagination than
those fictions which discover the truths of the soul.
Hence the buffoonish tone of those sketches which treat of dull reali-
ties. Hence the tone of excitation, the breathless terror and ecstatic fixation
in those tales which explore the soulscape rather than the social milieu in
which a soul is fated to exist.
Everyone knows that Poe himself points to such a division between
his tales by giving his volume in 1840 the double title, Tales of the Grotesque
and Arabesque. Poe scholars agree that A. H. Quinn correctly identified the
source of these odd terms in Poe’s critical vocabulary as Sir Walter Scott’s
essay, ‘On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,’ Fortnightly Review

(1827). Much has been made over the exact meanings of ‘arabesque’ and ‘gro-
tesque,’ and whether we can apply them only to the tales in the 1840 volume
or use them as pigeonholes in which to sort out all of Poe’s fictions. Although
Poe in his criticism is forever, as we have seen, making rigid distinctions, this
particular pair of terms has made for as much confusion as clarification of his
intentions. A reordering of the works is in order.
I take ‘grotesque’ and ‘arabesque’ to indicate two fundamentally differ-
ent intentions on the part of the fictioneer. Roughly stated, a grotesque is a
satire, an arabesque a prose equivalent of a poem. The terms themselves, as
used by Scott—and presumably by Poe—derive not from the vocabulary of
literature but from that of art, decor, architecture. In this they resemble that
parent term, Gothic, of which they are, for Poe, subdivisions.
In an art work, grotesque signifies the depiction of monsters in an elabo-
rate, foliated setting; while arabesque refers to an intricate pattern, geometric in
design, which does not reproduce the human form—this latter element deriv-
ing from the Mohammedan injunction against the reproduction in a work of
art of that divine image, the human body. Arabesque thus links Poe’s practice
as a writer of Gothic tales with the desired condition toward which his imagi-
nation ever impels him: renunciation and transcendence of the body. It con-
nects also with his interest in that other Romantic craze, Arabiana, already
touched on in such poems as ‘Al Aaraaf ’ and ‘Israfel.’ The intricacy of pattern
in an arabesque corresponds to Poe’s desire, or need, to reveal by complex and
elaborate concealments of his theme. There is no human form anywhere in Poe’s
arabesques; but their intricate patterns of abstraction create a synthetic and
harmonious—though often horrifying—experience, a consistency.
When a compulsive theoretician of literary form draws the terms of his
distinctions from another art, the fact seems both worthy of notice and an
invitation to inference. There is evident an irreconcilable difference in both
the intention and the mode of operation between a work of fiction and a pic-
torial or three-dimensional art form. A fiction, as Poe elsewhere says repeat-
edly enough, requires a plot, indeed hinges upon its plot; and what is plot
but the management of a human action in time? But painting, architecture,
décor—the arts to which the terms grotesque and arabesque are more properly
applied—have nothing to do with plots or actions, they are concerned with
the arrangements of elements in space. Such arts are essentially static, devoid
(usually) of human content, and constitute expressions by a shaping aesthetic
sense of its chosen materials. The reasons may readily be inferred why Poe’s
fictions so often resemble tableaux vivants, his tableaux vivants so readily
becoming tableaux morts.
* * *
12 Daniel Hoffman
I propose to disregard Poe’s use of these terms only for the tales in his
1840 volume, but rather to regard them as indicative of two of his principal
commitments of the imagination in his fiction. (Always excepted from these
considerations are his tales of ratiocination, in which, to be sure, elements
of both the grotesque and the arabesque appear.) By an inductive analysis
of Poe’s stories, such as he himself (I would like to think) might desire us
to make upon his oeuvre, I intuit the following criteria for his tales of the
Grotesque and the Arabesque. (Henceforth I shall capitalize them as generic
nouns, as Poe did in his title.)
A Grotesque is not debarred from representing a real person, but it
must do so in a caricature, making monstrosities of realities. Consequently
we discover that all of Poe’s Grotesques are set in contemporary time, and
many are satires of recognizable persons and events. (E.g., the send-up of
General Winfield Scott in ‘The Man That Was Used Up’; the put-down of
the Gold Rush in ‘Von Kempelen and His Discovery’; the attacks on con-
temporary government and philosophy in ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ and
‘Mellonta Tauta.’) Poe’s Arabesques, however, are set in unspecified time and
in imaginary places (as is true of ‘Ligeia,’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’
‘Berenice,’ etc.). In the Arabesques there are a very few characters—a nar-
rator, two or three others—but the Grotesques may have a cast of a dozen
characters or more, although there is no effort to give these personages more
than one dimension.
Although the two modes seem mutually exclusive, Poe on examination
proves often to have written an Arabesque and a Grotesque on the same theme.
His variable sense of gravity enables such divagations to appear in his work.
How often haven’t we wildly swung between ecstasy and revulsion, between
hoax and revelation, between flapdoodle and the sublime! Some may think this
proof of Poe’s instability, his inability to control his tone. Or perhaps his Imp
of the Perverse leads him to mock in Grotesques the achievement of his own
Arabesques, as though to put his work beyond the reach of parody by others.
Consider. What is ‘A Predicament,’ that preposterous parody—ostensibly—of
a Blackwood’s story, but a parody—in fact—of Poe’s own (and as yet unwritten)
‘The Pit and the Pendulum’? And speaking of his ‘Imp of the Perverse,’ what
other than that Imp made him turn the other way and write ‘The Angel of
the Odd’—a laborious spoof of a simpleton prone to take too many drams,
who comes thereby to the frustration of great expectations. Yet again, what is
‘Some Words with a Mummy’ but a send-up of the very theme taken seriously
in ‘Mesmeric Revelations,’ although to be sure that itself was a hoax to begin
with—a hoax of serious intent. But then again, all of Poe’s hoaxes have a
serious intent, somewhere. ‘Thou Art the Man’ is such a hoax (the narrator
knowing the solution all the time), and it is a version, in the mode of frontier
humor (the native Grotesque) of the detection theme presented more seriously,
more skillfully, and in a more cosmopolitan vehicle in ‘The Purloined Letter.’

‘The Masque of the Red Death’ is one of Poe’s most memorable Arabesques,
parodied, so to speak, by a Grotesque on the very same theme, ‘King Pest.’
And, as the present chapter will indicate, other such pairs of linked dissimilars
include ‘Eleonora’ and ‘Loss of Breath’; ‘Ligeia’ and ‘The Spectacles’; ‘The Cask
of Amontillado’ and ‘The Premature Burial.’
What characterizes the Arabesques is their exploration of extreme psy-
chological states—the narrators or chief characters are often madmen, or
persons who undergo some excruciating suffering of the soul. Insofar as the
Grotesque is a mode of satire, it depends on a rationalistic view of experience
as the norm against which the recorded monstrous defections be measured;
but in the Grotesques the ratiocinative power leads not to the perception of
ecstasy, as in the tales of detection and exploration, but rather to the expo-
sure of the idiocy of the monstrous world.
Yet a further inference from Poe’s duplicity in the treatment of so many
of his themes is this: Chief among his themes is duplicity itself. The double-
ness of experience. How can we tell the reality from its mirror, the world
from its picture in a work of art, the image from the image of the image?
Poe, whose entire enterprise is a desperate effort to unify our existence on
this suffering globe of shards, himself sees that all of our passions, intuitions,
thoughts, are susceptible of inversion, may become their opposites, so that
ecstatic transcendence may be lodged in the heart of a hoax. Identity itself,
the very vessel of perception, may be fatally flawed, fatally broken in twain.
One of Poe’s themes is the fate of the man haunted by his own double, his
anima, his weird. Which is the real consciousness, the ‘I’ who speaks or the
doppelgänger who pursues him?
Seeing Double
Had I not been thus prolix, you might either have misunderstood
me altogether, or, with the rabble, have fancied me mad. As it
is, you will easily perceive that I am one of the many uncounted
victims of the Imp of the Perverse.
Thus speaks Hoaxiepoe in his earnest guise as truthsayer. It is evident, if

only from the sentences just quoted, that the author is aware of deep cleavages
in his own self—or, in the terminology of his time, in his soul. He appears,
to himself as well as to others, as both sane and mad; as both a civil workaday
person who keeps appointments and earns his wages, and as a victim of the Imp
of the Perverse. This Imp, it will be recalled, is that principle which compels
us to ‘act, for the reason that we should not. . . . Nor will this overwhelming
tendency to do wrong for the wrong’s sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into
ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse.’
14 Daniel Hoffman
Poe speaks here with unexampled knowledge of the hidden self within
the self. In ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ he summons the courage so to expose
his secret sinfulness only because, like J. Alfred Prufrock, he speaks from
across a bourne from which no traveller returns: it is his gallows confes-
sion, his confession of his confession of his motiveless crime, a crime which
had been perfect except for his double compulsion to perform that which he
should not do: first to murder his victim (no details are given as to any injury
the victim may have done him), then, ‘as [he] reflected upon [his] absolute
security,’ to confess—to rush down the street crying aloud his guilt—which
had otherwise been undetected. Curiously, the mode of the murder’s com-
mission was suffocation: he substituted for his victim’s night-candle a poi-
sonous candle of his own devising. Curiously again, when apprehended, ‘I
turned—I gasped for breath. For a moment I experienced all the pangs of
suffocation. . . .’ Everything is doubled, as the punishment fits the crime.
Who, or what, is this Imp of the Perverse but a portion of the ego sepa-
rated out from the rest, which seeks the destruction of that from which it is
separated? The fact that it may seek its own destruction too does not deter
it from its calamitous purpose. Life is on a collision course with death; the
death-wish betrays, whenever it can, the life instinct. This seems madness,
the mind undoing its own self-protective calculation by an uncontrollable, ‘a
radical, a primitive impulse.’
This impulse is so primitive, so uncanny, so terrifying that in ‘The Imp
of the Perverse’ it appears only as a malignant force impelling the protagonist.
He cannot objectify it as a character. But if this impulse to undo one’s own
security be considered in a comic rather than a terrifying aspect—as com-
edy is so often the obverse of terror—it can easily be objectified in a ridicu-
lous guise. Stripped of its terror, it can make us—make author also—laugh,
though to be sure its effect upon the self from which it has separated itself
is every bit as disastrous as was that of the Imp of the Perverse, whose gro-
tesque double is the Angel of the Odd. In Poe’s sketch of that title, the pro-
tagonist—the primary self—is a perfectly ordinary homme moyen sensuel, to
whom appears a ridiculous personage who comments upon his thoughts and
plies him with drink. This Angel of the Odd, speaking in the Dutch dialect
Poe had borrowed from Irving for ‘Hans Pfaall,’ is a personage constructed
from a rum puncheon, kegs, bottles and a funnel. At his urging the narra-
tor gets so drunk that he snoozes past the hour on which his fire insurance
expired. Having missed the deadline for signing its renewal, he awakens to
discover, naturally enough, that his house is on fire—and now he becomes
temporarily blinded, is deserted by his fiancée, decides upon suicide, dives
into a river, changes his mind, then rushes over a precipice—from which he
is saved by his ‘grasping the end of a long guide-rope, which depended from
a passing balloon.’ This is perhaps more silly than amusing, yet what does
it burlesque but the very themes of self-destruction and escape from reality
which elsewhere comprise the ballast of Poe’s more serious tales?
Between them, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ and ‘The Angel of the Odd’
state in outline form, as it were, many basic postulates of Poe’s donnée: the
division of the self, the destructive opposition of the death-wish and the life-
wish; fear of death, blindness, suffocation (all, as Freud repeatedly shows,
surrogate forms of castration-fear and fear of impotence); the unanticipated
eruption of aggressive impulse, and of self-incrimination; the incurable
addiction to drink (or drugs) which speeds the self-destructive impulse on
its way; and the wish-fantasy of escape from all of these predicaments.
* * *
Some of this obsessive material becomes clear, because handled with

masterful intelligence, in the story ‘William Wilson.’ The name William
Wilson, as the narrator tells us, is a nom pro tem. The chosen disguise reveals
that its bearer is, in his own view, self-begotten: he is William Wilson, Wil-
liam son of his own Will. He has, that is, willed himself into being—willed
the self we meet, the one that survives its murder of its double. It’s not entirely
clear whether, at the end, as William Wilson sees his own bloodied face in
a mirror where a moment earlier no mirror stood before, he does survive the
murder of his doppelgänger, or whether he speaks his lurid confession from
beyond the grave. If he survives, he does so in a condition of madness which
his exacerbated prose style embodies and reveals:
Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair
page lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation.
This has been already too much an object for the scorn—for the
horror—for the detestation of my race. To the uttermost regions
of the globe have not the indignant winds bruited its unparal-
leled infamy? Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned!—to the
earth art thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to
its golden aspirations?—and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless,
does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven?
These, as W. H. Auden was the first to notice, are the accents of lunacy—
these triple iterations, these rhetorical inflations, these rhodomontades in
which luxuriates an abandoned soul—accents which Poe gives his narrator
as a means of establishing his character. True, in the body of the tale William
Wilson does not rant and rave in three-decker clauses. Indeed, he tells his
doomed screed with a reasonableness, a clarity, a perspicuous control of his
own narrative which cannot fail to involve the reader in his fate. Unlike the
16 Daniel Hoffman
narrator of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (‘why will you say that I am mad?’), the
possibility of his own dementia never occurs to William Wilson. He is sane,
he is cool, he is fully aware of his own doings. But there is one circumstance
in his life he can only report, for he himself does not understand it. It is an
urge to do evil: ‘a sudden elevation in turpitude whose origin alone it is my
present purpose to assign.’
What follows is the autobiography of ‘William Wilson.’ Its chief events
are recognizably based upon two periods in Edgar Poe’s own life, his boy-
hood schooldays at Stoke Newington in England and his misadventures at
the gaming tables while a student in the University of Virginia. But these
schoolboy remembrances are conflated in a tone and style of Byronic inten-
sity. Indeed the shadow of Byron tinges this tale, for, as Arthur Hobson
Quinn points out, Poe drew upon Irving’s sketch ‘An Unwritten Account of
Lord Byron’ (published in 1836) in its design.
Little did Poe know it, but in ‘William Wilson’ he made so easy Gris-
wold’s mission of calumniating his character! Not content with reproduc-
ing in William Wilson’s history these two well-publicized episodes from his
own life, he also assigned to his fictitious narrator his own birthday! The 19th
of January, 1813. Or, in its first printing (1839), the 19th of January, 1811.
(Poe kept moving his birthdate forward, in successive magazine biographies,
in order to seem younger than he was. So, it appears, did William Wilson.)
But to be scrupulous about it, Poe didn’t actually say that it was William Wil-
son whose birth-date coincided with his own. He makes William Wilson say
that ‘My namesake was born on the nineteenth of January, 1813 [or 1811]—
and this is a somewhat remarkable coincidence; for the day is precisely that
of my own nativity.’ By this time, William Wilson, the bully and scourge of
the other boys at Dr. Bransby’s dismal school, is himself the victim of the
one among them who resists ‘the imperiousness’ of his disposition. This lad,
by yet another singular coincidence, is also named William Wilson. (I shall
hereinafter call him Wilson 2).
William Wilson is tormented daily as Wilson 2 coolly imitates his man-
ner, dress, and speech, though the one defect, the only one, in Wilson 2 is
that he cannot speak louder than a whisper. Nevertheless, ‘His singular whis-
per, it grew to be the very echo of my own.’ What is further curious is that none
of the schoolboys but Wilson himself seems aware of the mocking and sar-
castic harassment inflicted upon him by Wilson 2. William at last is driven
to try to murder his tormenting double: he approaches, by stealth, at night,
the sleeping Wilson 2. As he looks upon his victim he feels ‘a numbness, an
iciness of feeling . . . gasping for breath. . . .’ For he is struck by the identity
of the victim’s appearance with his own. He flees, quitting the bedchamber,
the school, this phase of his life.
Quickly to sum up the rest of the tale, William Wilson passes from Dr.
Bransby’s through Eton, from Eton to Oxford, by now possessing ‘rooted
habits of vice . . . soulless dissipation.’ Now he arranges to cheat a lord of
his patrimony with a fixed deck of cards. (No doubt Edgar here remembers
his own losing at cards while at Virginia, in consequence of which debts he
had to leave the University.) Just as he is about to clinch the trick, there
seems to enter the dimly lit room that familiar stranger who is his nem-
esis. ‘Who and what was this Wilson?—and whence came he?—and what
were his purposes? Upon neither of these points could I be satisfied. . . .’
William Wilson is his own obtuse narrator. Though he thinks himself as
clever as might a Monsieur Dupin, he never acknowledges what is obvious
to the reader—what Poe had made inevitable by giving this tale for epi-
graph these lines (which he made up, T. O. Mabbott says, but attributed to
Chamberlayne’s Pharronida),
What say of it? what say Conscience grim,

That spectre in my path?
Wilson 2 exposes William Wilson, forcing his immediate departure

from Oxford in disgrace. But, he learns, ‘I fled in vain. My evil destiny pur-
sued me as if in exultation,’ pursued him to Paris, to Vienna, Berlin, Moscow.
At last, William Wilson attends a masked ball in Naples, intent upon seduc-
ing the young wife of the Duke his host. There, too, in a costume exactly
like his own, masked in black as he himself is, he sees his nemesis approach.
In a frenzy Wilson drags his double into a little antechamber, and ‘getting
him at mercy, plunged my sword, with brute ferocity, repeatedly through
and through his bosom.’ Looking up, he discovers now a mirror where the
wall had heretofore seemed blank, and ‘as I stepped up to it in an extremity
of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood,
advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait.’ But no—
It was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could

have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said:
‘You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforth art thou also
dead—dead to the World, to Heaven, and to Hope! In me didst thou
exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how
utterly thou hast murdered thyself!’
Utterly murdered thyself! What is Conscience, after all, but that part
of the ego which regards the rest as an object which it can judge. The part so
regarded is the less developed, the more infantile, regressive, narcissistic. The
18 Daniel Hoffman
more primitive, the more uncontrolled, incivil, aggressive. But how can the
evil-doing part of the ego survive the murder of its own judging half?
‘William Wilson’ is perhaps the most vivid and memorable of Roman-
tic tales of the divided self. In its psychological probing, and in the success of
its objectifying the twin irrepressible impulses to do evil and to judge oneself, it
makes Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde seem naïve. For how much closer
to the inadmissible truth is Poe’s resolution than Stevenson’s, who makes the
better of the two selves destroy its evil-doing double. In Poe’s own country
the only thing like ‘William Wilson’ is by that other demon-haunted genius,
Mark Twain. But where Poe’s tale is taut with demonic intensity, there is a
wonderful hilarity in ‘The Facts Concerning A Recent Carnival of Crime in
Connecticut,’ in which Mark Twain, tortured by his Calvinist conscience,
outwits his tormentor—and murders him. Then he is free to slay enemies,
cheat widows, and freely indulge that wayward, mischief-loving self whose
life had been a perpetual pang of suffering thanks to Conscience.
But in Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ the duplication of the self is more com-
plex, the emotional logic more complicated. If William Wilson’s double is
his conscience, he is also his Imp of the Perverse. Which is to say that each
half of the split ego has its own Imp of the Perverse—Wilson himself is such
an Imp to Wilson, the first Wilson revelling in obliquity in acquiescence to
a deep impulse in himself which outrages the moral imperative represented
by Wilson 2. On the point succeeding in his outrageous vices—bullying the
schoolboys, tricking Lord Glendenning into cutting a marked deck, seduc-
ing the Duchess Di Broglio—what makes Wilson fail but the betrayal of his
impulse to evil by his equally uncontrollable impulse to judge himself? No
wonder he has no hope of Heaven at the end, for whichever Wilson he acts
as, the other will arise to torment him. All the more damning because there’s
no vestige in Poe’s tale of the damnatory Calvinism which in later life drove
Mark Twain to the point of despair. When the Imp of the Perverse triumphs
and rules unchallenged, as at the end of ‘William Wilson,’ that much of the
self which survives is condemned to madness in the house of woe.
Murder!
Despite the strength of the death wish among Poe’s characters, only
in one tale does any of them literally commit suicide. In ‘The Assignation’
(one of Edgar’s earliest Arabesques, begun as a parody of the Blackwood’s
type of Gothic tale), there are not one but two suicides: the Prince Mentoni
and the Marchesa Aphrodite both perish by their own hands, at the stroke
of the same hour on the clock. As the clock ticked on, Poe became more
circumspect and skillful in the treatment of his pervasive theme. He puts a
mask upon red death, as it were, and contrives at least two disguises for the
self ’s will to destruction: (a) by dividing the ego into a self and a double, he
enables one to murder the other in a dramatization of the suicide-wish; (b)

without resort to such doubling, Poe contrives that the self undergo obsessive
and repeated, but involuntary, mortal dangers, particularly by accidental and
premature entombment. Such is the heavy burden of his putatively factual-
autobiographical sketch, ‘The Premature Burial.’
But there’s yet a third device in Edgar’s handling of his guilty secret
and his secret guilt. To wit, (c), in which he doubles his character and then
arranges for one self to murder the other by burying him alive. Such is the case,
most memorably, in ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’ To understand, as fully as we
must, who does what to whom, and why, when Montresor leaves Fortunato
chained to the one wall with another, newly plastered, before him, let us con-
sider Poe’s affection for the motif of the premature burial. (It will recur also
in ‘The Black Cat,’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’; and, with variations,
in ‘Berenice’ and ‘Ligeia.’ We have already seen Poe’s fondness for conferring
death-like states upon the living, as in ‘Monsieur Valdemar’ and ‘Mesmeric
Revelation,’ as well as for bringing the dead back to life, as in ‘Some Words
with a Mummy.’)
‘There are certain themes,’ he writes, ‘of which the interest is all-absorbing,
but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. . . . To
be buried alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which
has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.’ This ‘ultimate woe’ requires that
‘the severity and majesty of truth sanctify and sustain’ the author’s presentation
thereof. In this way Poe invokes the cloak of truth-telling, as had Defoe, Swift,
and Richardson before him, for subjects and motives so different from his.
What ensues in ‘The Premature Burial’ is a catalogue of suppositious occasions
on which an unfortunate person, thought to be dead, was buried alive. Some
were rescued from their vaults or tombs, one or two were later disinterred and
discovered in the postures of horrible awareness of their terrifying predica-
ments: ‘. . . Thus she remained, and thus she rotted, erect.’
At the last, the truth-teller tells of his own experience, of which the
foregoing were but simulacra. Being subject to epileptic seizures, it is not
surprising he should be obsessed by the fear of being buried while in a trance.
He even has had his family vault ‘so remodelled as to admit of being readily
opened from within.’ No wonder he has made a scrapbook of every occur-
rence the world over of the accident he most fears. On one occasion—the last
which his tale recounts—he seemed to awaken in a closely confined wooden
space, all dark . . .
there came suddenly to my nostrils the strong peculiar odor of

moist earth. . . . I was not within the vault. I had fallen into a trance
while absent from home—while among strangers—when, or how,
I could not remember—and it was they who had buried me as a
20 Daniel Hoffman
dog—nailed up in some coffin—and thrust, deep, deep, and for

ever, into some ordinary and nameless grave.
This seems as horrifying as the worst of the other predicaments Poe has
bestowed upon his tortured narrators—groping in the pit, lying bound
beneath the pendulum, whirling in the maelstrom, being stabbed by one’s
double. It is just here, at this point, that ‘truth’ intervenes, to turn horror to
mere nightmare and to restore the bright light of rational exposition to a cir-
cumstance too dreadful for the soul to bear. The narrator of ‘The Premature
Burial’ screams and attracts the attention of strangers who ‘restored [him]
to the full possession of [his] memory.’ Now he recalls that he had gone to
sleep in the narrow cabin of a sloop bearing a cargo of garden mould. It was
no more than that, and the terror is completely explained away. His tortures,
he concludes,
were inconceivably hideous; but out of Evil proceeded Good; for

their very excess wrought in my spirit an inevitable revulsion.
My soul acquired tone—acquired temper. I went abroad. I took
vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of Heaven. I thought
upon other subjects than Death. . . . I read no ‘Night Thoughts,’ no
fustian about church-yards—no bugaboo tables—such as this. In
short, I became a new man, and lived a man’s life.
Poor Eddie. What this rather labored sketch is trying to tell us is, ‘I wish I
could thus easily rid myself of these obsessive hallucinations.’ Calling ‘The
Premature Burial’ a bugaboo tale, Eddie admits that he cannot shake him-
self free from the long shadow, the gasping breath, the feeling of fatal and
foetal enclosure.
If he cannot be free from it, though, he can figure out how best to make
use of it in his ratiocinative-ecstatic-horrific tales. By means of whose telling
he can all but control the terrors that shake him to the marrow of his soul.
Doomed to live in his own time, Poe had to be his own alienist. In 1844
there was no physician in America who could have given Poe a better under-
standing of his terrors than he himself so painfully arrived at. A century later
he could have read about such things in Dr. Karl Menninger’s study, Man
Against Himself. He might have found a real-life counterpart to the sufferer
in his own ‘The Premature Burial’:
One recalls the extraordinary career of Harry Houdini (Ehrich

Weiss) who was particularly fond of extricating himself from
apparently inextricable situations,
and here Menninger quotes from an article about Houdini in The Psycho-
analytic Review,
straightjackets, all manner of manacles, chains, handcuffs, prison

cells, chests, hampers, glass boxes, roll-top desks, and even iron
boilers. With his arms thoroughly secured he leaped from bridges,
suspended head downward by block and tackle he loosened himself
from meshes of constricting apparatus. He allowed himself to be
chained and buried in six feet of earth, to be locked in steel vaults,
to be nailed in huge packing cases. Once, breaking free after an
endeavor lasting over an hour, he said, “The pain, torture, agony,
and misery of that struggle will forever live in my mind.” His
variations on the escape act were endless, nothing being too bizarre,
tedious, or difficult so long as the principles of a constraining force
were present.
Was there ever so close a reenactment of Poe’s most horror-struck fantasies?

Houdini’s escapes recapitulate the predicaments of Poe’s hapless balloon-
ists, the fears of his epileptic, the fates of his voyager Pym and of Madeline
Usher. Of Houdini, Menninger continues,
His most dramatic escapes were from coffins buried underground

and from chains while under water.
But what does it all mean? Why did Houdini seek out, as though impelled
by some principle of perversity, situations so claustrophobic and predica-
ments so difficult of egress?
Coupled with this, unconsciously, is the fact that he had an

extraordinary attachment for his mother which strongly affected
his entire life . . .
And the author in The Psychoanalytic Review opined that ‘almost every stunt
staged by Houdini represented a form of pseudo-suicide.’ Now, Menninger
himself concludes that
We have no right then to dismiss the significance of a particular

method of committing suicide [or pseudo-suicide] as meaningless.
In the light of clinical experience we know with a fair degree of
definiteness what some of these symbols, and hence these methods,
mean. . . . Such fantasies may be accompanied by a strong sense of
22 Daniel Hoffman
guilt and there is a well-known (concomitant) conception of the

womb, or entry into the womb, as being something terrible. This
we recognize in the nature of the mythological representations of
entering life hereafter—the dog Cerberus, the terrible river Styx,
purgatory and so on.
Alas the poor psychotic imagination, to which everything that counts

for anything becomes both itself and its opposite: Death is an image of birth,
birth of death, and suicide and murder partake of each other’s character in
the throes of the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, the id and the super-
ego, the self and the world.
* * *
‘The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but

when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.’ So begins the narrator of
‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ who, like the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge’s
Rime, has but this one tale to tell—and that fifty years after the event. But
what injuries Fortunato had done him, or what insult, he never reveals. These
offenses are as mysterious, as shrouded, or—as we now say—as repressed as
the crimes committed by the mysterious stranger in Poe’s sketch ‘The Man of
the Crowd’; as rancorous and secret as the wound given Monsieur Dupin by
the Minister D—. All we are given is this miscreant’s name: Fortunato. The
injured party who revels in the perfection of his revenge is Montresor.
Montresor. Fortunato. Are these not synonymous? When Montresor
leads Fortunato down into the farthest vault of his family’s wine cellar, into
a catacombs of human bones, is he not, like William Wilson, conducting his
double thither? My treasure, my fortune, down into the bowels of the earth,
a charnel-house of bones.
But if Fortunato is Montresor’s double, he is not, like Wilson, his
conscience. Indeed, Fortunato appears a pathetic adversary. When first
seen—as in the dénouement of ‘William Wilson’ and ‘The Masque of the
Red Death,’ it is during carnival—he is wearing motley, cap and bells, and
is quite drunk. No difficult thing for Montresor to play upon his enemy’s
vanity as a connoisseur of wines (Fortunate would seem already a victim
of the Imp of the Perverse, masquerading as the Angel of the Odd). Mon-
tresor easily cajoles him down into the vault to taste his newly purchased
Amontillado. As Montresor feverishly walls up the crypt into which he has
chained the hapless Fortunato, the last sound he hears is the jingling of his
bells. At this, he says, ‘My heart grew sick—on account of the dampness
of the catacombs.’ For fifty years no mortal has disturbed his handiwork,
the wall of bones and stones behind which the remains of Fortunato, still
chained to the rock, stand now. (Like the unfortunate lady in ‘The Prema-
ture Burial,’ he has rotted erect.)
But has not Montresor walled up himself in this revenge? Of what else
can we think, can he have thought for the past half-century, but of that
night’s vengeance upon his enemy? His freedom to do otherwise stands
chained in the dank vault with Fortunato.
A somewhat different thesis is maintained by Mme Bonaparte. She
finds the wine-cellar—the long, dark, dank tunnel of human remains—to be
an obvious, indeed an importunate, symbol of the maternal womb and the
entrance thither, and Montresor, leading Fortunato ever deeper to effect his
execution, is committing the murder of his father-figure in the act of pos-
sessing the mother’s body. The fact that the names of the two characters are
interchangeable synonyms may seem to buttress this assertion.
Come to think of it, how can we deny the thesis? But, on thinking
further, how can we accept it as a full exposition of the narrator’s horrible
purpose, his malignancy, his compulsion fifty years ago so to act, his obses-
sion now to confess his action? Considering the persons, circumstances, and
objects in this very brief tale in connection not only with the universal sig-
nifications which psychiatric studies place upon them, but also the equally
universal significations they attract to themselves as members of Poe’s oeuvre,
some further notions come symbiotically into play.
If, as I maintain, the two are doubles, it is doubtless of some moment
that one, Montresor, is in full possession of his wits, acts ruthlessly accord-
ing to his premeditated plan, and exercises aggressive and total power over
the other. That other, Fortunato, on the contrary is from the start befuddled
by both vanity and inebriation; acts on sudden impulse; assumes good will
where Montresor is malice incarnate; and suffers as the passive, total vic-
tim of his adversary’s malign cunning. The aggressor is presented as aggran-
dized by his victory, the victim as already degraded and ridiculous (as well as
pathetic) in his sufferings.
His ridiculousness is symbolized by his costume: ‘The man wore motley.
He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted
by the comical cap and bells.’ These are the bells whose jangling is the last
sound Montresor hears from behind the wall of Fortunato’s tomb. Now, the
cap and bells are of course everywhere acknowledged as signs of the Fool, but
why is the Fool so crowned? The cap needs no description—we immediately
see it as the bent conical foolscap of tradition, perhaps with a pompom, tas-
sel, or bell at the very tip, while the bells would likely be bunched in clus-
ters above each of the wearer’s ears. Anyone familiar with the Fool’s antics
in folk pageantry will not miss his personification, particularly around the
head, of the male member. The Fool is man’s lustful nature made absurd and
comical. If Fortunato is Montresor’s double or the image of his father, he is
24 Daniel Hoffman
made to appear ridiculous in motley because he also represents the all but
irrepressible stirrings and strivings of Montresor’s own sexual nature. Thus
‘The Cask of Amontillado’ is, whatever else it may be, a screed of psychoma-
chia, in which the calculating intellectual principle cleverly tricks, entraps,
immobilizes and extinguishes the body. What were the injuries and insults
of Fortunato upon Montresor? Among others, they include the denial by the
former to the latter of that transcendence, that beatitude, which cannot be
known to the soul still harassed and enslaved by passion.
So by interring Fortunato, Montresor at once has symbolically slain his
own father and rival for his mother’s affection, and forever interred his own
passion, his own fertility, his own vitality. This narrator has indeed acted in
accordance with—has indeed become—his Imp of the Perverse. But is he lib-
erated thereby to experience the transcendent bliss which the insults of Fortu-
nato had denied him? Not a bit of it. He too is dead to the world, immobile,
chained to the rock of his one guilt-ridden act of aggression against Father and
Self. This is the horrible truth he did not learn until he had experienced it.
And how appropriate it is that such a dreadful aggression against the
self be enacted in a place which cannot but suggest the mother’s womb, in its
aspect of the terrifying: a charnel-house of bones, the family vault. Here is
the undoubted source of Montresor’s/Fortunato’s being.
Poe seems as fixated as his Montresor, but not as successfully has the
author himself interred his own vitality-principle. If he tells essentially the
same tale over and over, he yet tells it differently every time. This must be the
distinction, in art as in life, between symbol and real action. Symbolic action
can repeat itself with variations till the end of time, but a real act of this
obsessive kind is as much a prison for the actor as was Montresor’s murder of
his double, than which he has no other tale to tell.
Madness!
There are no parents in the tales of Edgar Poe, nary a Mum nor a Dad.
Instead all is symbol. And what does this total repression of both sonhood
and parenthood signify but that to acknowledge such relationships is to
venture into territory too dangerous, too terrifying, for specificity. Desire
and hatred are alike insatiable and unallayed. But the terrible war of super-
ego upon the id, the endless battle between conscience and impulse, the
unsleeping enmity of the self and its Imp of the Perverse—these struggles
are enacted and re-enacted in Poe’s work, but always in disguise.
Take ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ surely one of his nearly perfect tales. It’s
only four pages long, a triumph of the art of economy:
How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how

calmly I can tell you the whole story.
When a narrator commences in this vein we know him to be mad already.

But we also know his author to be sane. For with such precision to por-
tray the methodicalness of a madman is the work not of a madman but
of a man who truly understands what it is to be mad. Artistic control is
the warrant of auctorial sanity. It is axiomatic in the psychiatric prac-
tice of our century that self-knowledge is a necessary condition for the
therapeutic process. Never using the language of the modern diagnosti-
cian—which was unavailable to him in the first place, and which in any
case he didn’t need—Poe demonstrates the extent of his self-knowledge
in his manipulation of symbolic objects and actions toward ends which
his tales embody.
The events are few, the action brief. ‘I’ (in the story) believes himself
sane because he is so calm, so methodical, so fully aware and in control of his
purpose. Of course his knowledge of that purpose is limited, while his recital
thereof endows the reader with a greater knowledge than his own. ‘The dis-
ease,’ he says right at the start, ‘had sharpened my senses. . . . Above all was
the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heavens and in the earth.
I heard many things in hell.’ Now of whom can this be said but a delusional
person? At the same time, mad as he is, this narrator is the hero of sensibility.
His heightened senses bring close both heaven and hell.
His plot is motiveless. ‘Object there was none. Passion there was none. I
loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult.
For his gold I had no desire.’ The crime he is about to commit will be all the
more terrible because apparently gratuitous. But let us not be lulled by his
narrator’s lack of admitted motive. He may have a motive—one which he
cannot admit, even to himself.
I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! 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.
And a paragraph later he reiterates, ‘It was not the old man who vexed me,
but his Evil Eye.’
Nowhere does this narrator explain what relationship, if any, exists
between him and the possessor of the Evil Eye. We do, however, learn from
his tale that he and the old man live under the same roof—apparently alone
together, for there’s no evidence of anyone else’s being in the house. Is the
young man the old man’s servant? Odd that he would not say so. Perhaps the
youth is the old man’s son. Quite natural that he should not say so. ‘I loved
the old man. He had never wronged me. . . . I was never kinder to the old
26 Daniel Hoffman
man than during the whole week before I killed him.’ Such the aggressive
revulsion caused by the old man’s Evil Eye!
What can this be all about? The Evil Eye is a belief as old and as dire
as any in man’s superstitious memory, and it usually signifies the attribution
to another of a power wished for by the self. In this particular case there
are other vibrations emanating from the vulture-like eye of the benign old
man. Insofar as we have warrant—which I think we do—to take him as a
father-figure, his Eye becomes the all-seeing surveillance of the child by the
father, even by The Father. This surveillance is of course the origin of the
child’s conscience, the inculcation into his soul of the paternal principles of
right and wrong. As such, the old man’s eye becomes a ray to be feared. For
if the boy deviate ever so little from the strict paths of rectitude, it will find
him out.
Poe, in other tales, seems to be obsessed with the eye to the point of
fetishism. In ‘Ligeia’ it is the lady’s eyes which represent, to her husband, the
total knowledge embodied in her person. By synecdoche the eyes become that
which he worships. But the old man’s eye is endowed with no such spiritual
powers. Come to think of it, it is always referred to in the singular, as though
he had but one. An old man with one all-seeing eye, an Evil Eye—from the
plausible to the superstitious we pass in the text; perhaps further still to the
mythical. One-eyed Odin, one-eyed because he sold his other for knowledge.
Yet the knowledge in a father’s (or a father-figure’s) eye which a child most
likely fears is the suspicion that he has been seen in a forbidden act, especially
masturbation, or some other exercise of the libido. That above all seems to
the young child to be forbidden, and therefore what an all-seeing Eye would
see. Yet this old man’s ocular power is never so specified. What is specified,
though, is the resemblance of his one eye to that of a vulture.
Vulture, vulture. Everywhere else in Poe’s work, in Poe’s mind, vulture
is associated with Time, and time is associated with our mortality, our con-
finement in a body. The vulture-like eye of an aged man is thus an insup-
portable reminder of the narrator’s insufferable mortality. Could he but rid
himself of its all-seeing scrutiny, he would then be free of his subjection to
time.
All the more so if the father-figure in this tale be, in one of his aspects,
a Father-Figure. As, to an infant, his own natural father doubtless is. As,
to the baby Eddie, his foster-father may have been. Perhaps he had even a
subliminal memory of his natural father, who so early deserted him, eye and
all, to the hard knocks experience held in store. So, the evil in that Evil Eye
is likely a mingling of the stern reproaches of conscience with the reminder
of his own subjection to time, age, and death.
To murder the possessor of such an eye would be indeed to reverse their
situations. In life, the old man seems to the narrator an absolute monarch, a
personage whose power over him, however benignly exercised, is nonethe-

less immutable. Such exactly is the degree to which a murderer dominates
his victim. And so it is that the narrator does not merely do the old man in.
No, he stealthily approaches the sleeping old man, in the dead of night, and
ever so craftily draws nearer, then plays upon his sleeping face a single ray
from his lantern. A ray like the beam of an eye. This he does each night for
a week—that very week in which he was never before so kind to him during
the waking hours, when the old man had his eye working.
Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in

opening the door. A watch’s minute hand moves more quickly
than did mine. Never before that night had I felt the extent of
my powers—of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings
of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little by
little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts.
This miscreant is full of the praise of his own sagacity, a terrible par-
ody of the true sagacity of a Dupin or a Legrand. For what he takes to be
ratiocination is in fact the irresistible operation of the principle of his own
perversity, the urge to do secret deeds, have secret thoughts undetected by
the otherwise ever-watchful eye of the old man. He is so pleased to have out-
witted that eye that he chuckles—and the old man stirs, then cries ‘Who’s
there?’ The room is pitchy black, the shutters drawn for fear of robbers. Now
the old man is sitting bolt upright in bed, ‘listening—just as I have done,
night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall.’
The old man must have realized what was happening, what was about
to happen, for
Presently I heard a slight grown . . . not of pain or of grief—oh,

no!—it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of
the soul when overcharged with awe. . . . I knew it well. I knew
what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at
heart.
And then, breaking the darkness and the silence, he spots his ray directly
‘upon the vulture eye.’ ‘Now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick
sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.’ This is the sound,
he says, of the old man’s heartbeat.
Excited to a pitch of ‘uncontrollable terror’ by the drumbeat of his vic-
tim’s heart, he gives a shout, flings wide the door of his lantern, and drags
the old man to the floor. Then he suffocates him under the mattress. ‘His eye
would trouble me no more.’
28 Daniel Hoffman
Now, quickly, methodically, the murderer completes his work. ‘First

I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.’
Then he places all between the beams under the floorboards. These he deftly
replaces so that no eye could detect a thing. He had made care to catch all
the blood in a tub. ‘Ha! ha!’
Death by suffocation—this is a recrudescence of the favorite mode of
dying everywhere else in Edgar Poe’s tales of the dying, the dead, and the
doomed. Illness is invariably phthisis; what character draws untroubled breath?
Such sufferings seem inevitable to the imagination of a writer whose memory is
blighted by the consumption which carried off the three women he most loved.
But there is yet another reason for the young man’s choosing to suffocate the
eye which he could not abide. As is true of dreamwork, the vengeance is meted
out thrice: he extinguishes the eye, he suffocates the old man, he dismembers
him. I think these three terrible acts are disguises of each other.
In its aspect of getting rid of the Evil Eye, this murder is a more intense
and violent form of blinding. And the symbolic content of blinding has been
self-evident since Oedipus inflicted it upon himself as a partial remission for
what the lex talionis, more strictly applied, would have required. In striking
the Evil Eye of the old man, the young madman strikes, symbolically, at his
sexual power. Nor does this contradict the other significations I have sug-
gested for the ocular member. As the source of conscience, of surveillance of
the boy’s sexual misdemeanors, and as the reminder of his subjection to his
own body, the eye derives some of its powers from its linkage, in imagina-
tion, with potency.
But what has suffocation to do with this? Only that the inability to
breathe is an equivalent of impotence, of sexual impotence. By inflicting this
form of death on the old man, the youth is denying his elder’s sexual power.
And cutting off the head, the arms, the legs? These amputations, too,
are symbolic castrations.
The ‘I’ is nothing if not methodical. He leaves nothing to chance.
No sooner has he replaced the floorboards—it is now four o’clock—but
there is a rapping at his door. Neighbors, hearing a scream, had called the
police. He explains that the scream was his own, in a dream. Then—why
does he do this?—he invites the police into the house, to search and see for
themselves, saying that the old man was away in the country.
I led them, at length, to his chamber. I showed them his treasures,

secure, undisturbed. In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought
chairs into the room, and desired them here to rest from their
fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph,
placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the
corpse of the victim.
At first all is well, but as they sit, and chat, his head begins to ache, he hears
a ringing in his ears. It grows in volume, ‘a low, dull, quick sound . . . as a
watch makes when enveloped in cotton. . . . hark! louder! louder! louder!’
He could escape the Evil Eye, but not ‘the beating of his hideous
heart.’
Of course it was his own heart which the murderer heard beat. Would
he have heard it, had not his Imp of the Perverse commanded that he lead the
police to the very scene of the crime? Or was this Imp, whose impulse seems
so inexplicable, his own conscience, inescapable as long as his own heart
should beat, demanding punishment for the terrible crime he had wrought?
Thus he is never free from the gaze of the old man’s clear blue eye.
WA LT E R S T E P P
The Ironic Double in Poe’s

“The Cask of Amontillado”
I n Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” a heraldic emblem offers a sugges-

tive entrance into the story. Descending into the catacombs of Montresor’s
failed family, Fortunato says, “I forget your arms.” It is one of his numerous
blind, unintentional insults. The proud Montresor, biding his time, blinks
not and replies: “A huge human foot d’or, in a field of azure; the foot crushes
a serpent rampant whose fangs are embedded in the heel.”
“And the motto?”

“Nemo me impune lacessit.”
“Good!” he said.
The brief scene highlights the major plot dynamics of Poe’s great
story: the clumsy insult, Montresor’s menacing irony, and Fortunato’s fur-
ther blindness to this irony (“Good!”). Montresor flashes countless “clues”
like the one above before Fortunato’s rheumy eyes—signals of his impend-
ing doom, but Fortunato does not perceive. The clues are part of the larger
“system” or “demonstration” motif of the story: Montresor, the diabolical
rationalist, systematically demonstrates again and again that the arriviste,
Fortunato, does not know, cannot distinguish. Montresor, at the end of his
life, has addressed his narrative to “You, who so well know the nature of my
From Studies in Short Fiction 13, no. 4 (Fall 1976). © 1977 by Newberry College.
31
32 Walter Stepp
soul,” and it is as if he were performing before some ultimate audience, say-

ing “You see? I show him the picture of his own death, and he says ‘Good!’ ”
An unspoken corollary of this speech I have imagined for his might read,
“And yet, this buffoon, this Fortunato . . . ‘is rich, respected, admired; he is
happy, as once I was.’ He is the heir of Fortune!” And so Montresor proceeds
to demonstrate the illegitimacy of this heir.
The heraldic emblem represents all the irony of life that Fortunato can-
not comprehend. But is it the more interesting, I think, for what it says of
Poe’s knowledge of his evil protagonist (the two being so often equated in
Poe’s case). For the emblem suggests a deeper motivation that Montresor
does not understand, either, but which Poe seems to have built upon. The
Latin verb in the motto makes clear what is clear anyway—that Montresor
identifies himself with the golden foot, ponderously triumphing over the
lashing serpent. When he holds up the dire image before Fortunato’s unsee-
ing eyes, he has in mind no doubt the golden legitimacy of his vengeance, a
just and unquestionable retribution for the thousand lacerations he has borne
in silence. He will tread him into the ground, and indeed he does seal For-
tunato in stone.
Such is Montresor’s reading of the emblem, it seems reasonably clear;
but another reading—Poe’s, I think—does not so easily identify Montresor
with the foot. The snake is the more obvious choice. Secrecy, cunning, ser-
pentine subtlety—these are the themes Montresor demonstrated best of all.
And the huge, golden boot fits very snugly the Fortunato that Montresor
presents to us—large, powerful, and very clumsy. The larger story shows very
well how to read the emblem: a giant has blindly stepped on a snake.
Moreover, to arrive at my main point, the emblem represents a scene
of mutual destruction. Allegorically speaking, the foot and the serpent are
locked together in a death embrace: neither can escape the ironic bond that
is between them. Through this allegory, then, I want to point to the deeper
relationship between the two men, a deeper motive for murder, and, finally,
a deep, ineffably horrible sense of retribution for the crime. This last may be
especially difficult to see, in view of the fact that much of the slow horror of
the tale derives from just that sense that Montresor has indeed escaped retri-
bution for his deed, that he has acted out his readers’ most terrible fantasy: to
murder “without conscience.” This is the chief burden of his demonstration,
told with appropriately dry matter-of-factness. He ends by letting us know
he has lived fifty triumphant years since the murder of “the noble Fortunato.”
My allegory, then, is certainly not Montresor’s.
Is it Poe’s? I shall say that Fortunato rather ironically represents the
familiar Poe doppelgänger, and that, as in Poe’s earlier, more explicit allegory,
“William Wilson,” the double corresponds with conscience. (That “with” is a
nice hedge for the moment.) The correspondence is unmistakably pat in the
The Ironic Double in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” 33
earlier story; “Cask” suggests that Poe’s command of his theme has considerably
deepened in that the double now is a reversed image—a “negative” double, if
you will, an ironic double. (Well, all doubles are; I mean something further in
that the double is not recognized “as such” by Montresor.) I think most readers
have noticed the rather perfect symmetry of opposition between Montresor
and Fortunato; most readers should, for that is the chief burden of Montresor’s
systematic demonstration. Montresor frames a “façade-system” to deny his
double, the irony being that he denies him so systematically that he ends by
creating a perfect double-in-reverse. The analogy with a photographic positive
and its negative is rather exact here—not because life operates so, but because
of Montresor’s compulsive program, his obsessional wish to demonstrate that
“He is not I.” Or: “I am not he.” The right emphasis ought to emerge from the
demonstation to follow.
I think I need mention only a few instances of the systematic opposi-
tions that Montresor’s procrustean method presents to us, enough to recall
its obsessive symmetry. Most importantly, Fortunato is broadly drawn as
a character entirely befitting his carnival motley and clownish bells. He
appears as the open, gullible extrovert, an innocent possessed of that same
ignorant vanity that caused the original fall from grace; he thinks he knows
enough to sample the apple the serpent tempts him with. He believes the
sacred Amontillado is meant for him, but he is a drunkard. Montresor lets
us know, certainly not a man of his companion’s fine taste. Every delicacy,
every pearl of ironic distinction, is utterly lost on this man: “He is not I; I
am not he.”
But it should be said that Montresor more than once obliquely acknowl-
edges that there is more to Fortunato than his portrait is designed to show.
Montresor does acknowledge certain sympathies with Fortunato, which
point to what is being denied by the rationalist’s demonstration. He begins,
“He has a weak point—this Fortunato—although in other regards he was
a man to be respected and even feared.” Here at least, in the beginning,
Montresor is quite conscious of his portraiture’s limitation, and perhaps that
is enough to convince us that he is not himself caught up in his own “sin-
cerity”—Montresor’s word for his rival’s weakness: “In painting and gem-
mary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack, but in the matter of old
wines he was sincere.” Montresor plays on this sincerity even as Fortunato
practices on gullible millionaires. Fortunato is hoist by his own petard, and
Poe intimates that Montresor is too, I think; but of course the mine of irony
lies deeper with him. If Fortunato’s “sincerity” is his connoisseurship, Mon-
tresor’s is his system. But that is the larger point; here let me emphasize their
clearer level of affinity: they are both successful “quacks.”
“The rumor of a relationship”—the phrase is from “William Wilson”—
sifts out in a few of Montresor’s oft-noted “slips.” One most touching occurs
34 Walter Stepp
when Fortunato is near death. Montresor speaks of “a sad voice, which I had
difficulty in recognizing as that of the noble Fortunato.” The epithet may
be taken as an obvious piece of sarcasm in keeping with the general ironic
tenor, but I do not find that Montresor allows himself the double-edge when
addressing “you who so well know the nature of my soul.” Then he keeps
to hard, dry understatement of fact. (An exception might be Montresor’s
final utterance: “In pace requiescat.” And even then, if there is indeed a bond
between them . . .)
And most readers have noted this piece of apparent rationalization:
“There came forth [from out the niche] only a jingling of bells. My heart
grew sick—on account of the catacombs.” There is also Montresor’s fail-
ure to satisfy the “definitive” conditions he has set down for himself, the
code of honorable vengeance. “A wrong is unredressed when retribu-
tion overtakes its redresser,” Montresor says, and whether he satisfies
that clause is being debated here. “It is equally unredressed when the
avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the
wrong.” Satisfaction is not debatable here; Montresor fails, for of course
Fortunato never knows why he dies. He does not know the avenger
“as such.” Indeed, his nemesis has gone to great lengths to show that
Fortunato is not capable of knowing such a man. He merely knows that
Montresor has deceived him and that his fortune has run out. To con-
nect with our larger theme, then, Montresor has failed “definitively”
to achieve his vengeance in a way that suggests he does not understand
its motive much more than does Fortunato. Why did he fail? It would
have been simple enough to state the formal motive. You have wronged
me thus and so; therefore you die. Whether we explain it as a prideful
blindness (system always assumed its rationale is self-evident) or as an
unwillingness to raise the ambiguous question, the irony of Montresor’s
“oversight” derives deep from the common substance of the two appar-
ently opposed characters. As the emblem foretold, Montresor is bound
with Fortunato and “dies” with him.
But it is the “mocking echo” motif that is the most suggestive of the
men’s relationship. (I take the phrase from Hawthorne’s “Young Good-
man Brown,” another kind of double story.) Montresor’s chosen method
of demonstration and torment is to resound Fortunato’s innocent words,
striking a sinister edge in them known only to himself and his sole
confidant, his reader. I am suggesting something further, a strange case
of what one might call “murderous identification.” I am thinking of the
obvious cse of “William Wilson,” in which the protagonist learns too
late the retribution for slaying one’s conscience. Two examples: When
Fortunato at last realizes his murderer’s intentions, he vainly tries to
humor him.
“But is it not getting late? Will they not be awaiting us at the

palazzo, the Lady Fortunato and the rest? Let us be gone.”
“Yes,” I said, “Let us be gone.”
“For the love of God, Montresor!”
“Yes,” I said, “for the love of God!”
And Fortunato is heard no more, silenced at last by his own words

thrust back at him. Certainly the most horrific—because so under-
stated—example of this diabolical doubling occurs immediately preced-
ing this last. While Montresor has been laying the tiers of his masonry,
Fortunato has been sobering up and presumably comprehending the
imminence of his death; “a low moaning cry from the depth of the recess.
It was not the cry of a drunken man.” This is followed by a long and
“obstinate” silence. When the wall is nearly completed, “A succession of
loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat of the chained
form, seemed to thrust me violently back.” Montresor quickly puts down
his momentary fright and reassures himself of the “solid fabric of the
catacombs.” Then, “I reapproached the wall, I replied to the yells of him
who clamored. I re-echoed—I aided—I surpassed them in volume and in
strength. I did this, and the clamorer grew still.” I have always wanted to
see a skilled actor play that scene; rather, two skilled actors. Fine points
matter especially here, to see in Montresor’s performance just the fine,
ironic blend of “quackery” and “sincerity.” Fortunato’s dazed agony would
be a study, too, as he witnesses the weird spectacle of his devil out-clam-
oring his victim’s agonies—eerie harmonics there. And perhaps in this
terrible way, Montresor demonstrates how one defeats the double—by
beating him at his own game, doubling him up. Just as the subtler quack
dupes the lesser, so perhaps Montresor “re-echoes” an “echoer.”
Again, the parallel with “William Wilson” helps here. There it was
the uncanny voice of the double-as-conscience that was most devastating.
“And his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own.” But William
Wilson was not so well defended as Montresor; he tried the direct fron-
tal assault and lost. Montresor, it would seem, achieves his triumph by
reversing roles with his double, in effect usurping the double’s occupation.
Now he becomes the menacing echo and sends his double to the doom
meant for himself, as it happened to Wilson.
By systematically denying every impulse represented by “the noble
Fortunato,” Montresor perhaps restores the perfect, lucid order that pre-
vailed when the Montresors “were a great and numerous family.” That is
to say, a mental equilibrium, false though it may be, has been restored. I
am speculating now that the decline of the Montresor family represented
a devastation of disorder to the compulsive Montresor, signifying to him
36 Walter Stepp
the price of his impulsivity. I suggest this term, of course, because it is the
direct antithesis of the cool, controlled character Montresor represents
himself to be. I have tried to show Montresor’s ambivalence toward the
impulsive parvenue, the childlike Fortunato, indeed innocent to the end
since he never “knows.” As in “William Wilson,” Montresor is “galled
. . . by the rumor of a relationship,” but in spite of the double’s “continual
spirit of contradiction, I could not bring myself to hate him altogether.”
Who is “the noble Fortunato”?
In “William Wilson,” Poe makes it absolutely clear that the dou-
ble represents conscience; such a parallel is not clear in “Cask,” but it is
the case, I think. Fortunato is not the interdictory conscience of “Wil-
liam Wilson,” but he is the conscience-related: he is guileless, trusting
innocence. It may be misleading to call him conscience, but his death is
required to slay conscience. If it is not so clear that Fortunato corresponds
to conscience, perhaps the blame (or credit) may be laid to Montresor’s
elaborate plan of denial. If Fortunato is a double-as-conscience, such an
idea is not likely to be directly verified by a man whose one great wish is
to portray himself as a man—nay, the man—without conscience. Indeed,
the murder of Fortunato might be thought of as a “test case” to confirm
just that notion: a man kills his conscience and rests in peace for fifty
years. Surely the horror of Poe’s little gem rests on the fantasy of the
crime without consequences. If a man might do that, as every boy has
dreamed of doing, where is “the public moral perspective”? The disposal
of a rival becomes as simple as a child’s “omnipotent” wish that he should
“go away.”
“William Wilson” tells the story of a man who murdered his con-
science and thus himself; the same story is at work in “Cask,” I submit,
but with the great difference that Wilson recognizes his folly, while
Montresor steadfastly refuses to. This significant difference is at least
one reason why I find perhaps too easily, our own conscientious under-
standing of the way things ought to be; Montresor is more difficult,
he challenges that understanding. He makes claims on us, if we take
him seriously, that Wilson does not. Wilson, for all his prodigality, is,
after all, “one of us,” the difference being of degree. But Montresor, like
Iago, stands in the line of Machiavellians who assert that the public
moral perspective is but a façade by which knaves are stung and puppies
drowned. We may say that Montresor is at heart a tormented sinner like
Wilson, but it requires rather than subtlety to show it, and the villain is
not likely to own it when we do.
The question of “comeuppance” in the two stories is a measure of
their relative subtlety. In “William Wilson,” poetic justice is clear if not
profound: He slew his conscience and thus himself. Poe clearly emphasizes
an allegorical understanding, and his story serves that purpose admirably

well. In “The Cask of Amontillado,” the same idea is intimated, but
much more ambiguously and with formidable qualifications that make
its meaning less easily satisfying. That is, though a reader may discern
significant chinks in Montresor’s armor, the armor remains—for a lifetime,
he tells us. The armor represents a powerful lie, and it is important not to
underestimate its power. Its felt presence stands in defiance of any mere
allegorical, or purely intellectual, understanding. It is disturbing, it sustains
the muted horror of this story, and is not easily dismissed, I think, as in
James Gargano’s formuation: “With a specious intellectuality, common
to Poe’s violent men, Montresor seeks to escape from his own limitations
by outside force. But the force is a surrogate of the self, cozening [the]
man toward damnation with all the brilliant intrigue Montresor uses in
destroying Fortunato.” All which I most potently believe, but I hold it not
honesty to have it thus set down, as Hamlet replies to his own speech. In the
“damnation” of the criminal Montresor, I believe, in theory. Theological
grounds being what they are not these days, I might take the case in
the good humanistic tradition Gargano espouses. To gain precision and
authority, I might go further to document, on psychoanalytic grounds,
the suffering that must lie at the heart of “the compulsion neurotic.” (I
think that is the correct classification.) But, alas, these are general and
even problematic premises; they do inform my understanding of Poe’s
story, but they tend to pale before the immediacy of Montresor’s defiant
evil. The truth of the story, its meaning, must acknowledge that dilemma
of the reader—unless, of course, as is common, we want merely to use
the story as a “case” to illustrate doctrine. The slow horror of the story
rests ultimately on the reader’s ambivalent wish-belief that Montresor did
indeed triumph, that he did indeed sin with impunity: that he did slay his
conscience. When Poe had Montresor address his story to “you, who so
well know the nature of soul,”—referring perhaps to the reader’s role as
ironic double—I do not think he intended an easy irony.
G I TA R A J A N
A Feminist Rereading of Poe’s

“The Tell-Tale Heart”
S ome contemporary feminists and theorists argue that there is a differ-

ence between masculinist and feminist discourse in literary texts. French
theorists like Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous follow
Jacques Lacan and psychoanalytic theory and trace the unconscious drives
exhibited in the discourse of the text as repressed male/female desires. Even
though these desires may be contradictory and conflicting, they reveal the
position of the speaking subject (male or female) within the discourse of
the text. The French scholars, in seeking the overlapping or androgynous
places of discourse in the text, assert that males and females engage in dif-
ferently gendered readings. Kristeva and Cixous argue that sexual identity
(male or female) is a metaphysical construct outside the boundaries of the
text, while gender identity is based upon cultural notions of maleness and
femaleness evidenced in the text. Gender identity is more fluid than the
former and makes room for the crucial concept of androgyny that is central
to feminist readings in demolishing the rigid patriarchal notion of what is
male/female. Androgyny deconstructs crippling binary oppositions of mas-
culinity and femininity by allowing the speaking subject to occupy either
or both positions.
From Papers on Language & Literature 24, no. 3 (Summer 1988): 283–300. © 1988 by the
Board of Trustees of Southern Illinois University.
39
40 Gita Rajan
While sexual identity, and, consequently, discrimination, feature prom-

inently in masculinist readings, French theorists are radically shifting the
very nature of the struggle of the sexes by focusing on gender-governed iden-
tity. Hence, a feminist reinterpretation of a narrative typically could argue
that an unmarked narrator can be seen as female. Such a reading would
displace a whole series of masculinist assumptions. In accordance with this
approach, I will focus on Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” especially its narrator,
and argue that the narrator is indeed female. Poe himself never indicates
that the narrator is male; in fact, his text offers no gender markings. Readers
have assumed that the narrator is male because a neutralized and unmarked
term is generally granted to be male. This is a trap that the language of
the tale innocuously lays before the reader. By positing a female narrator, I
propose to dislodge the earlier, patriarchal notion of a male narrator for the
story. I argue, instead, that a gender-marked rereading of this tale reveals the
narrator’s exploration of her female situation in a particular feminist dis-
course. My feminist reading of “The Tell-Tale Heart” profiles the identity
of the narrator as filtered through Freud’s, Lacan’s, and Cixous’s theories of
narrativity.
Psychoanalysis partially bridges the gap between conscious and

unconscious thought and language through dream theory. Freud argues
that instinctual forces—eros and thanatos—manifest themselves through
dreams, and that these forces coexist and continually contradict each other,
being intertwined in pairs like love/hate, life/death, and passivity/aggres-
sion. However, Freud maintains that people manage to lead ordered lives
because they sublimate these forces as desires in dreams through at least
two specific mechanisms, “condensation” and “displacement.” Freud builds
his psychoanalytic theory on human sexuality and desire, seeing the male
as superior, in possession of the phallus, i.e., power. A female is inferior for
Freud because of her lack of the sexual organ to signify the phallus and the
power it symbolizes. In short, Freud’s definition of the male and female,
locked into this privative power equation, automatically privileges the male
and marginalizes the female.
Lacan, in his revision of Freudian theory, fastens upon three principles:
desire (the phallus as power), condensation/displacement (the dream as a
system of signs), and hierarchy (the male as superior, or possessing power
through the penis: the female as inferior, or lacking power).1 Relying on
Roman Jakobson’s structural linguistics, he combines these three principles
to establish a relationship between language per se and conscious/uncon-
scious thought. Jakobson uses language as a model of signs to explain human
A Feminist Rereading of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” 41
thought and consequent behavior. A sign, for Jakobson, is a representation

through language of the relationship between signifier (the physical sound
of speech or the written mark on the page) and the signified (the invisible
concept that this sound or mark represents). Jakobson’s linguistic formula-
tions reveal the doubleness of the sign and the fragility of the signifier (word)
and signified (concept) relationship. In effect, he sees meaning emerging in
discourse not through the relationship between signifier and signified but
through the interaction of one signifier with another.
Jakobson maintains that language is constructed along two axes—the
vertical/metaphoric and the horizontal/metonymic. Lacan’s matches Jakob-
son’s theory of language with Freud’s theory of dreams, positing that dreams
are structured along metaphoric and metonymic lines. 2 Lacan claims that
the “rhetoric of the unconscious” is constructed on two main tropes—met-
aphor and metonymy. He equates condensation with metaphor because it
is a process of selection, substituting one signifier/word for another. Dis-
placement he sees as metonymy because it combines one signifier/word with
another. For Lacan, unconscious desire, like language, is structured as a sys-
tem of signs, articulated metaphorically and metonymically in dreamwork
and considered as discourse. While in Freudian analysis the focus is on the
excavation of the subject’s behavior, in Lacan it shifts to language, tracing
the path of desire as a sequential power transaction in the discourse of the
text. Thus, Lacan reconstructs Freud’s behavioral model into a seemingly less
prejudiced linguistic one by emphasizing the arbitrariness and precarious-
ness of language itself.
Further, according to Lacan, the metaphoric register represents the
masculine through the “transcendental phallus,” embodying the ultimate
power of the signifier as a linguistic mark whose meaning is forever repressed
(in the unconscious or the “text”) and never attainable. Hence, every subject
must engage in a constant metaphoric game of substitution in the attempt to
grasp this final desire. In contrast, the metonymic is temporal and sequen-
tial; it propels the signifier forward in an attempt to recover the (unconscious)
signified through narration. Significantly, Lacan claims that this reaching
forward to achieve completeness is a mark of femininity, a feminine marker
in discourse. Finally, Lacan concludes that even though language itself is
symbolic, the symptom that prompts discourse is metonymic. Thus, the met-
onymic, feminine, “imaginary” register is the force that propels narrative. 3
It is at this point that Lacan differs radically from Freud. While Freud
assumes that language can completely appropriate and express thought,
granting closure in the text, Lacan posits an inherent gap in this relation-
ship, arguing for never-ending narrativity. For Lacan, the sign can never
be complete or made whole because a signifier can only point to another
signifier, resulting in an unending chain of signifiers we forever attempt to
42 Gita Rajan
bridge through language and thought. Lacan connects language to thought

as expressions of patterns of desire, motivated and propelled towards pos-
sessing the ultimate sign of power—the “transcendental signified,” or phal-
lus. Thus, the transcendental signified belongs in the metaphoric register,
and the desire to possess it creates narrativity, which belongs to the met-
onymic register. Lacan strategically argues that the desire to possess the
“transcendental phallus” is universal, both in males and females, and appears
to collapse sexual difference. But this apparent egalitarianism, I argue, does
not in fact work.
A masculinist reading of Poe’s tale using Lacan’s theory still supports
the Freudian notion of the Oedipal myth. However, the Lacanian approach
emphasizes sexual difference less than the Freudian approach does. Rob-
ert Con Davis analyzes Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” using Lacanian prin-
ciples in “Lacan, Poe and Narrative Repression.” He focuses on the latent
and repressed levels of the text as a method of locating the nexus of power.
Davis argues the act of gazing, whether the old man’s or the narrator’s, is a
metaphoric power transaction between the subject and the object of the gaze.
Using Freud’s “Instincts and Their Vicissititudes,” with its traditional patri-
archal dichotomies of “subject/object, active/passive,” Davis matches Freud’s
theme of the “gaze” with Lacan’s theory of voyeurism to interpret Poe’s tale.4
Davis highlights the “Evil Eye” as a predominant metaphor in Poe’s tale
that functions primarily through its power of the Gaze. Building on the
theme of the gaze and voyeurism, Davis validates his masculinist reading
by arguing that the old man and the narrator are indeed doubles, always
already connected by the gaze. He sees both characters as having similar,
almost paranoically sensitive hearing and sight, insomnia, and a preoccupa-
tion with death. The “eye” of the old man represents the Symbolic Law of
the Father, or Lacan’s version of Freud’s Oedipal complex. Davis argues that
in an attempt to escape paternal subjugation, the narrator engages in his
own vindictive game of voyeurism. Davis sees the murder of the old man
as a cruelly symbolic act of Oedipal mastery: “in choosing to heighten the
old man’s fear of death and kill him, the narrator controls—just as a voyeur
sadistically controls—a situation like his own, as if the subject and object
could be merged in a mirror phase of complete identification” (255). Davis
even argues for a third voyeur in the figure of Death: “Death . . . had stalked
with his black shadow . . . and enveloped the victim.”5 This allows him to
posit a typical Lacanian triangle, consisting of the old man, the narrator, and
Death, and create a constant shift in the power of the gaze through the triple
itinerary of the signifier.
Because Davis places the narrator and the old man in the “double” posi-
tions connected by the gaze, he sees the gaps in the gaze between the subject
and object and the gazer and voyeur as forces that produce the narrative,
propel the tale forward, and alternately manifest and repress the text. Based
on a primarily metaphoric interpretation—the eye as the Symbolic Gaze of
the Father—Davis argues for a male narrator who acts as voyeur and exhibi-
tionist alternately. Davis neatly sums up the final scene of Poe’s tale as clearly
metaphoric by saying: “His [the narrator’s] resistance to being seen points to
a desire to escape subjugation absolutely and to choose death rather than to
become passive while alive” (254). Significantly, Lacan’s suggestion that the
metonymic dimension of the text is female is absent in Davis’s reading. Thus,
even though Lacanian readings seem to open the door to feminist perspec-
tives, they ultimately only nudge the door ajar.
Cixous’s feminist approach to psychoanalytic interpretation and her

notion of feminine writing provide a fruitful way of sabotaging the masculin-
ist-biased reading of texts. Hence a rereading of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”
with Cixous’s paradigm offers an alternate gender-marked interpretation.
She systematically interrogates existing critical presuppositions, deconstructs
them, and advocates a three-step reinscription procedure.6 First, according
to Cixous, one must recognize a latent masculinist prejudice in society, a
hidden privileging of the male and marginalizing of the female. Next, one
must consciously undo the basic slanting in favor of the male term over the
female term at the very nodes of these seemingly logical oppositions, such
as male/female, reason/feeling, culture/nature, etc. Patriarchy, by creating
these oppositions, privileges the first term and lowers the status of the sec-
ond, forcing the textual subject to occupy either of these positions and accept
the power (or lack thereof) that goes along with it. This logic divides each
term against itself and makes the whole system of binary (Western) thought
rigidly prescriptive. The male, according to this system of thought, can have
an identity and value only in juxtaposition to an inferior female signifier
and vice versa. Also, in privileging one term over another, the first term sets
the norm for the second. More important, oppositional thinking, which is
characteristic of patriarchy, forbids a wholeness or a shared existence for any
term, focusing on maleness or on femaleness instead of the androgyny that
Cixous and other French feminists advocate.
Consequently, Cixous’s final step is to combat this problem of divi-
sion by embracing these oppositions and erasing their differences. This is the
“pretext,” or background, for the process of jouissance that Cixous advocates.
The strategy behind jouissance is to discredit the notion of difference by
going beyond the idea of constraining divisions, to explore instead the free-
dom of excess, a utopian vision that subverts the male definition of desire.
Patriarchy is based on a system of libidinal economy (a repression of desire
44 Gita Rajan
both conscious and unconscious that creates meaning in a text). Cixous’s

jouissance demands a libidinal excess—additions of unconscious meanings
through consciously constructed texts. The practical method behind this
political feminist position is to create a multiplicity of meanings. In linguis-
tic terms, jouissance creates an excess of signifiers, the freeplay of which will
build several levels of meanings, all of which can be validated by the text.
These meanings do not depend upon a series of repressed previous ones; they
do not impoverish the meanings that come before them through a process of
substitution but, instead, enhance each other through a process of addition.
An example of this is the notion of androgyny which is central to some femi-
nist readings. Instead of focusing on either male or female voice in the text,
androgyny allows the same voice to be male and/or female in various parts of
the text, allowing for numerous complementary interpretations.
Kristeva, in Desire and Language, and Cixous, in La Juene Née, argue that
the concept of androgyny belongs to the realm of the “Imaginary,” which,
in Lacanian theory, is pre-Symbolic, or pre-Oedipal, and thus, is before the
Law of the Father. While Cixous is explicit in calling this jouissance in the
sense of the purely pleasurable state of excess, Kristeva connects jouissance to
reproduction. However, they share this vision of utopia, with no boundaries
or barriers of any kind, a vision that is based on unlimited joy.7
The inherent danger in Kristeva’s and Cixous’s vision of utopia is their
marked privileging of the imaginative/poetic over the analytical/theoreti-
cal in feminist writing. Because of their emphasis on emotions rather than
reason as the feminine mode, some patriarchal theorists do not treat femi-
nist discourse seriously. Sentimentality is precisely the club that patriarchy
holds over the woman to control and deem her inferior. However, there is
a definite value in adopting Cixous’s position of abundance in an effort to
invalidate the rigid male parameters and explore the text with an expectation
of plentitude and multiple meanings. It is essential to point out that Cixous’s
notion of jouissance as a pleasure principle is different from Lacan’s notion
of free space with an abundance of signifiers (or even Barthes’s version of the
“pleasures of the text”). The latter suggests a chasm with an abundance of
repressed, free floating signifiers, while the former gathers up this abundance
of signifiers to nourish and cherish separate multiple readings.
Cixous begins by questioning the validity of categories like male/female
in both writing and reading texts. She sees these as gaps created by ideologi-
cal differences propagated by a phallogocentric (phallus- and logos-oriented)
interpretive community. Further, she argues that this kind of oppositional
thinking is itself aggressive (very much like the male logic and body behind
it), because one term in the couple comes into existence through the “death
of the other.” Cixous, in La Jeune Née asks, “Where is she?” (115) in a patri-
archal binary thought system that creates divisions like “Activity/Passivity,
Culture/Nature, Father/Mother, Head/Emotions, Logos/Pathos” (116)

which is structured primarily on the male/female opposition. An effective
way to allow both terms to exist is to ask for a gendered position that both
males and females can occupy either jointly or individually within the texts,
as speaking subjects. This is made possible through the notion of jouissance,
which focuses on the speaking subject with a gendered (hence mobile) iden-
tity. Also, this deliberate exploration of multiple meanings would ceaselessly
expose the hidden male agenda which is created to silence women.
I preface my rereading of Poe’s tale with a Freudian analysis, much like

that in Marie Bonaparte’s Life of Poe.8 However, while Bonaparte’s empha-
sizes the element of primal-scene voyeurism, mine sees the male narrator’s
retelling of his story/dream as a narration of a rite of passage. “The Tell-Tale
Heart” begins by describing the narrator’s feelings about taking care of an
old man. The old man’s disturbing stare upsets the narrator, who decides on
an impulse to kill him. The rest of the tale focuses on the narrator’s elaborate
plan to murder him, and ends with the narrator’s confession of the crime.
The story has Poe’s typical macabre atmosphere and deliberately contradic-
tory syntactical style. By killing the old man, the narrator symbolically cas-
trates him, eliminating him from the text, and hopes to escape subjugation.
This allows him to step into the old man’s position of unchallenged power.
The act of murder reveals the condensed expression of his desire to usurp
the old man’s place and authority. Similarly, his swing between neurotic and
hysteric utterances, repeatedly assuring the reader of his sanity, is an effort
to displace the sense of fear that is incumbent upon possessing such author-
ity. At the beginning of the tale, the narrator shelters the old man (love),
but ends up murdering him (hate). The narrator’s contradictory actions, in
an effort to possess ultimate power, are the result of the intertwining of eros
and thanatos. The narrator’s final confession to the policemen (the substitute
father figures) is a combination and sublimation of his desire for power and
fear of castration as a challenge to his new power.
The standard Oedipal interpretation is explicit in the climactic bed-
room scene that graphically reveals the simultaneous condensed and dis-
placed desires of the narrator. The bed serves to feed the contradictory
instinctual urges of eros and thanatos, satisfying the young man’s passion
while smothering him to death, granting the young man power while nul-
lifying it in the old man. The narrator’s imbalanced emotional utterances
about being “driven” by the old man’s “eye” are symptoms of the condensed
desire that make him conceive his elaborate plan of shutting the old man’s
“Evil eye forever” (303). It is his attempt to usurp that very authority of the
46 Gita Rajan
old man’s surveillance. And the narrator’s own deafening “heartbeat” prods
him on, leading him from one event to the next in the narrative, revealing
his efforts to escape the displaced sense of fear in letting this desire get out
of control. While the eye (condensation) represents the narrator’s problem
through a sense of abstract desire, the heartbeat (displacement) serves as the
significant, concrete sense of fear in dealing with this problem. This enables
the tale to maintain its ambivalence between myth and reality, dream and
nightmare, due to a coexisting tension between metaphor/condensation and
metonymy/displacement throughout the narration. In this traditional Freud-
ian analysis, the identity of narrator remains fixedly male.
However, my rereading of the tale includes both a masculinist and
feminist approach to the narrator. Using Lacanian principles, I profile the
narrator as “speaking subject,” presenting the narrator first as male, then as
female. Unlike Davis’s reading, my masculinist rereading focuses on both
the metaphoric and metonymic aspects of the text, moving away from an
exclusive “Gaze”-oriented interpretation of manifest and repressed levels of
discourse. I treat the eye as a metaphor of patriarchal scrutiny and social
control, and the heart as metonymic device to subvert such control. The nar-
rator admits his obsession in saying, “when it [the eye] 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 forever” (305).
The narrator explicitly reveals his anger at the old man’s symbolic method of
subjugation and expresses his consequent desire to annihilate the old man,
thereby negating and usurping his power. Davis too, points this out by show-
ing how the narrator first isolates the gaze, then inverts it, so that he can gaze
at and subjugate the old man. The narrator retaliates against the “Evil Eye”
by voyeuristically gazing at the sleeping man. Thus, the gaze moves from
the old man to the narrator, symbolizing the shift of power between them.
Lacan calls this mobility the “itinerary of the signifier” (171) to indicate the
constant substitution maneuvers that the metaphoric register undertakes in
its attempt to possess the ultimate object of desire—the transcendental sig-
nifier.9 Within Poe’s tale, the “itinerary of the signifier” can be graphically
traced along the “single thin ray” of light from the narrator’s lantern that
falls upon the “vulture eye . . . directed as if by instinct, precisely upon the
damned spot” (306). Gaining new power through his reversal of the gaze
makes the narrator heady, and he cries exultantly that the old man “was stone
dead. His eye would trouble me no more” (306).
However, the “itinerary of the signifier,” due to its constant process of
substitution, does not allow power to rest with one gazer for a long period.
The very nature of the gaze, as posited by both Freud and Lacan, is extremely
volatile, temporary, and unpredictable. Consequently, in Poe’s story the
power of the gaze destabilizes the narrator, and it is for this reason that he
breaks down and confesses to the mildly suspecting policemen. The police
in Poe’s tale are the literal representations of societal power, but they are
also a metaphor for the Law of the Father in the unconscious. The police-
men’s gaze, thus, both literally and metaphorically represents the sanctioned
authority that the narrator had just usurped from the old man. When they
gaze at the narrator, they reverse the path of the gaze, once again throwing
him back into the passive object position that is revealed by his hysterical and
humiliating confession.
Equally crucial in a Lacanian analysis is the metonymic register, marked
by the “heart” in Poe’s tale. It exhibits a complicated displacement process
working simultaneously on two manifest levels. At one level it represents
the narrator’s confused emotions, such that the narrator’s passions and fears
combine and clash, spurring the tale forward. The tale unfolds through the
narrator’s hysterical utterances, extreme passion (even though the narrator
explicitly denies this at the beginning of his tale), obsessive desire, neurotic
fears, and pathetic confession. At another level, it represents the physical
pounding of the narrator’s heart, giving him the energy to kill the old man.
On the night of the assault, the narrator remarks: “Never, before that night,
had I felt the extent of my own powers” (306). Notably, it is the narrator’s fear
of the imagined sound of the old man’s heart, that overwhelming roar, that
ultimately betrays him into confessing to the policemen. These two aspects
of displacement embodied metonymically in the heart are fused in a strange
manner, alternating between hearing and feeling throughout the tale, such
that they keep plummeting the narrative onwards. Thus, the sounds in the
tale move rapidly from heartbeat to creaking doors, to muffled smothering
sounds, to loud ticking watches, and finally pound as unbearable noise in the
narrator’s head till he articulates his fear through the confused discourse of
a hysterical confession.
There is also a third kind of displacement at the repressed level of the
text. This is evidenced in the metonymic shift not only between one aspect
of the heart to the other, but in a total shift from sound to sight at crucial
points in the text. Thus, the metonymic register displaces the narrator’s feel-
ings throughout the text in various ways. A good example is the elaborate
precautions that the narrator takes to direct a single ray of light in a dark-
ened room on the old man’s eye (sight). When the narrative has been raised
to a fever pitch on the night of the murder, the narrator suddenly fumbles
with the catch on the lantern and goes into a detailed description of sounds
of “death watches,” and crickets in “chimneys,” effectively displacing reader
attention. The displacement and metonymic tactics repressed in the narrative
itself act as a marker for signaling the manifest displacement of the narra-
tor’s fears regarding his uncontrolled and unsanctioned actions. It is here
that Lacan’s notion of the “itinerary of signifiers” in the metonymic register
48 Gita Rajan
serves him well. Metonymy, as both agent and trope, by constantly shifting,
mediates between thought and language, showing both the instability of
this relationship, and its inability to bridge the gap. At the textual level, it
highlights the constant forward movement in an attempt to narrate through
the rapid and confusing chain of events. It reveals the obsessively fragmented
discourse of the narrator, in a painful effort to make meaning, and to make
whole this relationship between thought and language. Thus, in my mascu-
linist reading, by using the Lacanian paradigm of a male speaking subject, I
reveal the problematic nature of language itself. When the narrator fails, one
glimpses—with a strange pathos—the failure of language, too.
In contrast, my Lacanian feminist rereading of Poe’s tale, identifying
a female narrator, yields an interpretation that is the reverse of the Oedipal
myth. Instead of a young man desiring the power symbolized by the Father,
she is the daughter desiring her father. I will show that Lacan’s innovative-
ness lies in the way he volatilizes the metaphoric and metonymic registers
through his theory of the “itinerary of the signifier.” Lacan suggests that sex
roles as represented by linguistic tropes can be made less rigid. Hence sexual
difference can be erased by energizing and mobilizing these linguistic tropes.
Metaphor as a trope represents a pattern of desiring and desired where the
object of desire is the transcendental signified, or phallus. Metonymy would
be the act of seeking and transacting this power through narrative. Thus,
Lacan’s strategy is to dislocate the fixity of sexual identity, or what he claims
is gender identity, through the use of tropes as agents of desire. This would
allow both men and women to possess the transcendental phallus, or its met-
aphoric power; but because of the temporary nature of this power, the very
act of possession would be continually deferred and drawn out metonymi-
cally in narrative for both masculine and feminine subjects.
Within this framework, the narrator in Poe’s tale can be posited as a
female rather than a male who desires power. She stalks the old man and
father figure for “seven long nights” and kills him in an attempt to escape
the surveillance of his Evil Eye. The female narrator begins in the tradi-
tional feminine position of a nurturer. She takes him into her house and
even remarks with dark irony after terrifying him with her nightly ritualis-
tic voyeurism: “I went boldly into his chamber, and spoke courageously to
him, calling him by his name in a hearty tone, and inquiring how he had
passed the night” (306). But she deeply resents the scrutiny of his eye, feeling
abused and objectified by his paternal surveillance. Angered and humiliated
by his gaze, she goes through the same maneuver that the male narrator does
in reversing the path of this gaze. Unlike the male narrator, her primary
desire is to rid herself of the male gaze, or domination. However, in traveling
through the gaze’s path, she substitutes the first desire for her need physically
to possess the old man. In this context, the climactic scene in the bedroom,
with its implied sexual overtones, supports a Lacanian feminist reading bet-
ter than an Oedipal one. In that one moment of possession, she becomes the
aggressor; she even assumes a male sexual posture, forcing the old man to
receive her, almost raping him, so that “he shrieked once—once only” (305).
The scene culminates with her smirk: “There was nothing to wash out—no
stain of any kind—no blood spot whatsoever. . . . A tub caught it all” (305).
In this one act, the female narrator captures both the masculine gaze and
masculine role. Thus, in appropriating the male posture, she even refers to
herself in explicitly masculine terms, claiming repeatedly, that her actions
are not those of a “madman.”
Yet, ironically, the very authority of her newfound power makes her
more vulnerable, more of an object of desire by others. Metaphorically, she
moves from the position of actively desiring that Lacan allows to both the
male and female to the position of being passively desired, one that is tra-
ditionally only the female’s. It is here that the Lacanian “itinerary of the
signifier” betrays her. The movement between male/female roles is ultimately
restrictive to the female. Unlike the male narrator who confesses for fear
of castration, the female narrator is denied this option. Acknowledging her
femininity, she stands before the policemen, stripped of her power in her
traditional posture as female, passive, subservient, and accountable to the
male gaze—and exposed in the eyes of the Law through the return of the
repressed (murdered) father. She begins and ends in a stereotypically femi-
nine posture, the nurturer who has returned to her quintessentially repressed
object position.
My feminist rereading with metonymy as focal point again reveals the
confined position of the female narrator. The heart as an allegory of metonymy
displaces the narrator’s fears and desires, working on the two levels already
examined, making her obey the dictates of her confused emotions. Further,
Poe’s text, if reread as narrated by a female speaking subject, indicates that
this desire and fear is more frequently associated with a female “voice” than
it is with the male’s. The female narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” focuses on
evocations of space and emptiness, which are typical expressions of female
consciousness. The narrator claims her fear was engulfing, making her feel
as if “enveloped in cotton” (305), just like her “Terrors” which “welled” up in
her bosom, “deepening, with its dreadful echo” (304). Interestingly, Lacan’s
theory of metonymy as the motor of language supports the psychoanalytic
view that links the female phobia of emptiness (as a primal corollary to lack-
ing the phallus) with gaps in narrativity that make this tale seem discontinu-
ous and disjointed.10 Thus, the narrator’s confused recounting of her tale is
a method of compensating for this emptiness, from the initial display of
desire in her heart to the culminating betrayal of that desire, resulting in her
agonizing confession.
50 Gita Rajan
This feminist investigation into the speaking subject, both male

and female, unmasks the hidden male agenda; it also shows that a
feminist rereading using only the Lacanian principles of psychoanalysis is
problematic. As already shown, the female narrator’s voluntary confession
to the mildly suspecting policemen reveals her restricted position. As
woman, she reoccupies her traditional role as a submissive, victimized
object, offering herself up to be scrutinized once more by the male gaze.
She can, finally, never aspire to usurp this power or be outside/above the
Law of the Father. Ironically, even though a feminist rereading grants
the female narrator a temporary masculine, active, subject posture, it
undercuts this interpretation in returning her to a traditionally female
position by superimposing a judicial and patriarchal closure. Such a
feminist reading shows how clearly the female is boxed into a role, making
both her sexual and gender identity rigid. A feminist rereading must go
beyond the unmasking of such oppression; it must seek alternate positions
for the female speaking subject.
Although Lacanian psychoanalysis first creates a division between
male/female and then erases it under the guise of gender equalization, it
seems to suggest that certain codes of behavior and discourse are allowable
only to a male. Should a female dare to transgress, she will be punished
by the Law of the Father. Consequently, the female narrator is permitted
to desire the “metaphoric” phallus as power, but she can never aspire to
possess it. And if she chooses to disobey this basic patriarchal dictum, not
only will she fail but she must bear the moral consequences. In a feminist
rereading of the ending of the tale, the female narrator’s marginalization
becomes explicit. What was successfully interpreted as a dramatization
of the Oedipal myth for the male narrator turns to the harsh reality of
oppression for the female narrator.
A feminist theorist must suspect that this development reveals
Lacan’s bias in adapting Freud’s notion of manifest and repressed texts.
At the manifest level, Lacan explicitly advocates sexual egalitarianism,
but at the repressed (more influential) level he implicitly subverts it. My
feminist rereading of the manifest text is as presented in the above analy-
ses. Yet if one were to reread the repressed text, the Lacanian prejudice
against the female would become obvious. I submit that the unconscious,
or repressed text, through the pressure it exerts on the conscious or mani-
fest text, shows that patriarchal morality condemns a woman for being
aggressive, for desiring power, and ultimately punishes her for achieving
this power even temporarily. Both male and female readers of Poe’s story
have tended to accept the Law of the Father, together with all its arbitrary
presuppositions, and grant power only to the male. Thus, the status of the
male narrator in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” has remained stable. But if
one wishes to transcend this phallogocentric prejudice, one must look

elsewhere than Freud and Lacan.
To experience what Cixous explains as jouissance within Poe’s text,
we must erase the rigidity of metaphor (eye) and metonymy (heart) as
separate categories. Instead, a gendered reading of Poe’s tale would make
the “eye” and the “heart” serve as metaphors and metonymies simulta-
neously, intermingling and creating multiple meanings. Quite accu-
rately, Cixous’s use of tropes can be called gendered, as they have greater
maneuverability than Lacan’s sexual tropes, which are clearly marked as
metaphor/symbolic/male, and metonymy/imaginary/female. This strategy is
Cixous’s way of combating Lacan’s notion of gender dissemination, which
is actually based on a sexual paradigm. Lacan’s position is invested with
patriarchal biases such that the female term is violated and abused either
at the conscious (manifest text) or unconscious (repressed text) level. The
“eye” as metaphor has yielded meaning to Poe’s text, but reading it met-
onymically enriches the tale further. The “eye” is the virtual symptom of
the female narrator’s desire to gain power in a male dominated society.
In this context, it energizes the sequence of events in the tale to climax
in the narrator’s confession. Since killing the old man does not grant her
lasting power, she confesses to the policemen and, thus, recirculates her
power. Paradoxically, in the confessional scene “she” adroitly forces the
male gaze to expose the controlled violence of the patriarchy. Her aggres-
sion against the old man is an explicit assault on male domination. Her
confession becomes her implicit critique of domination. For a feminist
reader, this is gratifying, an expression of solidarity through her exposure
of ideology. For a masculinist reader, it is one more reminder of rebellion
against patriarchal oppression. Her confession reveals the latent fetters
of bondage in a patriarchal ideology, and she rereverses the gaze of the
policemen by letting it bounce off her objectified body by using the eye as
a metonymic instrument. Here the gaze is just one more part in her plan
to expose the system. She exchanges the virtual prison bars of the Father’s
Law for the actual ones of the penal system. Henceforth, she will covertly
make her point on discrimination against women through the underlying
irony of her tale.
Writhing under the policemen’s scrutiny, she protests: “they were mak-
ing a mockery of my horror! . . . But any thing was better than this agony
. . . more tolerable than this derision” (306). This indicates that her first
plan to usurp power from the old man had failed, and now she must adopt
another, creating a new perspective for the final scene. Her confession, now
read ironically and not as evidence of guilt, directs the gaze back into the
metaphoric register. It activates her plan for the exposé. For a moment,
between her first plan and the second one, the gaze falls on the metaphoric
52 Gita Rajan
spectre of the Law. In this sense, the interweaving of metaphor and meton-
ymy, as a slippage of tropes, allows for multiple readings that build on one
another instead of repressing one meaning to manifest another. This is an
example of the jouissance that Cixous advocates as a method of accretion.
Similarly, luxuriating in the jouissance of multiplicity, the “heart”
can be moved from the metonymic to the metaphoric register. As a meta-
phor, it serves to foreground the tale as belonging to the romance genre,
with all its associations of passion and fantasy. It also allows the tale to be
read as wish fulfillment, a dream in which the narrator as melodramatic
heroine becomes the cynosure in a male arena, the active speaking sub-
ject, instead of the fetishized object. She proudly declares: “I foamed—I
raved—I swore” (307), as a way of explaining her frantic attempts to
remain on center stage. This is an enactment of the stereotypical feminine
posture. By obeying the dictates of her heart in committing the passion-
ate crime (exaggerated, no doubt), she dramatizes her execrated position
as woman. Now the female narrator emerges as the martyr through her
confession, also a typical position for the female.
But when examining the text under the light of jouissance, the first
step in reading is to expose such a patriarchal stereotyping. Yet the inter-
weaving of the metaphoric and metonymic registers gives diverse read-
ings. According to the metonymic register (eye), the female narrator is
an active speaking subject who assumes a male gendered identity, but the
metaphoric register (heart) forces her back into the archetypical female
position of martyr. This slip between the metaphoric and metonymic reg-
isters is crucial to feminist writing because it reveals the androgyny cre-
ated by jouissance. Moreover, gendered identity sheds a different light on
the other characters in the tale, too. In the crucial, confessional scene, all
the characters can be read androgynously. The literal keepers of the Law
of the Father, the policemen observe passively while the female narrator is
explosively active. She is the speaking subject, frantically pacing, vigor-
ously thumping the furniture, and energetically talking. She is catapulted
into her final ironic, yet male and active posture by “the beating of his
heart!” (307, italics added). It is the old man’s heart, dramatized like a
damsel in distress, that vocalizes the narrator’s confession. In the ironic
conclusion of the tale, both the policemen and the old man remain static,
while the female narrator adopts the dynamic and aggressive role, deliber-
ately calling attention to the subservient status of all women. What needs
to be emphasized here is the active androgynous narrator who can be
contrasted to the passive males; her actions should not be mistaken for the
actions for a stereotypical “hysterical” female. This erroneous stereotyp-
ing will, no doubt, create a neat niche for the female, but leave the male
position in the discourse vacant. Thus, Cixous’s brand of androgyny and

multiple readings cancel out stereotypical sexual markings of the text.
Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” can indeed be read as the female nar-
rator’s own cry from “The soul when overcharged with awe” (304), a tale
of escape, but escape into deliberate captivity so that she can articulate a
female discourse. She experiments and functions in both the active and
passive registers as a speaking subject and passive object. In this venture,
her discourse becomes a painful tool of signifying and defining herself
within the confines of patriarchy. Through jouissance, interweaving met-
aphors and metonymies, constantly slipping between the tropes, defying
libidinal economy, and creating an excess of signifiers, she inscribes an
“other” discourse. This rewriting becomes possible through the complex
pattern of gendered tropes that are occupied by both male and female
characters in the tale. It is this embracing, this gathering together, not
only of the tropes, but also of the characters occupying these gendered
tropes, that makes this tale a revelation of feminist rewriting as well as
rereading.
No t e s
1. Jacques Lacan, “L’Instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient,” Ecrits I, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). Lacan argues that metonymy is the “derailment
of instinct . . . externally extended towards the desire of something else” (278).
2. Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic
Disturbances,” in Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956) 55–82.
Lacan matches Saussure’s linguistic model with Jakobson’s to formulate the signi-
fier/signified and metaphor/metonymy relationship (274).
3. See Jerry Ann Flieger, “The Purloined Punchline: Joke as Textual Para-
digm,” Contemporary Literary Criticism, ed. Robert Con Davis (New York: Long-
man, 1986) 277–94, who claims that a text through its intersubjectivity acts as a
feminine symptom of inexhaustible desire. Toril Moi, in her introduction to Sexual/
Textual Politics, discusses Lacan’s theory of the “symbolic/metaphoric” and male
vector as always coexisting with the “imaginary/metonymic” and female vector in
any discourse in an attempt to make meaning within the text. See Anthony Wilden,
The Language of the Self (New York: Dell, 1975) 249–70, for a discussion of Lacan’s
symbolic/imaginary registers.
4. Robert Con Davis, “Lacan, Poe, and Narrative Repression,” in Lacan and
Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference In Narrative Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins UP, 1984). Davis argues that, according to Freud, the act of gazing represents
the gazer’s status as subject actively engaged in a pleasurable power game with the
receiver of the gaze. In the object position, the receiver passively submits to the pain-
ful humiliation of the gazer’s oppressive surveillance. By incorporating Lacan into
Freud’s theory, Davis shows that the “Gaze” is composed of three shifting positions
of the subject’s desire for the Other. Beginning with the gazer in a voyeuristic subject
position, scrutinizing an exhibitionist as object, we move to a second, mirror-like
stage, where the subject/object of the gaze are replicas of each other. In the final
54 Gita Rajan
moment, positions are reversed when the (former subject and current) object returns
the gaze. Like the ever-shifting signifiers in language, the gaze is also a never-end-
ing game. Davis’s Lacanian interpretation sees the gaze as a mark of desire for the
Other that is revealed in the text through intersubjectivity and reciprocal looking.
Thus the looker, by looking, loses some of his power through the gaze itself.
5. Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New
York: Modern Library, 1965) 303; cited hereafter in the text.
6. Hélène Cixous, “An Imaginary Utopia,” Sexual/Textual Politics, ed. Toril
Moi (New York: Methuen, 1985) 102–27. Cixous’s theoretical paradigm is based
on Derrida’s deconstructive poetics. This particular three-step reinscription is my
synthesis of Cixous’s position as expressed in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in New
French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: U of
Massachusetts P, 1980) 245–64, and in “Castration or Decapitation?” Signs 7 (1981):
41–55.
7. For a more detailed discussion on the nature of patriarchal thought, the
concept of sexual difference, and écriture feminine see Hélène Cixous and Catherine
Clément, La Jeune Née (Paris: Union General d’Editions, 1975) 147; Julia Kristeva,
Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez,
trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1980)
239–40; both cited hereafter in the text.
8. Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1949; London:
Hogarth P, 1971).
9. Lacan, “L’Instance” 171.
10. Jacques Lacan, “Seminar XX” in Feminine Sexuality, ed. Juliet Mitchell
and Jaqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1982). For Lacan’s discussion of women,
see 48.
HENRY SUSSMAN
A Note on the Public and the

Private in Literature:
The Literature of “Acting Out”
L iterature delights in a blurring of public and private realms often disas-

trous when it occurs on existential, ethical, psychoanalytical, or legal levels.
Indeed, from a perspective of wish-fulfillment, this confusion between the
public and the private accounts in part for the attraction that literature holds
for its readers. Whereas no small measure of our socialization is dedicated
to the inscription and then rigorous observation of a boundary between our
public self-representation and our private inventions (a dynamic in some
sense akin to the relation between “langue” and “parole”), some of the most
memorable characters (and gods) in literature freely overstep this margin—
with tragic or heroic, but never everyday consequences.
I am of course here speaking to a set of fictive works in which “char-
acters” are, in a variety of ways, “represented.” I would nevertheless argue
that within this “body” of literature, however inconsistent and ill-formed
it may be, some of the most seductive works, often playing a formative role
in young readers’ gravitation toward literary discourse, are ones in which
important characters traverse the border between the private and the public,
and in which this transgression is then publically registered and addressed.
Is there any meaningful commonality that sustains the bookshelf con-
taining the volumes that have attracted a disproportionate number of, say,
my past students to literary studies? Is it possible to postulate the grounds
From MLN 104, no. 3 (April 1989): 597–611. © 1989 by The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
55
56 Henry Sussman
for seminal and formative instances of literary transference? I myself pass

from private observation to public debate while avoiding the middle ground
of empirical testing when I tell you that, based on my experience, this subset
of literary “classics” is heavy on Poe, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Camus—and
that the attraction of some of their works at least in part hinges on the transi-
tion between public and private spheres undergone by certain of the central
characters.
To the extent that all of these authors, not merely Poe, take up the
phenomenon of the “tell-tale heart,” the nearly imperceptible trace of some
private murder or other outrage, they tap into roots running deep into the
history of literature. The central human figures of Greek tragedies are not
merely heroes and heroines; they are defendants as well in legal trials, well
in advance of the Josef K. of Kafka’s novel. (The “modernity” of Kafka’s
adaptation in part consists of the extreme idiosyncratic isolation with which
a trial can still take place.) And as suggested above, the divinity of the Greek
gods in no small measure consists of the freedom they exercise to introject
their private “emotions”—disappointments, jealousies, and rages—into their
official “portfolios.”
As “modern” literature gives increasing credence to private language and
personal aberration—and why not, following Benjamin, situate Baudelaire
at the horizon of modernity?—measuring the impact of the idiosyncratic
within the public sphere becomes increasingly inevitable. Although the fol-
lowing reading of two key instances of this watershed—in Poe and Kafka—
is to some degree situated in the thematic domain, it should be noted that
important formal and technical innovations in “modern” and “post-modern”
literature also impact on the transition from the private to the public in an
important way. When we approach the “Hades” or “Nighttown” episode of
James Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, some of the obvious critical issues that
come to mind are the following: the incorporation of a topsy-turvy “Walpur-
gisnacht” episode in an already highly experimental novel, and the collation
of widely disparate thematic strands effected by the chapter. Yet hand in
hand with the chapter’s formal innovations goes the dramatization of some
of Bloom’s most private and eccentric fantasies, in the form of an exaggerated
stage trial. This event furnishes a public forum for Bloom’s most secret and
embarrassing wishes. It may well be argued that the trial itself, as an actual
institution and as it is represented in literature, is a medium for ascertaining,
opposing, and punishing instances of acting out1 performed by individuals.
The “Circe” episode in Ulysses is merely symptomatic of the trials running
rampant throughout modern literature, one of whose major preoccupations
then becomes the unresolvable complications resulting from dual citizenship
in public and private spheres. The remainder of these remarks will be devoted
to two of modern literature’s climactic moments in its survey of the border
A Note on the Public and the Private in Literature 57
between the public and the private, Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Kafka’s
“The Metamorphosis.”
“The Tell-Tale Heart” is all of five or six pages long, yet it pursues the
figure eight of a doubled trajectory of horror; in this way, it opens up a dimen-
sion of infinity. In the senselessness of the murder that it chronicles, this tale
shares much with Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The old man who is
the narrator’s victim “had never wronged me. He had never given me insult.
For his gold I had no desire. 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.”2 The old man with the uncanny eye, a Sphynx-like
eye of blindness and inhuman vision at the same time, causes the narrator
a certain anxiety. Or even better—the story begins in a state of terror that
precedes any substance that can explain it. The text’s very first words run:
“True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am” (289).
Nervousness is already, to paraphrase Hegel, the truth of this text’s self-cer-
tainty. From its outset, this tale offers us the possibility of explaining it away
as an account of a monster, a deviant beyond the table of ordinary behavior.
“But why will you say that I am mad?” (289). But this “out” is merely a ruse,
for the figure-eight of acting out in which the narrator traps himself is not
only at the heart of everyday socio-psychological behavior; it is in the very
site of literary expression itself.
The ostensible occasion for the narrator’s anxiety is an unseeing, unfeel-
ing, uncanny eye. Yet this eye is also the old man’s “I,” or is it also the nar-
rator’s? As a corpse, the old man “was stone dead” (292). In a sense, then,
our old man, who already begins in a state of petrification, mocking the
vitality of life, only meets his fate in submitting to murder. Our anxious nar-
rator decides that he can quell his terror only by eliminating its purported
source, the old man. The murder itself is described at least as much as a death
sentence by terrorization and stalking as by stabbing and dismemberment.
“And this I did for seven long nights—every night just at midnight—but I
found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it
was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye” (290). The murder
does not even succeed in closing the malòcchio, because it is always already
closed. The narrator acts out his dread by killing its purported source. (In
a different sphere, Raskolnikov’s murdering the pawnbroker may be said to
act out certain of his Nietzschean social theories and his sense of intellectual
superiority.) Curiously, in the Poe story, before the narrator consummates
his private affects in the act of murder, he attempts to transfer the terror to
the victim. The victim must not only die: before dying, the aggressive party’s
torment must be projected upon him.
The narrator would attempt to quell the given affect or structure
through a specific action, in this case an act of murder, but this emotional
58 Henry Sussman
cycle pursues only one loop of the figure eight. For the terror of discovery
is every bit the equal of the inability to cope with Angst. The acting out of
unassimilable emotion promises a certain relief, in this case, the elimina-
tion of an uncanny Sphynx or Medusa-like figure; but in the wake of the
action, comfort becomes even more elusive, because a counter-terror rears
its unforgettable head: the fear that the acting out will itself become public.
The narrator’s last thought just before he precipitates himself on his victim
is formulated as follows: “And now a new anxiety seized me—the sound
would be heard by a neighbor!” (292). Only initially does acting out present
itself as a cure or catharsis; once it has been permitted, once it has been “let
out,” so to speak, it becomes the basis of a complementary and every bit as
persistent anxiety.
We are of course too sophisticated theoretically these days to own that
the “substance” of any literary work could be any emotion, such as anxiety,
or a psychological manifestation such as “acting out.” Far be it from me to
fall into such a pit, where I might fall prey to pendulums. What is crucial
about the fact that intensely experienced psychological events could compel
the narrator to action is less the specific emotion (he could be depressive) or
the nature of his action than the dimensions that his predicament confuses.
The narrator is driven for relief to the public, where he finds none. When he
retreats (or rather, is driven back) to the private, the publicity of his solution
pursues him there. Poe’s tale outlines the confounding of the public and the
private that is a very fundamental literary condition. Fictive writing, Poe’s
story included, may be regarded as an expression of the inescapable confusion
between the public and the private, just as the narrator’s murderous act may
be regarded as an expression of his affect, and, correspondingly, the terror of
discovery in which the text ends may be read as an expression of the mur-
derous act. We will not follow Poe’s ironic direction to dismiss the tale as
the depiction of a madman; but the chronicle of acting out, among its other
results, powerfully describes the site from which literature is produced.
Just as the narrator is anxious before the fact, the old man is, perhaps
out of consideration, dead almost before his murder takes place. “All in vain;
because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before
him, and had enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful presence of the
unperceived shadow that caused him to feel—although he neither saw nor
heard—to feel the presence of my head within the room” (291). Murderer and
victim, like Master and Bondsman in Hegel and detective and murderer in
Crime and Punishment, share much in common. The phenomenon of “tell-tale
heart” breaks out not once but twice in the story, before and after the murder.
And both times the narrator assumes that the discernible tachycardia—itself
a symptom, an internal variety of acting out—is situated in the old man. But
there is no reason for us to follow him here. The nervous heart is projective;
it could palpitate in the narrator’s chest every bit as much as in the victim’s.
“I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart. . . .
Meanwhile the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and
quicker, and louder and louder every moment. The old man’s terror must have
been extreme. . . . I have told you that I am nervous: so I am” (291).
At one point in the story, the narrator actually succeeds in leaving
behind his terrors. This is during the brief (a matter of lines) moment between
the compulsive act itself and the arrival of the police. In celebration of this
moment, Poe composes some of the most memorable lines in all his writing:
“I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye—not
even his—could have detected anything wrong. There was nothing to wash
out—no stain of any kind—no blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for
that. A tub had caught all—ha! ha!” (292). This is the one moment in the
text when the narrator can allow himself the delusion that he has succeeded
both in eliminating the source of his disquietude and in obliterating all traces
of his acting out. The contrast between the unmitigated hopelessness of the
character and his inarticulate, self-congratulatory laughter comprises one of
the masterstrokes of modern literature. We laugh as well—at the pathetic
hopes invested in a tub, at a sordid murder that for one instant promises to
be a tale of a tub. The narrator is here in the position of a man who has fallen
before he knows it. But his audience sees! And this knowledge is his greatest
fear. The narrator “speaks,” then, from the position of irony; he, not the old
man, is a victim, the dupe of irony itself.
There is a self-defeating quality to the fear of discovery founded, at
least in part, on the desire for expression. The act of murder may transform
the narrator’s initial, unmotivated anxiety into a specific one—dread that
the acting out will be discerned. As this story reads, however, the police
who have been summoned by a bystander to the scene of the crime are fairly
indifferent and obtuse to the clues indicating the narrator’s guilt. Expres-
sion, publication of the deed, is both what the narrator dreads most and a
new possible source of relief. Indeed, the narrator cannot be quieted until he
himself has publicized his guilt.
The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was

singularly at ease. . . . My head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my
ears: but still they sat and still chatted. . . . Why would they not be
gone? . . . Oh God! what could I do? I foamed—I raved—I swore! I
swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon
the boards, but the noise arose above all and continually increased. It
grew louder—louder—louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly,
and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God!—no,
no! They heard!—they suspected!—they knew!—they were making
60 Henry Sussman
a mockery of my horror!—this I thought, and this I think. But

anything was better than this agony! (293)
The greatest agony of all for Poe—and it is inscribed in “The Pit and the
Pendulum” and “The Premature Burial” as well as this text—is affect with-
out expression. If the officers are blind to the narrator’s misdeed and insen-
sitive to his torture, the narrator will set them straight, will complete the
communication. In the above passage, the policemen are deaf and blind. The
horror of premature burial is less death, an inevitability, than the absence of
acknowledgment of one’s predicament. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the police-
men, until the narrator disabuses them of the luxury of ignorance, share the
obtuseness and lack of sensation characterizing the old man’s eye. The nar-
rator punishes the old man by a sentence of death for his inattentiveness; in
the case of the policemen, he corrects their inattentiveness with a notice that
will inevitably result in his punishment. But in both cases, inattentiveness to
affect, to sensitivity, leads to willed disaster, i.e., to retribution.
By virtue of superior sensitivity, placing the narrator in a category
with artistic geniuses and professors, the narrator resides in the space of the
ironist. The role of the ironist is to suffer, from the incomprehension and
insensitivity of others, but also to gain revenge, to mete out punishment. The
ironist traverses the distance from affect to expression by means of acting
out. So restricted a privilege is acting out, that wherever it begins there is
no end to it, because whoever observes it will immediately claim its privilege
for herself. This is as true of our socio-psychological relationships as it is in
literature. The volatility of acting out explains many situations distinctive for
their endlessness: the “unhappy” family or organizational unit; the “feud”
spanning generations; the ongoing “hotspots” of world politics—Northern
Ireland, the Middle East.
The ironic narrator feels and punishes. These are fine, even pleasurable
activities. The weakness of the system is the nonspecificity of feeling and
punishment with regard to the subject–object distinction. Feelings may be
projected onto others, as when the narrator assumes that the nervous hearts
in the tale belong to the living and dead victim; and punishment, as Hegel
well understood in the physics that he elaborated for “Force and the Under-
standing,” has an uncanny way of inflicting itself back on the “self.” In the
basic terminology of psychoanalysis, Freud was also aware of the infinite
transferability of affect and aggression. It is in this sense that the ironic nar-
rator functions so well both as a sadist and a masochist.
The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” acts out, both in misguided self-
interest and for us (there is a certain messianism in superior ironic knowl-
edge). The acting out falls within the ambivalent economy of expression. It
arises both from a compulsion to express and a dread of apprehension (the
cognitive and criminological senses of this latter word are close). Within the
framework of the tale, the narrator expresses his preexisting anxiety by the
murder and his attempts to mask it.
Yet the tale is itself an expression, of someone or something. Internally,
the tale chronicles a certain acting out, which is an inefficient way of coping
with the affect that precedes the story, an acting out founded on a confusion
of the public and private spheres. As an expression, the tale itself is a mani-
festation or instance of acting out. Within the assessment of its own status
that “The Tell-Tale Heart” provides, “writing out” is but a hair’s breadth away
from “acting out.” To the extent that tales and other artifacts give expression
to emotions that have gone unnoticed and misapprehended—remembering
that for Poe sensibility in a vacuum is the greatest horror—they come close
indeed to actions embodying in themselves the thought or emotion that has
not otherwise succeeded in expressing itself. The similarity in status between
the “acting out” that the tale thematically chronicles and its own writing out
is close indeed.
The narrator murders the old man in part to quell an anxiety that
has become public at least to the extent that he has become aware of it.
He is not satisfied until the act has become publicized, even though it is
uncertain that it needs to be. Texts, by the same token, exist in the sphere
of publicity, of publication. Texts too are residues of something expressed
inadequately elsewhere. An ironic text describing an unnecessary but inev-
itable murder, which is then unnecessarily made public, where it inevitably
precipitates an unnecessary punishment—such a text speaks with intensity
to its own status and exigency. Something compels actions out and writing
out—but this compulsion is far from giving these actions and artifacts any
self-explanatory necessity.
From the perspective of literary history, it is most tempting to link Poe’s
account of the disastrous exigency of expression with the ironically aware
moment in which “The Tell-Tale Heart” arises. On some level, Poe’s tale
does exist in a privileged relationship with the other masterful explorations
of irony—by the Schlegels, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Mel-
ville—of its age. It is important to note at the same time, however, that the
vertiginous play between the public and the private that we find in this text
extends well into the twentieth century—where it plays a significant role
in distinguishing some of the literature that readers have pursued with the
greatest compulsion. Meursault’s shooting the Arab on the beach in Albert
Camus’s The Stranger derives its enormous power in part from the obscurity
of its motive. The act itself is firmly rooted in the tradition of irony, but it is
rendered mysterious and compelling by the absence of context in which its
acting out takes place. The Stranger, with all the contemporary updating of
its emotional and stylistic components, demonstrates the power that acting
62 Henry Sussman
out, as a literary wish, continues to assert. And then, of course, there is the
meditation on the play between the public and private spheres conducted at
a far remove from Poe, Joyce, and Camus—by Franz Kafka.
There is a curious satisfaction surrounding Gregor Samsa, the half-man,
half-dung-beetle hero of “The Metamorphosis,” a satisfaction not unlike the
one we experience when we read, “A tub had caught all, ha! ha!” Gregor exists
at the very limits of literature. He, or perhaps properly it, strains our cred-
ibility to the ultimate degree but inhabits his own space as no other figure
could. The intense pleasure of reading “The Metamorphosis”—which is not
to say that this story sustains no other emotions—consists in the experience
of knowing that literature has opened itself full throttle and has because of
this gripped the reader all the more firmly in the track of discovery. Gregor
is just right, precisely because he is all wrong.
The question as to when his fate is permanently sealed is the sort
of question that sustains critical debate. One could well argue that, in
keeping with the other son-figures in Kafka’s fiction and the retrospec-
tive logic of guilt that Kafka explored so fully, Gregor is ruined from the
outset of the story, from the very dawning of his “consciousness.” There is
much to sustain this position; it is not to be dismissed. I would prefer to
explore another hypothesis, however, one more in keeping with Kafka’s
examination of the interplay between the public and the private: namely,
that Gregor’s goose is not fully cooked until he, having literally blown his
cover, 3 is observed by the middle lodger. Gregor has, in responding to per-
haps the final vestige of his humanity, left his hiding-place and entered the
room where his sister is playing her violin. Up until this moment, Gregor’s
monstrosity has been kept a family secret, known only to the immediate
family and its servant. When Gregor becomes a public nuisance, the family
can no longer tolerate his exceptional status and the exceptional measures,
including concealment and dissimulation, that it requires. Whatever the
strange turn of events initiated by the metamorphosis means to the family
is one thing; when it becomes a matter of public record, the status of the
event, and its meaning, changes—terminating the familial contract.
Kafka is, then, in this text continuing his interrogation of familial leg-
acies, obligations, and prerogatives. The family is the setting for Gregor’s
transformation. It may be that Kafka’s other son (and artist) parables have
light to shed on this event. The metamorphosis takes place as an ineluctable,
involuntary event. Its inevitability may be, however, just a deceptive cover,
inducing us to look away from its more subtle qualities. If the metamorpho-
sis is more than a mere fact, if it is expressive of something, then Gregor’s
bizarre transformation may be another instance of acting out, another place
where the private is allowed to venture into the public; as much so as the
murder committed by the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Gregor’s fate is irrevocably decided when that Smith Brother look-alike,

the lodger, utters the following words: “I beg to announce that because of the
disgusting conditions (widerlichen Verhältnisse) prevailing in this household
and this family . . . I give you notice on the spot (augenblicklich). . . . I shall
consider bringing an action for damages against you, based on claims—
believe me—that will be easily susceptible of proof ” (CS, 132). Threatening
legal action, this statement assumes the form of a judgment. Once ventilated,
the bizarre conditions now defining Gregor’s existence justify convening a
trial. A trial in fact takes place whenever the private strays into the properly
public sphere. All acts of acting out, which facilitate this transition, are adju-
dicable. Being on trial is a nightmarish predicament, but it offers its attrac-
tions as well. Someone is at last paying attention to the defendant, who, if he
is anyone other than Meursault, is the possessor of some unique sensitivity
or genius. Trials may be regarded as collusions between the punitive institu-
tions of society and an individual’s hitherto unheeded cry for attention, for
expression. Acting out, and the literature surveying the transference between
the public and the private that it effects, are fated to the repetition of their
trials, judicial and imaginary.
The judgment that the lodger delivers to the entire Samsa family, not
only Gregor, stands anything but alone in Kafka’s fiction. Such sentences
mark pivotal moments in such texts as The Trial, “The Judgment,” “In the
Penal Colony,” and “The Knock at the Manor Gate.” Again, we must ask
ourselves: if Gregor’s transformation is so involuntary (as Josef K.’s indict-
ment is so given), how could it comprise an instance of acting out; how
could it express in a dysfunctional but for that reason interesting way some
feeling or expression that has found no satisfying form? To answer this,
again to suggest that Gregor’s mission is not complete until he is discovered,
we should direct our attention to some of the above-named fictive works,
in which the bearer (or vessel) of knowledge happens also to occupy the
role of the son.
The figure of the son in Kafka’s fiction is hopelessly ambivalent: he is
the bearer of awesome responsibilities, often voluntarily undertaken, which
at some other level he also despises and resists. The Kafkan son is a pedes-
trian messiah, one not above his rage and triteness, even if these reactions
are elaborately disguised. The brother of “The Knock at the Manor Gate”
is sentenced to the ominous fate figured by “half a pallet, half an operating
table” (CS, 419), even though it is clear that he did nothing to provoke the
unusual events (it is not certain his sister did either). The brother is messianic
by virtue of his overtly stated innocence; any guilt in the story, and it is not
clear that there is any, accrues to him by transference.
The son in Kafka’s fiction bears some affinity to the artist. Artists
and sons share the sensitivity demonstrated by the ironic narrator in “The
64 Henry Sussman
Tell-Tale Heart.” In the first half of “The judgment,” narrated from the
son’s point of view (rather than the father’s), the son worries about his love-
starved and financially destitute friend in Russia; in “The Metamorphosis,”
the son provides for Grete’s music lessons (perhaps this is why even in the
end, when it really is too late, Gregor insists on hearing the concert. After
all, he’s paid for it). The son is capable of hiding a considerable amount of
condescension and resentment within this messianic moral superiority, and
in keeping with Kafka’s imaginative esthetic, these negative emotions can
assume some bizarre forms (perhaps this is why the son of “A Crossbreed
[A Sport]” feels such an affinity to the kitten/lamb that is a family legacy).
In “The Judgment,” Georg Bendemann writes of his engagement to the
friend in Russia: “ just let me say that I am very happy and as between you
and me the only difference in our relationship is that instead of a quite
ordinary kind of friend you will now have in me a happy friend. Besides
that, you will acquire in my financée, who sends her warm greetings and
will soon write you herself, a genuine friend of the opposite sex, which is
not without importance to a bachelor” (CS, 80). As if the friend, whatever
his circumstances, is incapable of any sexual relationship on his own. Later
in the story, Georg represents his friend’s circumstances to himself: “At the
door of an empty, plundered warehouse he saw him. Among the wreckage
of his showcases, the slashed remnants of his wares, the falling gas brack-
ets, he was just standing up” (CS, 85). The friend’s situation is worse than a
case of gas, but it is entirely Georg’s projection.
The story goes on, of course, to systematically reverse the ascendancy
of this messianic position (Kafka’s extreme scepticism regarding this per-
spective marks the trajectory at which his fictive world is closest to that of
Joseph Conrad. Although the latter’s fiction draws on much of its power
from mythological narrative, in the Barthesian sense, much of its moral
outrage is directed at characters who have been taken in and corrupted by
their private messianic mythologies, such as Lord Jim, “he was one of us,”
and Nostromo, “one of us”).4 From the father’s perspective in Kafka’s story,
the divide-and-conquer strategy by which the son has attempted to separate
and manipulate the father and the friend in Russia has failed. Father and
friend have maintained their contact (enabling the friend to become the son’s
uncanny double); and the teleological scenario in which the son supplants the
father is anything but the case in this story.
In “The Metamorphosis” Gregor’s efforts on behalf of the Samsa fam-
ily have been nothing short of heroic, lulling his parents and sister into a
kind of complacency at the beginning of the story. The first good news
that Gregor hears after his catastrophe is that his father, unbeknownst
to him, has some savings left over from his old business. At the time of
the collapse,
Gregor’s sole desire was to do his utmost to help the family to

forget as soon as possible the catastrophe that had overwhelmed
his business and thrown them all into a state of complete despair.
And so he had set to work with unusual ardor and almost overnight
had become a commercial traveler instead of a little clerk, with of
course much greater chances of earning money, and his success
was immediately transformed (verwandelten) into good round coin
which he could lay on the table for his amazed and happy family.
These had been fine times, and they had never recurred, at least
not with the same sense of glory, although later on Gregor had
earned so much money that he was able to meet the expenses of
the whole household and did so. They simply had got used to it,
both the family and Gregor; the money was gratefully accepted
and gladly given, but there was no special uprush of warm feeling.
With his sister alone had he remained intimate, and it was a secret
plan of his that she, who loved music, unlike himself, and could
play movingly on the violin, should be sent next year to study at the
Conservatorium, despite the great expense that would entail, which
must be made up in some other way. (CS, 110–11)
“Had to get used to it,” “no special uprush of warm feeling”: these
are the phrases we must bear in mind as we interpret the bizarre, seem-
ingly ineluctable insect-transformation as an instance of acting out, a
publicizing and notification of the private and inadequately expressed.
And indeed, once Gregor becomes an insect, the role of voluntary, but
inadequately appreciated family messiah is open to him no more. The
story takes care, in its unique realism, to demonstrate the inadequacy of
Gregor’s new body and voice to his former roles and functions.
In a sense, the unappreciated Gregor has willed his complete failure,
in terms of the earlier criteria for his success. The transfigured Gregor
occupies a position of total irresponsibility—the marginal and utterly use-
less space of writing. In a sense, Gregor must go to the length of becom-
ing a dung-beetle in order to openly acknowledge his writing-habit. It
is as an allegory of unstated irresponsibility that “The Metamorphosis”
becomes an allegory of writing. Gregor still retains certain sentimental
attachments and “human” inclinations: warm feelings toward his sister, a
fondness at least for her music. As alien as Gregor’s transformation may
be, the story does provide a rationale for it, in terms of acting out, in
terms of a distorted and displaced expression of what has remained pri-
vate. As in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the public apprehension of this message
is tantamount to a speedy and decisive judgment. Gregor’s significance is
revised in the aftermath of this trial. The revisionist Gregor is as much
66 Henry Sussman
the occasion for the family’s rejuvenation as its depression, just as the
guilt-provoking Hunger Artist prepares the way for the panther, whose
gratification is so easy and immediate.
Merely by waking up, then, on a fateful morning, Gregor Samsa
“acts out,” transfigures the values of his existence by externalizing what
has been previously relegated to privacy, where it belonged. As a rhetori-
cal as well as biological figure, Gregor hovers in the between-space link-
ing humanity to something radically Other. Gregor is the enigmatic and
ambiguous expression of something else, namely Gregor.
For Kafka as well as Poe, then, as becomes painfully evident in the
“Letter to His Father,” acting out and writing out are intimate indeed.
What the figure of the sentimental, humanized dung-beetle is to Gregor,
the text of “The Metamorphosis” is to Kafka—a space where the pub-
lic and private, rigorously quarantined from each other in everyday life,
meet; where ambivalence has found a tangible manifestation.
Literature holds out the wish that, at least within its qualified con-
fines, the private can enter the public without devastating consequences.
This bridging may well constitute one of literature’s most compelling
attractions. A carefully chosen and well-formulated literary image can
perform this transference at the same time that it constitutes an inex-
haustible object for interpretation. Literature gives voice to and assembles
images for a privacy that we must divulge only if we want to.
To a large extent, irony is the difference in knowledge that makes
acting out possible. Irony is the basis of the claim, whether by the son
or the narrator, of superior knowledge or enhanced sensitivity. Ordinar-
ily, we relegate the significance of irony to a merely literary or rhetorical
level. Yet if literature is indeed a privileged site for the confounding of
the public and the private that takes place in acting out, then irony is not
merely a rhetorical figure: irony becomes a structure at the basis of our
psychological life. Irony first defines the watershed between knowledge
and expression, and then militates for its bridging over, both in the form
of acting out and in literary artifacts. The vision of irony compels us, both
as individuals and readers, toward the brink where our privacy opens into
the public domain. The results are to be found both in the living and in
the reading.
No t e s
1. Although the term “acting out” currently enjoys widespread usage as a
concept and diagnostic tool in psychiatry, its roots run deep in the classical lit-
erature of psychoanalysis. In its original denotation, “acting out” comprises some
indirection or short-circuiting that takes place in the process of psychoanalytical
transference, affect, for instance, directed at someone other than the analyst. (The
complete original term is “acting out of transference.”) After Freud, “acting out”
takes on a more general meaning. It goes beyond the psychoanalytical relationship
and characterizes instances of indirect and displaced behavior and expression in
general. Acting out can therefore assume a myriad of forms: “misplaced aggression,”
in which fear and anger are not vented at the individual(s) who give rise to them but
at some uninvolved, “safer” party; malicious gossip, in which rage takes the form of
public character assassination rather than direct, private expression of differences;
and various manifestations of “bizarre behavior,” e.g. mumbling, talking to oneself
“out loud,” in which private thoughts are transmitted to the public sphere, but in a
deliberately scrambled and problematical form. Freud’s meditations on this concept
begin in such a 1914 essay as “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,”
in which acting out receives its initial definition as a dramatization by the patient
of material that has eluded his memory (“the patient does not remember anything of
what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out”). At this stage in his work, Freud
is already aware of the danger “that the patient’s actions outside the transference may
do him temporary harm in his ordinary life,” and for this reason attempts to secure
the patient’s “promise not to take any important decisions affecting his life during
the time of his treatment . . . but to postpone all such plans until after his recovery.”
My colleague David Willbern directed me to this material, which is to be found in
Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–74) XII: 150–55. With regard to later
elaborations of this notion, friends involved in clinical therapeutic work point me
toward the ongoing serial publication, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, initiated,
among others, by Anna Freud, as an important locus where the implications of act-
ing out have been explored.
2. The edition I have used for Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is Poe’s Tales of
Mystery and Imagination, Everyman’s Library Edition, intro. Padraic Colum (New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 289–93.
3. English citations of Kafka in the present essay refer to Franz Kafka, The
Complete Stories, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1976), henceforth abbre-
viated “CS.” German introjections derive from Franz Kafka, Sämtliche Erzählungen,
ed. Paul Raabe (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1972). Gregor gives away his own “cover”
because in the second section of “The Metamorphosis” a cover is precisely the way
in which he attempts to conceal himself. “One day he carried a sheet on his way
back to the sofa (das Leintuch auf das Kanapee)—it cost him four hours’ labor—and
arranged it there in such a way as to hide him completely (daß er nun gänzlich verdecht
war),” [CS, 114].
4. One of Conrad’s most telling captions for his character Lord Jim, uttered by
Marlowe, is “I only know that he is one of us,” Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, intro. Mor-
ton Dauwen Zabel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 161. Through this expres-
sion, Marlowe ironically refers to the duplicity of Jim’s status and his claim: he is an
absolutely mundane individual who would presume to a literary and extralegal plane.
This paradox, as an instance of the status of fiction, must have been important to
Conrad if he went on to name his subsequent epic, and its title-character, Nostromo,
with its play on the first-person plural personal pronoun in Spanish, nosotros. Conrad
is clearly fascinated and revolted by the juncture at which people and events assume
(or claim) mythological (or imagistic) proportions.
PA I G E M AT T H E Y B Y N U M
“Observe how healthily—how calmly I can

tell you the whole story”: Moral Insanity
and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”
D avid R. Saliba has recently argued that Edgar Allan Poe’s “structural
omission of an objective viewpoint for the reader [in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’]
forces the reader to experience the tale with no point of reference outside
the framework of the story”. “The reader”, says Saliba, “is led through the
story by the narrator with no sense of reality other than what the narrator
has to say”. This narrative technique forces the reader to identify with the
narrator and to take the narrator’s values as his own (pp. 142–43n). What
Saliba fails to realize is that no one can read a text without an external sense
of reality; all audiences bring to a work of literature some frame of refer-
ence that exists outside the text. And for Poe’s audience in the 1840s, that
frame of reference would have included a knowledge of a controversial new
disease called ‘moral insanity’ and of the legal and philosophical dilemmas
that surrounded its discovery. Poe’s narrator in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is a
morally insane man, and Poe would have expected his readers to locate the
symptoms of that condition in the language of his narration. Thus if we
are to recover the meaning of the tale for Poe’s audience, an audience that
applauded ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ at the same time that it shunned tales like
‘Ligeia’, ‘William Wilson’, and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’—indeed,
if we are to assess the tale’s significance for today’s audience—we need to
establish the medical history from which Poe drew.
From Literature and Science as Modes of Expression, edited by Frederick Amrine, pp. 141–152.
© 1989 by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
69
70 Paige Matthey Bynum
We begin, then, with the ‘father of American psychiatry’, Benjamin

Rush. In 1787, Rush was placed in charge of the insane at the Pennsyl-
vania Hospital, and his work in this institution culminated in the first
book on psychiatry by a native American, Medical Inquiries and Observa-
tions upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812). In his introduction to two of
the essays Rush included in Diseases of the Mind,1 E. T. Carlson explains
how Rush developed a new theory of insanity based on associationism
and faculty psychology. Following the Scottish school of mental philoso-
phy, Rush posited nine basic capacities or “faculties” in the human mind,
grouping these nine faculties into three categories: the “passions” included
the passions per se, the will, and faith or “the believing faculty”; the “intel-
lectual faculties” encompassed the reason or understanding, imagination,
and memory; and the “moral faculties” included the moral faculty itself,
conscience, and a sense of deity (Carlson, p. ix).2 Insanity had long been
recognized as a disease affecting what Rush called the intellectual facul-
ties. Where Rush broke with traditional psychiatric theory was in declar-
ing that insanity did not necessarily involve a disorder of the intellect, that
the moral faculties alone were capable of succumbing to disease (Carlson,
p. x). Like Philippe Pinel in France, he realized that a form of insanity
might occur which perverted the sense of moral responsibility necessary
to deter crime. Thus in a normal individual, an innate moral sense could
stave off the passions while the intellect calmly concluded the proper con-
duct. But if this moral sense, this power to distinguish between good
and evil, were momentarily suspended, the opportunity for calm inquiry
would be denied, and the individual’s will would become committed to
a criminal act before his reason could repudiate it (Rush, 1972, p. 1). He
would then become the victim of an “irresistible impulse” forced upon the
will “through the instrumentality of the passions” (Rush, 1830, pp. 262;
355–57). In modern terminology, he would be emotionally disturbed.
Startling as it was, Rush’s theory of “moral derangement” received
little attention in America before the 1830s. Then, in 1835, James Cowles
Prichard published his classic discussion of the problem in Treatise on
Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind. This work popularized the
study of what Prichard termed “moral insanity”, making it, in the words
of one historian, the “focus of psychological studies and polemical argu-
ments until the end of the century” (Carlson, p. xi). Following the leads
of Pinel and Rush, Prichard restated and developed the body of theory
which would eventually lead to the classification of psychopathic person-
alities. He posited a disease in which
the intellectual faculties appear to have sustained little or no injury,

while the disorder is manifested principally or alone, in the state
Moral Insanity and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” 71
of the feelings, temper, or habits. In cases of this description the

moral and active principles of the mind are strangely perverted and
depraved; the power of self-government is lost or greatly impaired;
and the individual is found to be incapable, not of talking or
reasoning upon any subject proposed to him, for this he will often
do with great shrewdness and volubility, but of conducting himself
with decency and propriety. . . . His wishes and inclinations, his
attachments, his likings and dislikings have all undergone a morbid
change, and this change appears to be the originating cause, or to
lie at the foundations of any disturbance which the understanding
itself may seem to have sustained, and even in some instances to
form throughout the sole manifestation of the disease (pp. 4–5).
A disturbance of the emotions could be both the cause and the “sole
manifestation” of mental illness. The morally insane man might be rational,
might realize that those around him would condemn his behavior, but he
himself would not.
In the decade following the appearance of Prichard’s study, the concept
of moral insanity became the topic of political, social, and theological debate
both at home and abroad. As Rush himself foresaw, any new theories which
emphasized the power of man’s emotions to determine his actions occasioned
intense hostility when they conflicted with other, presumably more agreeable,
ideas about human nature. Such theories were opposed on the grounds that
they degraded the quality of man’s spiritual life, and for the more pragmatic
reason that they reduced the incentives for good behavior. But nowhere were
the new theories on moral insanity argued more strenuously that in the
courts. Prior to the work of men like Rush and Prichard, if a person pleaded
insanity in a court of law, he was presumed to be either an idiot or a raving
maniac. A review of press releases concerning these trials, and of verbatim
trial reports, shows that judges, counsel, witnesses, and observers tended to
use three major criteria to establish insanity: the accused had to be unable
to recognize right from wrong; he had to be illogical and virtually witless at
all times; and he had to reveal a violent disposition before committing his
offense (‘Homicidal Insanity’, p. 279; Wharton, I, 162–72). John Haslam’s
discussion of the jurisprudence of insanity in Observations on Madness and
Melancholy (1810) reveals that madness was considered to be, in Haslam’s
words, as opposed to “reason and good sense as light is to darkness”; in order
to exempt a man from criminal responsibility, the defense had to establish
that he was “totally deprived of his understanding” and no more knew what
he was doing “than an infant, than a brute, or a wild beast” (Haslam, 1975,
p. 31; see also Coventry, p. 136). A man who, like Poe’s narrator in ‘The
Black Cat’, became unaccountably brutal, set fire to his home, and violently
murdered his wife could not be judged insane if he appeared ‘normal’ to

witnesses at the time of the trial.3 And anyone who fled from the scene
of a murder, or tried to hide the evidence, was legally sane because he was
presumed to know right from wrong.
But the concept of moral insanity changed all this, and the legal
dilemma posed by this new definition of madness was obvious. If God had
so constituted men that their passions or impulses were not always govern-
able by an intact reason, how could society punish them for indulging in
these passions? As pleas of moral insanity became increasingly common, this
question stymied a criminal court system established as an instrument of ret-
ribution rather than as an agency for determining mental health.4 A reaction
was inevitable and almost immediate. Judges found themselves asserting that
moral insanity was, in Baron Rolfe’s words, “an extreme moral depravity not
only perfectly consistent with legal responsibility, but such as legal respon-
sibility is expressly invented to restrain” (‘Baron Rolfe’s Charge to the Jury’,
p. 214). Some of America’s leading pre–Civil War psychiatrists—men like
Isaac Ray, Samuel B. Woodward, and Amariah Brigham—wrote numerous
treatises and periodical articles delineating the characteristics and support-
ing the pleas of criminals claiming moral insanity, but they faced serious
opposition within their own profession almost from the outset, and by the
late 1840s even some distinguished asylum superintendents began denying
the existence of a ‘moral’ insanity.
The views of these skeptical physicians were generally more in keeping
with public sentiment, and those medical men who supported an accused
murderer’s claim of insanity came under increasingly sharp attacks in the
periodical press. The average man tended to suspect deception in defense
pleas of insanity, and newspapers often fanned these feelings. Thus by the
time Poe wrote ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, such trials were major events. When
William Freeman was tried for the stabbing murders of the prominent Van
Nest family in New York, the counsel included John Van Buren for the
prosecution and ex-governor William H. Seward for the defense. Papers
across the country kept track as seventy-two witnesses were called to tes-
tify as to his sanity, including a who’s-who list of medical authorities, and
Freeman himself, housed in a cage outside the courthouse, was the subject
of “uncounted spectators” until he died of consumption in his cell almost
eighteen months after his offense (The Trial of William Freeman, pp. 68–71,
79–80; Fosgate, pp. 409–14).5
Freeman and those like him were, to use the modern slang, “hot copy”.
The journals of the day devoted thousands of pages to analysis of them. Phil-
osophical and literary societies debated the ethical and moral implications of
decisions surrounding their cases. And writers like Poe—who was himself a
trial reporter in the 1843 murder-by-reason-of-moral-insanity trial of James
Wood (‘The Trial of James Wood’, pp. 105–106)6 —used them as models for
some of their most disturbing creations.
One of these creations came to life in ‘The Tell–Tale Heart’. Defendants
in moral insanity trials were rarely allowed to speak in their own behalf, but
Poe would let his character speak, and as he spoke, he would inadvertently
let slip the very evidence which would establish him as morally insane.
The first thing we should notice about Poe’s narrator is that his mono-
logue is actually a long argument trying to establish not his innocence—he
has already confessed to killing the old man—but rather his sanity. He builds
this argument on the premise that insanity is irreconcilable with systematic
action, and as evidence of his capacity for the latter, he explains how he has
executed an atrocious crime with faultless precision. “This is the point”, he
tells us: “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have
seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded—with what cau-
tion—with what foresight—with what dissimulation I went to work!” (Poe,
1978, p. 792). A madman, he implies, would be out of control, would be
profoundly illogical and not even recognize the implications of his actions.
His art in planning and coolness in executing his crime prove that he has the
lucidity, control, and subtle reason which only a sane man could possess.
Poe’s narrator is, of course, relying upon the old criteria used to establish
insanity. But it would have been difficult for an audience reading his words in
1843 not to call to mind the medical publications and trial reports filling the
popular press with a new theory of insanity. If they knew enough about this
new theory, they might even have recognized Poe’s narrator as a fair repre-
sentation of Prichard’s morally insane man. Like the patients in Prichard’s
study, he is capable of reasoning “with great shrewdness and volubility”, but
“his attachments . . . have undergone a morbid change” (Prichard, pp. 4–5).
This is not to say that Poe’s narrator is always rational. He may be able
to carry out his crime with a cool precision, but as he himself explains,
his determination to murder his old friend stems from an irrational fear
of his eye:
Object, there was none. I loved the old man. He had never given
me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes it
was this! 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 forever.
(1978, p. 792)
Poe skillfully refrains from divulging exactly what the narrator fears, and
his readers have consistently picked up the gauntlet and put forth their own
theories. Robert Shulman believes that the filmed-over eye suggests that the
old man is cut off from “insight into the ideal and the beautiful” and that
the narrator’s fear thus represents man’s “psychological dread that existence
is meaningless”, or more specifically, is a reflection of Poe’s feelings toward
the stepfather who “called into question the meaning of [his] life” (pp.
259–60). Arthur Robinson argues that the feared “Evil Eye” is actually the
“Evil I”, that the narrator “images himself as another and recoils from the
vision” (pp. 101–2). And in his introduction to ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, T. O.
Mabbott concludes that the tale is founded on the “popular superstition” of
the Evil Eye and points out that Poe may even be suggesting that it really is
the old man’s eye which drives the otherwise sane narrator mad (Poe, 1978,
p. 789). However we feel about these interpretations, we should perhaps
realize that much of Poe’s audience, and certainly Poe himself, would have
been familiar with Rush’s theory (1830, p. 173) that the insane were “for the
most part easily terrified, or composed, by the eye of a man who possesses
his reason”. They would have surmised that Poe’s narrator is terrified by, in
Rush’s words, “the mild and steady eye” of a sane man.7
But it is not the eye alone which brings about the final decision to
take the old man’s life. Rather, it is a peculiar sound, and to understand the
medical significance of this sound, we must go back to the beginning of
the tale. The narrator opens his defense by declaring that although he is
“very, very dreadfully nervous”, he is not mad (1978, p. 792). Poe’s readers
probably would have recognized his nervousness as one of the common
predisposing causes of moral insanity. Certainly most physicians writing
at the time of Poe’s tale would have agreed with Samuel B. Woodward (p.
288) that moral insanity, unlike mere depravity, was always preceded or
accompanied by “some diseased function of the organs, more or less inti-
mately connected with the nerves”. Rush had maintained that “all those
states of the body . . . which are accompanied with preternatural irritability
. . . dispose to vice” (1972, p. 20). But even if the audience was uncertain
about the significance of the narrator’s dreadful nervousness, they certainly
would not have been uncertain about the significance of his next statement.
This nervousness, or “disease”, had “sharpened [his] senses”, he tells us,
“not destroyed—not dulled them”, and “above all was [his] sense of hearing
acute” (1978, p. 792).
It would be difficult to think of a worse argument for sanity in 1843
than what Poe’s narrator calls his “over acuteness of the senses” (1978, p.
795). Medical opinion at home and abroad had long held that “there is
scarcely any symptom more frequently attendant upon maniacal . . . dis-
orders than a defect, excess, or some kind of derangement in the faculty
of hearing” (Reid, p. 190), and that it is frequently “noises in the ear, such
as sounds made during the night in the chimney”, and in particular, “the
noises of clocks and of bells” (Sigmond, p. 589; ‘On Impulsive Insanity’,

p. 620) which haunt the minds of these men.8 We should not be surprised
then to learn that, as he stands over his intended victim, Poe’s narrator
hears “a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped
in cotton” (1978, p. 795). His assertion that “he knew that sound well,
too” reminds us that he has also been hearing another sound—that of the
death-watches in the wall. “Night after night” he had listened to their tick-
ing, telling himself that “it is nothing but the wind in the chimney”, until
the night when, “excited to uncontrollable terror” by the noise, he stalks his
victim (1978, p. 796).
After the murder, the ticking sound returns, and the fear, outrage and
paranoia it inspires increase until the seemingly rational murderer must con-
fess his crime to the unsuspecting police. Even this confession would have
been considered strong evidence of moral insanity. In a typical case from
1832, a man on trial for the murder of his son was found insane because he
had “slaughtered his unoffending son to whom he should have been attached”,
and then confessed. One reporter explains:
The confession of the crime, I conceive, may be considered as an

evidence of insanity of considerable weight. Not that every man
who confesses a murder is to be considered insane, but, by this,
taken along with other circumstances, as when the individual . . .
attempts to give reasons for the propriety of his conduct, we have a
strong indication . . . of the deranged condition of the intellect. . . .
In short, it is so universal in such cases, that some very distinguished
medical jurists consider this confession alone to be a significant test
of insanity (Watson, 1832, p. 47).9
Observations such as this can be found throughout the trial reports of the
1830s and 40s, and while they may sound fairly obvious to today’s readers,
they contained new and fascinating information for Poe’s. And this, of
course, is the point. New medical theories were forcing upon Poe’s audi-
ence questions of ethical moment and challenging their old ideas about
the nature of man. It may even be that this audience, like most of the
students I teach today, found the real terror in the story lay in identifying
themselves not with the narrator, as Saliba suggests, but with the victim. It
certainly would have been natural for Poe’s 1843 readers to see themselves
as the victims of the morally insane men discussed in the popular press,
just as twentieth-century readers tend to associate themselves more with
suffering families and felled presidents than with madmen who attack
McDonald’s and presidential assassins. In any case, Poe’s narrator is main-
taining a causal sequence—I can reason; therefore I am not insane—which
Poe’s audience had just discovered was false, so that it is not only the
experiences the narrator reports that are unusual and problematic, but the
report itself. “Observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole
story”, he begins (1978, p. 792). But “calmly” could no longer be equated
with “healthily”. The narrator’s explanation fails to coincide with his audi-
ence’s knowledge, and the implication is that Poe intends to display this
disagreement in order that the audience might experience and evaluate it.
Far from being trapped inside the story, the audience would stand outside
the narrative and use its knowledge of the current medical controversy to
replace the speaker’s version of events with a better one, or even to ques-
tion the moral implications of such an argument.
The narrator tells them that he has suffocated an old man because
of his eye. But to make such an argument is finally to flaunt your lack of
motive, and indeed he begins his explanation by admitting that “object
there was none” (1978, p. 792). Those readers who insist upon positing an
external motive on the narrator’s part, or an unconscious motive on Poe’s,
deny the story some of its power. Like the murder of the Van Nest family,
this murder is all the more terrifying because it is gratuitous. The narrator’s
obsessions have no logical object in the manifest text, and the tension pro-
duced by his explaining at length something for which there is no satis-
factory explanation took Poe’s story to the heart of the vexing question of
moral responsibility as it dramatized the increasingly problematic nature
of the human personality.
For Poe’s 1843 audience, the new medical science had done more than
just drag Diana from her car; it had questioned the integrity of even the
‘rational’ mind. But what about today’s audience? Clearly the medical sources
Poe drew from are now outdated, and we no longer recognize Poe’s medical
allusions. But the deep-seated and not always clearly verbalized anxiety gen-
erated by the knowledge that men like Prichard and Rush imparted is still
with us. What Poe’s 1843 audience had learned—what his present audience
is still struggling with—was that a murderous rage could be present in any
man, could begin to manifest itself without motivation, and once manifest,
could exert complete control. The will to do wrong was internally derived;
it could no longer be referred to poisonous miasmatas, solipsism, alcohol, or
intellectual indulgence. Even reason could provide no check on these mur-
derous rages, since the most careful plans and meticulous arguments could be
made to support the most vicious actions. This was, and is, the real terror of
Poe’s tale: that there is in man the potential for an inexplicable moral short-
circuit that makes it impossible to find protection from the dangers that lay
within our neighbors—and ourselves. It is to Poe’s credit as an artist that he
has given this terror an imaginative representation which has remained valid
long after Prichard’s theories have disappeared.
No t e s
1. Rush originally published these essays in 1786. They were reprinted in
Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind in 1812, where they
went through five editions and numerous translations. In 1972, Brunner/Mazel
reprinted them again as a separate volume, introduced by E. T. Carlson, entitled
Two Essays on the Mind.
2. When combined with the notion that each faculty was connected to a par-
ticular area of the brain, Rush’s theory gained widespread acceptance as phrenology.
Poe was at one time an adherent to some of the ideas espoused by phrenology, but by
the 1840s, his views were closer to the views of established medicine.
3. A case fitting this description actually exists. See ‘John Ball’s Case’ (pp.
85–6). See also ‘Ancient Case of Homicidal Insanity’ (pp. 283–4), which gives the
case of a man convicted for murdering his wife despite the fact that he felt she was
one of the witches and wizards haunting him.
4. Thanks to the work of Pinel and the moral managers, public opinion regard-
ing insanity was becoming more enlightened, and as public awareness increased,
defense pleas of insanity became more common. There were only a few such cases
before 1825, but by the late 1840s there were well over fifty.
5. For a good example of how newspapers reported on these trials, see the
reports of the Freeman trial in the [New York] Evening Post, 19 March 1846, p. 1,
col. 9, and the New York Tribune, 20 March 1846, p. 3, col. 1.
6. It is clear, however, that Poe knew something about moral insanity as early
as 1837. In the first chapter of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837), Pym com-
pares Augustus’s intoxication to that state of madness which “frequently enables the
victim to imitate the outward demeanor of one in perfect possession of his senses”
(Poe, 1975, p. 50).
7. We should also remember that the fear-of-eyes theme runs throughout Poe’s
work of the 1830s and ’40s and is not always associated with father-figures. Metz-
engerstein “turn[s] pale and [shrinks] away from the rapid and searching expression
of his [horse’s] earnest and human-looking eye” (Poe, 1978, p. 28). The narrator of
‘Ligeia’ is at first attracted to and then terrified of the black orbs of his first love.
And of course, the narrator of ‘The Black Cat’ impulsively cuts out the searching
eye of his pet.
8. Both Sigmond and the author of ‘On Impulsive Insanity’ are quoting from
an essay by “Dr. Baillarger” which won an award from the French Academy of
Medicine for the best dissertation on psychological medicine in 1844 (Sigmond, p.
585). See also Rush’s discussion of “uncommonly acute” hearing in Diseases of the
Mind (1830, p. 143). John E. Reilly (pp. 5–6) has also noticed that the increased
acuteness of the senses was thought to be a sign of insanity in Poe’s time, but he
fails to note that the ticking and, later, ringing sounds heard by Poe’s narrator were
singled out by Poe’s contemporaries as common hallucinations among the insane.
He believes the narrator actually hears the noise made by death-watches in the wall,
but resorts back to hallucination when he must explain why the ticking increases in
tempo just before the murder.
9. Gunnar Bjurman points out (pp. 220ff) that one source for Poe’s plot might
have been Daniel Webster’s 1830 pamphlet on the trial of John Francis Knapp. Webster
describes a self-possessed murderer who, like Poe’s narrator, “feels [his crime] beating
at his heart, rising into his throat, and demanding disclosure” (XI, 52–54). There is
evidence that Poe knew about Webster’s pamphlet, but it should be remembered that
by 1843, Poe and his audience would have read many such pamphlets and reports.
Between 1825 and 1838, the Philadelphia publishing house of Carey and Lea published
almost twice as many medical books as those in any other category except fiction, and
mental health was a staple concern in these works (Kaser, pp. 72, 119–23).
R ef er e nce s
‘Ancient Case of Homicidal Insanity’, Connecticut Courant, 15 November 1785, reprinted in
American Journal of Insanity 3 (1847) pp. 283–4.
‘Baron Rolfe’s Charge to the Jury, in the case of the Boy Allnutt, who was tried at the Central
Criminal Court, for the Murder of his Grandfather, on the 15th Dec, 1847’, Journal of
Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology 1 (1848) pp. 193–216.
Bjurman, G.: Edgar Allan Poe: En Litteraturhistorisk Studie, Gleerup, Lund, 1916.
Carlson, E.: Introduction, B. Rush, Two Essays on the Mind, Brunner/Mazel, New York,
1972, pp. v–xii.
Coventry, C: ‘Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity’, American Journal of Insanity 1 (1844) pp.
134–44.
Fosgate, B.: ‘Case of William Freeman, the Murderer of the Van Nest Family’, American
Journal of the Medical Sciences 28 (1847) pp. 409–14.
Haslam, J.: ‘The Nature of Madness’, in Madness and Morals: Ideas on Insanity in the Nine-
teenth Century (ed. by V. Skultans), Routledge and Kegan Paul, Boston, 1975, p. 31.
(Excerpted from J. Haslam, Observations on Madness and Melancholy, Callow, London,
1810.)
‘Homicidal Insanity, Case of Hadfield’, American Journal of Insanity 3 (1847) pp. 277–82.
‘John Ball’s Case’, New York City-Hall Recorder 2 (1817) pp. 85–6.
Kaser, D.: Messrs. Carey & Lea of Philadelphia: A Study in the History of the Booktrade, Univ. of
Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1957.
‘On Impulsive Insanity’, Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology 1 (1848) pp.
609–22.
Poe, E.: ‘Metzengerstein’, in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (ed. by T. O. Mabbott),
Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1978, Vol. 2, pp. 15–31.
Poe, E.: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (ed. by H. Beaver), Penguin, Baltimore, 1975.
Poe, E.: ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (ed. by T. O. Mab-
bott), Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1978, Vol. 3, pp. 789–99.
Prichard, J.: A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind, Sherwood, Gilbert,
and Piper, London, 1835.
Reid, J.: Essays on Hypochondriasis and Other Nervous Affections, Longman, Hurst, Rees,
Orme, and Brown, London, 1823.
Reilly, J.: ‘The Lesser Death-Watch and “The Tell-Tale Heart”’, American Transcendental
Quarterly 2 (1969) pp. 3–9.
Robinson, A.: ‘Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”’, in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe’s Tales
(ed. by W. Howarth), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1971, pp. 94–102.
Rush, B.: ‘An Enquiry into The Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty’, in Two
Essays on the Mind, Brunner/Mazel, New York, 1972, pp. 1–40.
Rush, B.: Medical Inquiries and Observations upon Diseases of the Mind, 4th edn., John Grigg,
Philadelphia, 1830.
Saliba, D.: A Psychology of Fear: The Nightmare Formula of Edgar Allan Poe, Univ. Press of
America, Lanham, 1980.
Shulman, R.: ‘Poe and the Powers of the Mind’, ELH 37 (1970) pp. 245–62.
Sigmond, G.: ‘On Hallucinations’, Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology 1
(1848) pp. 585–608.
‘The Trial of James Wood’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 52 (1843) pp.
105–6.
The Trial of William Freeman, for the Murder of John G. Van Nest, including the Evidence and the
Arguments of Counsel, with the Decision of the Supreme Court Granting a New Trial, and
an Account of the Death of the Prisoner, and of the Post-Mortem Examination of His Body
by Amariah Brigham, M.D., and Others (reported by B. Hall), Derby, Miller & Co.,
Auburn, 1848.
Watson, A.: ‘Three Medico-legal Cases of Homicide, in which Insanity was pleaded in
Exculpation’, Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 38 (1832) pp. 45–58.
Webster, D.: Writings and Speeches, National Edition, 18 vols., Little Brown and Co., Boston,
1903.
Wharton, F.: A Treatise on Mental Unsoundness Embracing a General View of Psychological Law,
2 vols., Kay & Brother, Philadelphia, 1873.
Woodward, S.: ‘Moral Insanity’, Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 30 (1844) pp. 323–36.
S hawn R osenheim
Detective Fiction, Psychoanalysis,

and the Analytic Sublime
“We have gone so far as to combine the ideas of an agility astounding,

a strength superhuman, a ferocity brutal, a butchery without motive, a
grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from humanity, and a voice foreign
in tone to the ears of men of many nations, and devoid of all distinct or
intelligible syllabification. . . . What impression have I made upon your
fancy?” I felt a creeping of the flesh as Dupin asked me the question. “A
madman,” I said, “has done this deed—some raving maniac escaped from
a neighboring Maison de Santé.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
T I
hough “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” may be said to have initiated
the genre of detective fiction, many twentieth-century fans have been put
off by what seems like Poe’s capricious violation of an implicit narrative
convention. The ape, it is alleged, represents an instance of bad faith,
since no reader could reasonably be expected to include animals in a list
of potential murderers. More generally, we may take Poe’s ape story as an
index of a deeper bad faith on the part of the whole genre, in its frequent
imbalance between the detective story’s protracted narrative setup and its
often unsatisfying denouement. There is often an embarrassing sense on
the part of readers of detective fiction that its typically Gothic revelations
From The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen
Rachman. ©1995 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
81
82 Shawn Rosenheim
are incommensurate with the moral weight suggested by the genre’s

narrative form. In this sense, too, Poe’s orangutan is an emblem of readers,
who—their attention solicited by an unworthy narrative dilemma—find
that the real crime has been practiced on their own sensibility. In the words
of Geoffrey Hartman:
The trouble with the detective novel is not that it is moral but that
it is moralistic; not that it is popular but that it is stylized; not that
it lacks realism but that it picks up the latest realism and exploits it.
A voracious formalism dooms it to seem unreal, however “real” the
world it describes. . . . The form trusts too much in reason; its very
success opens to us the glimpse of a mechanized world, whether
controlled by God or Dr. No or the Angel of the Odd. (Hartman
1975, 225)
Though well taken, Hartman’s caution is hardly original: already in the

first detective story, Poe recognized the problem. As Poe indicated in a let-
ter to Phillip Cooke, he was aware that the promise of detective fiction to
unriddle the world was ultimately tautological: “Where is the ingenuity of
unravelling a web which you yourself have woven for the express purpose
of unravelling? These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to
being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not inge-
nious—but people think they are more ingenious than they are—on account
of the method and air of method” (Poe 1966, 2:328).
Poe’s comment interests me because, while he demystifies the detec-
tive story, insisting that the narrator’s solution to the crime is, in fact, no
“solution” at all, but a coup de théâtre staged by the author from behind the
scenes, he also recognizes the willingness of readers to be deceived by the
story’s “method and air of method.” Such an air of method might also be
described as the genre’s penchant for analysis, a term that recurs throughout
the Dupin stories.1 “Rue Morgue” begins with a discussion of “analysis,” and
in a letter describing “Marie Rogêt,” Poe emphasizes the same term: “under
the pretense of showing how Dupin . . . unravelled the mystery of Marie’s
assassination, I, in fact, enter into a very rigorous analysis of the real tragedy
in New York” (Poe 1969–78, 3:718). Though it may at first seem curious that
the literary genre most vocally devoted to the powers of the ratiocinative
mind should vex those powers on the mindless acts of Poe’s orangutan, on
consideration, Poe’s use of the ape in “Rue Morgue” emerges as something
more than a simple narrative miscalculation or mere sideshow. In brief, the
ape permits Poe to elaborate a cryptographic argument about language and
human identity, in which the extreme contrast between the ape’s physicality
and Dupin’s inhuman reason tells us something about the constitutive oppo-
Detective Fiction, Psychoanalysis, and the Analytic Sublime 83
sitions of the genre. And since detective fiction in general, and Poe’s more
particularly, has enjoyed a long and privileged relation to psychoanalytic
reading, Poe’s experiments with the monkey may tell us something about
how we, as readers, are ourselves made to ape his ape.
“Analysis” in several senses has been a key to the theoretical ubiquity of
“The Purloined Letter.” But while that story is unquestionably a great achieve-
ment, Poe purchases the analytic force of his narrative only by purging the
text of any attempt at realist representation (Limon 1990, 103). Hence, Bar-
bara Johnson’s too-familiar claim that Minister D—’s letter is “not hidden
in a geometrical space, where the police are looking for it . . . but is instead
located ‘in’ a symbolic structure” is correct only because of Poe’s refusal to
engage the difficult project of representing the texture of social experience
(Johnson 1980). In sharp contrast to the outdoor settings of “Marie Rogêt,”
or even to the street scenes in “Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter” retreats
from the boulevards, parks, and waterways of the teeming city, with their
social and sexual ambiguities, into the enclosed and private spaces of Minis-
ter D—’s chambers. Hence, the remarkable success of “The Purloined Let-
ter” as a locus for literary and psychoanalytic theory—indeed, as one of the
venues by which French theory has translated itself into America—begins
to seem the consequence of playing cards with a stacked deck. The tale’s
theoretical richness derives from the fact that Lacan, Derrida, Johnson, and
the others who have written in their wake have chosen a text that is already
supremely two-dimensional, already overtly concerned with allegorizing the
operations of the signifier.
In fact, the semiotic purity of “The Purloined Letter” is an exception in
Poe’s detective fiction, which focuses more generally on the tension between
representations of three-dimensional bodies and language, which is either
two-dimensional in its printed form or, as speech, proves uncannily disem-
bodied and invisible. The dominant form of the genre is far closer to “Rue
Morgue” or, in its true-crime mode, to “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” in
which Poe is less concerned with the “itinerary of the signifier” narrowly
conceived than he is with the problems posed by the difficult intersection
between the human capacity for language and the brute fact of incarnation.
Poe’s obsession with corpses, especially prominent in the late fiction, reveals
his continuing anxiety over the body’s refusal to suffer complete encipher-
ment into language. Significantly enough, Poe’s deaths are almost invariably
associated with injuries to the organs of speech. The horror of Valdemar’s
mesmeric dissolution in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” stems from
the grotesque contrast between his putrefying body and his “wonderfully,
thrillingly distinct—syllabification” (Poe 1984b, 839–40), as “ejaculations of
‘dead! dead!’ ” burst “from the tongue and not the lips of the sufferer” (ibid.,
842). In “Rue Morgue” the strangled Camille L’Espanaye’s tongue is “bitten
84 Shawn Rosenheim
partially through” (ibid., 410). Marie Rogêt bears “bruises and impressions
of fingers” about her throat, and “a piece of lace was found tied so tightly
around the neck as to be hidden from sight; it was completely buried in the
flesh, and was fastened by a knot which lay just under the left ear” (ibid., 513).
And in “Thou Art the Man,” often considered Poe’s fourth detective story,
the narrator (“Mr. P.”) exposes and destroys the murderer Charley Goodfel-
low by confronting him with the speaking corpse of his victim, who bursts
out of a wine cask with impressive consequences:
There sprang up into a sitting position, directly facing the host,

the bruised, bloody and nearly putrid corpse of the murdered Mr.
Shuttleworthy himself. It gazed for a few moments . . . with its
decaying and lack-lustre eyes . . . uttered slowly, but clearly and
impressively the words, “Thou art the man!” and then, falling over
the side of the chest as if thoroughly satisfied, stretched out its
limbs quiveringly. (Ibid., 740)2
Such obsessive instances of mutilated language suggest that for Poe

the disjunction between linguistic and physical identity was always trau-
matic. As in so much detective fiction, the violence attendant on social
relations in “Rue Morgue” results from the represented encounter between
two-dimensional signs and three-dimensional bodies, and might prop-
erly be described as cryptonymic. I borrow the term from Nicholas Abra-
ham and Maria Torok, who in their reinterpretation of Freud’s case study
hypothesize that the Wolf Man’s physical symptoms stem from a punning,
multilingual “verbarium” of key (or code) words, which indirectly name
the principal traumas of his life. The words are “encrypted” in the self to
avoid analysis by the self, for whom they pose insoluble psychic double
binds. In consequence, it becomes an essential but impossible task to say
whether the words name a real event or whether in themselves they pro-
duce the symptoms they are meant to explain. 3 Derrida describes the Wolf
Man in language equally well suited to the involutions of psychic space
manifested in, say, Roderick Usher: he had “edified a crypt within him:
an artifact, an artificial unconscious in the Self, an interior enclave, parti-
tions, hidden passages, zigzags, occult and difficult traffic” (Abraham and
Torok 1986, xliv); the only passage through this Gothic architecture of the
mind is through the magic words of the verbarium, coded translingually
across English, Russian, and German, to keep the crypt, that “monument
of a catastrophe,” impermeable (ibid., xlv). As the comparison to Usher
suggests, cryptonymy involves an unambiguously Gothic understanding
of language. Not only Derrida’s diction but the case study’s corresponding
themes of paralysis, violation, and unspeakability are common property of

the Gothic novel and of nineteenth-century hysteria.
As I have noted elsewhere (Rosenheim 1989), to an extraordinary
degree cryptography provides secret organizing principles for Poe’s trilogy
of detective stories. The cryptograph reflects on the level of the sign what
Dupin embodies on the level of character, and what the form of detective
fiction implies on the level of narrative: the fantasy of an absolutely legible
world. As it is encountered in Poe’s essays on secret writing, cryptography
is the utopian inverse of cryptonymy, since in it reader and writer are fully
present to one another within their two-dimensional cipher. Conceptually,
analysis is closely associated with cryptography. Both depend on the “sepa-
rating or breaking up of any whole into its parts so as to find out their nature,
proportion, function, relationship, etc.,”4 and both emphasize the abstract,
symbolic force of mind over matter, which provides a form of mental leverage
over the world. But already in the moment of creating the genre of detective
fiction, Poe suggests that the only “analysis” it can offer may itself be a fiction.
While cryptography seems to propose a detour around the Gothic aspects
of cryptonymy—a way of avoiding its disturbing physicality—cryptography
takes on disturbing cryptonymy features whenever Poe attempts to represent
actual bodies. The problem is that cryptography provides an alternative body
in conflict with one’s corporeal investment; since even in cryptography lan-
guage is never truly free of the material shell of the signifier, this linguistic
self finds itself in tension with one’s embodied identity.
Despite the story’s promise of legibility, “Rue Morgue” intimates that
the triumph of the detective’s analytics cannot be clearly distinguished from
the effects of the analytics on the reader’s body. To the degree that the reader
invests his belief in this formal drive toward legibility, he becomes Poe’s
dupe, for should the reader attempt to imitate Dupin, he quickly finds that
his analysis devolves into mere repetition.5 And yet, to that same degree,
these stories threaten to become meaningful: if the uncanny anticipation of
the story’s own interpretation is at all significant, it is so because the text dis-
closes in the reader’s body the nature of the interpretive desires that initiate
one’s reading. Like the purloined letter, the lesson of “Rue Morgue” is hid-
den in plain sight, announced in the story’s first lines: “The mental features
discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible of
analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects” (Poe 1984b, 397). While
our readings certainly produce “effects,” the desire to discover the right rela-
tion of analysis to literature is ultimately doomed by the impossibility of
establishing a metalanguage uncontaminated by the materiality of signifi-
cation. In this respect, the narrator’s attempt in “Rue Morgue” to keep his
analytic discourse free from the corporeal opacity of his subject resembles
Freud’s procedure in his case studies. If detective fiction is notoriously sus-
86 Shawn Rosenheim
ceptible to psychoanalytic interpretation, this is only because psychoanalysis,

too, has often seemed to presume the separation of its analytical procedures
from the materiality of its objects—a separation between language and the
body that “Rue Morgue” both constructs and, finally, destroys.
II
Following Richard Wilbur, critics have long recognized speech in “Rue

Morgue” as a symbolic expression of identification, noting that Dupin’s use
of a high and a low register links him with the high and low voices of the
sailor and the ape (Wilbur 1967). But Poe is finally less interested in pitch
than in syllabification, which runs on a continuum from the orangutan’s
grunts to Dupin’s “rich tenor,” with its “deliberateness and entire distinct-
ness” of enunciation (Poe 1984b, 410–12). Hence Poe’s own deliberation in
staging the ape’s crime within earshot of such a polyglot group of auditors,
each of whom hears in the orangutan’s voice someone speaking an unfamil-
iar language. Henri Duval: “The shrill voice, this witness thinks, was that
of an Italian. . . . Was not acquainted with the Italian language.” William
Bird: the voice “appeared to be that of a German. . . . Does not understand
German.” Alfonzo Garcia: “The shrill voice was that of an Englishman—is
sure of this. Does not understand the English language, but judges by into-
nation” (Poe 1984b, 409–10). Similarly, Isidore Muset, “—Odenheimer,”
and Alberto Montani, respectively attribute the voice to Spanish, French,
and Russian speakers. Poe even has Dupin supplement his references to the
“five great divisions of Europe” with mention of “Asiatics” and “Africans,” in
what amounts to a Cook’s Tour of the varieties of human speech:
Now, how strangely unusual must that voice have really been, about
which such testimony as this could have been elicited!—in whose
tones, even, denizens of the five great divisions of Europe could
recognize nothing familiar! You will say that it might have been
the voice of an Asiatic—of an African. . . . Without denying the
inference, I will now merely call your attention to [the fact that]
. . . no words—no sounds resembling words—were by any witness
mentioned as distinguishable. (Ibid., 416)
What is at stake in this inventory? As with the case studies of deaf-

mutes and feral children that appeared toward the end of the eighteenth
century, the orangutan offered Enlightenment thinkers a liminal figure of
the human at a time when language was crucially involved in the definition
of humanity. By the 1840s, however, the ape had been reduced to a comic
or grotesque image. But given Poe’s insistence on the syllabic nature of
speech, it is also important to recognize the orangutan’s affiliation with a

tradition of philosophical inquiry.6 The most comprehensive discussion of
the orangutan’s relation to language is given in The Origin and Progress of
Language, by James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, who devotes sixty pages to
this question in order to understand “the origin of an art so admirable and
so useful as language,” a subject “necessarily connected with an inquiry into
the original nature of man, and that primitive state in which he was, before
language was invented” (Burnet 1974, 1:267). Monboddo hypothesizes that
the orangutan is actually a species of humankind, being “a barbarous nation,
which has not yet learned the use of speech” (ibid., 270). The taxonomic
name of the orangutan, Homo sylvestris, is merely a translation of the Malay
“Ourang-Outang,” which, according to the naturalist Buffon, “signifies, in
their language, a wild man” (ibid., 272). According to Monboddo, orangutans
use tools, grow melancholy when separated from their tribes, and are capable
of conjugal attachment and even shame. Monboddo cites an explorer who
saw a female orangutan that “shewed signs of modesty . . . wept and groaned,
and performed other human actions: So that nothing human seemed to be
wanting in her, except speech” (ibid., 272–73).
By enlisting orangutans in the same species as humans, Monboddo
intends to demonstrate that what separates the two is less biology than
culture, epitomized by the possession of language. For Buffon, this lack of
speech discredits the orangutan’s evolutionary pretensions. Monboddo ridi-
cules Buffon, however, for making “the faculty of speech” part of the essence
of humanity, and for suggesting that “the state of pure nature, in which man
had not the use of speech, is a state altogether ideal and imaginary” (ibid.,
293). Buffon thus anticipates the current association of language and human
origins. For Poe as for Buffon, the “state of pure nature” is “altogether ideal”
and precisely “imaginary,” since, ontogenetically if not phylogenetically,
human consciousness is a function of the subject’s mirroring in language.
This tradition provides a context for understanding the dramatic pro-
cess by which the narrator discovers the identity of the killer. From the start,
Poe has planted clues: the crime is “brutal,” “inhuman,” “at odds with the
ordinary notions of human conduct.” Now Dupin remarks on the crime’s
strange combination of features:
“We have gone so far as to combine the ideas of an agility

astounding, a strength superhuman, a ferocity brutal, a butchery
without motive, a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from
humanity, and a voice foreign in tone to the ears of men of many
nations, and devoid of all distinct or intelligible syllabification. . . .
What impression have I made upon your fancy?”
88 Shawn Rosenheim
I felt a creeping of the flesh as Dupin asked me the question.

“A madman,” I said, “has done this deed—some raving maniac
escaped from a neighboring Maison de Santé.” (Poe 1984b, 423)
The narrator’s suggestion is close, but “the voices of madmen, even in their
wildest paroxysms . . . have always the coherence of syllabification” (ibid.,
558). Identification of the criminal depends, again, on Dupin’s understand-
ing of language; in fact, the testimony of the crime’s auditors constitutes an
aural cryptogram. The origin of this moment goes back to “A Few Words
on Secret Writing,” in which Poe remarked that of the hundred ciphers he
received, “there was only one which we did not immediately succeed in solv-
ing. This one we demonstrated to be an imposition—that is to say, we fully
proved it a jargon of random characters, having no meaning whatsoever.”
Poe’s ability to interpret signs requires him to recognize when a set of signs
violates the “universal” rules of linguistic formation. The claim to crypto-
graphic mastery depends on the logically prior ability to recognize when a
set of characters is not even language. By having the solution to the crime in
“Rue Morgue” turn on the aural cryptogram, Poe simultaneously dramatizes
both the power of human analysis and his fear of what life without language
might be like.
After its recapture the orangutan is lodged in the Jardin des Plantes.
Until his death in 1832, the Jardin was Georges Cuvier’s center of research;
as the repeated juxtaposition of Cuvier and Dupin indicates, Poe finds in
the zoologist’s mode of analysis an analogue to his own technique of detec-
tion.7 Cuvier was famous for his ability to reconstruct an animal’s anatomy
from fragmentary paleontological remains, through systematic structural
comparison. As a contemporary of Poe’s wrote: “Cuvier astonished the world
by the announcement that the law of relation which existed between the
various parts of animals applied not only to entire systems, but even to parts
of a system; so that, given an extremity, the whole skeleton might be known
. . . and even the habits of the animal could be indicated” (Review 1851).8
Like Cuvier’s bones, and in implicit analogy with them, syllables are for
Poe linguistic universals, basic morphological units that form the necessary
substrate to thought. Individual words possess meaning for the linguist only
through their participation in a global system: “the word is no longer attached
to a representation except insofar as it is previously a part of the grammatical
organization by means of which the language defines and guarantees its own
coherence” (Foucault 1973, 280–81).
Cuvier seems to provide a methodological justification for Poe’s
cryptographic reading of the world. But if this is so, what should we make of
Cuvier’s key role in revealing the true nature of the murderer? Having teased
the reader’s narrative appetite with oblique clues concerning the killer’s
nature, Dupin introduces the text of Cuvier with a theatrical flourish, sure
that his revelation will produce its intended effect: “It was a minute anatomical
and generally descriptive account of the large fulvous Ourang-Outang of
the East Indian Islands. The gigantic stature, the prodigious strength and
activity, the wild ferocity, and the imitative propensities of these mammalia
are sufficiently well known to all. I understood the full horrors of the murder
at once” (Poe 1984b, 424). This is a curious passage, not least because in Poe’s
version, the description of the orangutan virtually reverses Cuvier’s actual
claims. Not content to note that the orangutan is “a mild and gentle animal,
easily rendered tame and affectionate,” Cuvier disparages “the exaggerated
descriptions of some authors respecting this resemblance” to humans (Cuvier
1832, 54–55); he at once deflates both the ape’s anthropic pretensions and
its wildness. That Poe knew this text seems almost certain: M’Murtrie, who
translated Cuvier’s book, seven years later published with Poe and Thomas
Wyatt The Conchologist’s First Book, with “Animals according to Cuvier.” Yet
evidently Poe’s intellectual allegiance to Cuvier was subservient to his need
to magnify the melodramatic and Gothic aspects of the murders. In the
final analysis, it is not the crime but the solution that produces the reader’s
uncanny shiver, not the violence but the minute and clinical attention that
Dupin requires of the narrator. To understand why the killer’s simian origins
produce “the full horrors” of which the narrator speaks, we need first to
examine the effects of the revelation that Poe’s narrative produces.
III
Throughout the Dupin stories, Poe offers models for the nature of analysis,
including games of odd and even, theories of mental identification, and the
elaborate comparison of the respective merits of chess and whist. Yet as we
discover in “Rue Morgue,” analysis itself must remain disappointingly invis-
ible to the reader, except through its intensely pleasing effects:
We know of them, among other things, that they are always

to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the
liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability,
delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so
glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He
derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing
his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of
hieroglyphics. (Poe 1984b, 397)
In its basic narrative structure, “Rue Morgue” is itself an enigma whose

effects, according to its own logic, should clarify the nature of analysis. But
the opening discussion reverses the ordinary process of interpretation: the
90 Shawn Rosenheim
crime and its solution “will appear to the reader somewhat in the light of
a commentary upon the [analytic] propositions just advanced” (ibid., 400),
rather than the other way around. Nor is it clear exactly why we should
experience “the liveliest enjoyment” from the ensuing tale of violence. Might
we understand the tale as an allegory of the superiority of brain to brawn, in
which Dupin handily defeats both the sailor’s evasions and the ape’s brute
difference? Certainly; but the pleasure of such a reading is not itself analyti-
cal, and hence brings us no closer to understanding the properties that the
narrative so ostentatiously foregrounds. Since the narrator has compared
analytic pleasure to that enjoyed by the strong man, we ought perhaps to
consider the two “strong men” of the tale as guides. The first of these is
the orangutan (Homo sylvestris), possessed of “superhuman” strength; the
second is its owner, “a tall, stout, and muscular-looking person” who comes
equipped, as in a fairy tale, with “a huge oaken cudgel” (ibid., 426). But these
figures seem to exercise their powers only in violence: the elder L’Espanaye’s
head is “nearly severed” “with one determined sweep” of the ape’s “muscular
arm” (ibid., 430), and though the sailor seems amicable by comparison, even
he spends his energy whipping the ape into submission, and his muscles
tense at the thought of killing Dupin (“The sailor’s face flushed. . . . He
started to his feet and grasped his cudgel” [ibid., 427]). In practice, while
the pleasures of the analyst seem only figurally related to those of his mus-
cular counterpart (“As the strong man exults . . . so glories the analyst”),
the narrative that follows demonstrates that the relation between the two is
causal: the analyst’s skills are called for because of the strong man’s exertion,
as Dupin pits his thought against the unwitting power of the ape and the
sailor’s potential for violence.
According to Peter Brooks, any given story has a central metaphor
that, however dissolved into the thread of the narrative, articulates the
story’s primary relationships. And since all narrative can be mapped rhe-
torically as a relation between the poles of metaphor and metonymy, we can
describe the narrative’s duration as a metonymy “acting out of the implica-
tions of metaphor,” which at once reveals the meaning of the impacted ini-
tial metaphor and transforms it through its narrative embodiment (Brooks
1985, 13).
Citing the example of Conan Doyle’s “Musgrave Ritual,” Brooks shows
that the obscure and apparently meaningless ritual practiced by the Mus-
graves is actually a metaphor that condenses and shapes the action of the
story. Regardless of whether Brooks is right to contend that the relation
between initial metaphor and narrative metonymy holds for all stories, it
is undeniably true of detective fiction in general, and of its founding text as
well. The first rhetorical figure encountered in “Rue Morgue”—the analogy
between the pleasures of analysis and those of strength—provides the story’s
structuring metaphor; in fact, the tale has everything to do with the proper
way of understanding the relationship between the physical and the mental,
and the pleasures associated with each.
Take as an emblem of this disjunction the difficulty that the Mmes
L’Espanaye find in keeping head and body together: Camille L’Espanaye is
strangled; her mother’s throat is “so entirely cut that upon an attempt to raise
her, the head fell off ” (Poe 1984b, 411, 406). “Rue Morgue” repeatedly stages
the violent separation of heads and bodies, literal and figurative, and while
Dupin and the orangutan are the most visibly polarized emblems of this split,
the form of the tale repeats this pattern, joining its analytic head to the fic-
tive body through the most insecure of narrative ligatures: “The narrative to
follow will appear to the reader somewhat in the light of a commentary upon
the propositions just advanced” (ibid., 400). However one wishes to allego-
rize this relation of heads to bodies—as an opposition between spirit and
matter, analysis and effects, or ego and id—it is the distinguishing structural
feature of the text at every level. But though “Rue Morgue” formally repeats
the opposition between body and head in the relationship of narrative and
commentary, we can identify Brooks’s initial metaphor only in retrospect,
since Poe’s text conceals its metaphors as metonymies until the narrative’s
climactic revelation, by which time we as readers have been thoroughly
implicated in a scene at which we imagined ourselves only spectators.
Generically, this implication has already been built into the text
through its combination of the Gothic with what I call the analytic sub-
lime. Besides its extravagant setting in a “time-eaten and grotesque man-
sion, long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire, and
tottering to its fall” (ibid., 400–401), “Rue Morgue” reveals its generic debt
in the sensational violence of the killings, the segmentation of space into
barely permeable vesicles, and the uncanniness of the crime’s resolution.
Although Eve Sedgwick argues compellingly that as a genre the Gothic
is preeminently concerned with male homosocial desire, Poe’s detective
stories find their activating tension less in the closeting of sexual difference
than in the closeting of consciousness within the body. Despite its overt
disavowal of the Gothic (“let it not be supposed,” the narrator reminds us,
“that I am detailing any mystery, or penning any romance” [ibid., 402]),
Poe employs an aura of analytical reason only to intensify the reader’s expe-
rience of violence and disorder.
In the Gothic’s implicit spatial model, Sedgwick suggests, an “indi-
vidual fictional ‘self ’ ” is often “massively blocked off from something to
which it ought normally to have access”: air, personal history, a loved one.
Regardless of the specific lack, it is the unspeakability of this occlusion that
is generically distinctive: “The important privation is the privation exactly
of language, as though language were a sort of safety valve between the
92 Shawn Rosenheim
inside and the outside which being closed off, all knowledge, even when held
in common, becomes solitary, furtive, and explosive” (Sedgwick 1986, 17).9
Thus although the detective story, with its long retrospective reconstruc-
tions, seems par excellence the genre in which language is adequate to its
task of description, in the end, the apparent rationality of the detective is a
device used to create Sedgwick’s Gothic division. Far from offering a safety
valve between inner and outer, language itself separates the analyst from the
object, thereby creating the pressure differential between self and world that
language is pressed to describe. The impalpable tissue separating inside and
outside is consciousness itself, which can never be identical either with itself
or with the body. The more intensely Poe thematizes disembodied reason
(the analytic sublime), the more powerfully Gothic will be the moment in
which our identification with the body of the ape is revealed.
This use of reason against itself appears with particular clarity in the
episode in which Dupin discovers the exit by which the killer escaped from
the quarters of the Mmes L’Espanaye. In this first instance of the locked-
room mystery, the doors to the L’Espanaye home are locked; there are no
secret passages or “preternatural events”; and the condition of the bodies
rules out suicide. The two windows are shut, each fastened by “a very stout
nail” pushed into a gimlet hole drilled through frame and casement. Yet on
visiting the house, Dupin displays absolute confidence in his logical powers:
“The impossibility of egress, by means already stated, being thus absolute, we
are reduced to the windows. It is only left for us to prove that these apparent
‘impossibilities’ are, in reality, not such.” Reasoning that “the murderers did
escape from one of these windows,” Dupin decides that the sashes
must, then, have the power of fastening themselves. There was no

escape from this conclusion. I had traced the secret to its ultimate
result—and that result was the nail. It had, I say, in every respect, the
appearance of its fellow in the other window, but this fact was an
absolute nullity (conclusive as it might seem to be) when compared
with the consideration that here, at this point, terminated the clew.
“There must be something wrong,” I said, “about the nail.” I touched
it; and the head, with about a quarter of the shank, came off in my
fingers. The rest of the shank was in the gimlet-hole, where it had
been broken off. (Poe 1984b, 419)
This is what Freud called the “omnipotence-of-consciousness” with a ven-

geance: the evidence of the senses is “an absolute nullity” against the locked
room of Dupin’s logic (“There was no escape from this conclusion”). As pre-
dicted, and in apparent confirmation of his hypothesis, the nail-head pops
off at Dupin’s touch, as if his analysis was a type of narrative thaumaturgy,
able to bring about changes in the world through mere enunciation (“ ‘There
must be something wrong,’ I said, ‘about the nail’ ”). Such confusion of
causes and effects is a version of the tale’s split between analysis and action,
an indication that Poe’s analytical sublime contains the seeds of its own
undoing. The abstract introduction to a tale of horror (also familiar from
“The Imp of the Perverse”) intensifies the shock of the narrative by increas-
ing the contrast between the narrative’s ratiocinative calm and the brutality
to follow. And since excessive contrast is itself a Gothic convention, “Rue
Morgue” stages the relation between the story’s introduction and its main
body as another instance of the Gothic. Indeed, the nail itself anticipates
my conclusion: its status as a token of the power of reason is immediately
undermined by Dupin’s recognition that the nail itself is fractured. Like
everything else in “Rue Morgue,” the nail—an apparent integer—splits into
head and body.
IV
This constant recurrence of heads and bodies is structurally parallel to the

separation in detective fiction of the metonymy and metaphoric poles of lan-
guage. Working with clues associated with the narrative’s originating crime,
the detective’s analytical method is primarily a form of metonymy, which
is, in turn, associated with the frame narrative of the detective’s analysis,
and with its origins in cryptography. Conversely, the core narrative of most
detective stories obsessively concerns itself with bodies, most commonly
with their violation and murder. Metonymy, Lacan suggests, is evidence of
the displacement of desire for the mother onto the signifying chain itself.
As the law of the signifier, the law of the father separates the infant from
the mother at the moment when Oedipal injunctions manifest themselves
in, and as, the child’s newly acquired language. The child attempts to recap-
ture its original plenitude through the use of language, but this displaced
search turns into an identification of suspended desire with the process of
signification itself:
And the enigmas that desire seems to pose for a “natural

philosophy”—its frenzy mocking the abyss of the infinite, the
secret collusion with which it envelops the pleasure of knowing
and of dominating with a jouissance, these amount to no other
derangement of instinct than that of being caught in the rails—
eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else—of
metonymy. (Lacan 1977, 166–67)
94 Shawn Rosenheim
In place of the child’s imaginary, there are only the “rails” of metonymic
linkage, which, far from leading back to the mother, constitute the bars
separating one from her being. But this “desire for something else” is not
without compensatory pleasures, chief among which is the “jouissance” of
employing language to structure the observable world, investing it with the
sense of an almost tangible approach to the object of desire. The rails teeter
constantly along the edge of remembrance, “at the very suspension-point of
the signifying chain” (ibid.).
In its concern with evidence, the detective’s search is a variation on the
metonymic suspension displayed by the narrator of the Gothic romances,
who tends “to muse, for long unwearied hours, with [his] attention riveted
to some frivolous device on the margin or in the typography of a book” (Poe
1984b, 227). This obsessive attention is a defense mechanism designed to
turn the mind away from something that must seem to be repressed, but
which, in fact, hovers teasingly close to consciousness:
There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of

the science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact . . . that
in our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we
often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without
being able, in the end, to remember. And thus how frequently, in
my intense scrutiny of Ligeia’s eyes, have I felt approaching the full
knowledge of their expression—felt it approaching—yet not quite
be mine—and so at length entirely depart! (Ibid., 264–65)
Compare this to the narrator’s reaction to Dupin’s description of the strength,

ferocity, and “harsh and unequal voice” possessed by the orangutan: “At
these words a vague and half-formed conception of the meaning of Dupin
flitted over my mind. I seemed to be upon the verge of comprehension,
without power to comprehend—as men, at times, find themselves upon the
brink of remembrance without being able, in the end, to remember” (ibid.,
421). In both cases, the quality of this near-memory, and the habits of both
excessively attentive narrators, correspond to Lacan’s metonymic subject
“perversely” fixated “at the very suspension-point of the signifying chain,
where the memory-screen is immobilized and the fascinating image of the
fetish is petrified” (Lacan 1977, 167).
Lacan’s rhetorical analysis permits us to see how completely the met-
onymic frame narrative of the tale disembodies both analyst and reader, even
as the Gothic narrative core of the detective story foregrounds metaphors
of the body.10 This metaphoric pull toward embodiment is crystallized in
the basic scenario of “Rue Morgue,” which, as Marie Bonaparte noted long
ago, is a particularly nasty Oedipal triangle. For Bonaparte, the orangutan
represents the infant, whose obsession with the question of the mother’s
sexual difference is only settled through the symbolic castration involved in
Mme L’Espanaye’s decapitation. Bonaparte’s reading depends on a style of
anatomical literalization now out of fashion, discredited in an era in which
psychoanalytic critics rightfully prefer textual and rhetorical criticism to
readings that, as Brooks notes, mistakenly choose as their objects of analy-
sis “the author, the reader, or the fictive persons of the text” (Brooks 1987,
2). The problem is that “Rue Morgue” continually solicits what can only be
described as bad Freudian readings. Bonaparte’s biographical interpretation
of Poe’s fiction is, in the main, enjoyably unconvincing, but her monomania-
cal inventory of sexual symbols (of, for instance, the L’Espanayes’ chamber
as a gigantic projection of the interior female anatomy) is difficult to dismiss.
From the rending of the double doors of the L’Espanaye home (“a double or
folding gate . . . bolted neither at bottom nor top” forced “open, at length,
with a bayonet”), to the ape’s futile ransacking of Mme L’Espanaye’s private
drawers (“the drawers of a bureau . . . were open, and had been, apparently,
rifled, although many articles still remained in them” [Poe 1984b, 421]), to
the identification of the broken and the whole nail, the story overcodes its
anatomical symbols. Discovered in its crimes, the orangutan’s “wild glances”
fall on “the head of the bed, over which the face of its master, rigid with hor-
ror, was just discernible.” The ape stuffs Camille “head-down” in the chim-
ney; the L’Espanayes live in a room “at the head of the passage”; the nail in
the window behind the bed is fixed “nearly to the head”; Dupin looks over
“the head-board minutely”; the other nail too is “driven in nearly up to the
head.” The ape flees from its master’s bed to the L’Espanayes, where it swings
itself through the window “directly upon the headboard of the bed.” “Head”
is used twenty times, “bed,” “bedstead,” or “bedroom” seventeen times; as
well as rhyming aurally, “head” and “bed” continually chime through their
contiguity in the text, inviting the reader to link them through metaphor.
Even the fractured window-nail can represent the mother’s phallus: “Il y a le
mystère du clou mutilé d’une des fenêtres, sans doute symbole, sur le mode
‘mobilier,’ de la castration de la mère.” Dupin’s inductions about the broken
nail constitute a fort-da game in which he resolves the question of the mater-
nal phallus by both denying its presence (“ ‘There must be something wrong,’
I said, ‘about the nail.’ I touched it; and the head . . . came off in my fingers”)
and affirming it (“I now carefully replaced this head portion and . . . the fis-
sure was invisible”). Such an explanation helps clarify why the analysis of the
nail musters such weird intensity: “There must . . . be something wrong with
the nail” (Bonaparte 1949, 439).
My claim is not that such anatomical allegorizing substantiates psy-
choanalytic criticism, but that Freudian readers have long been attracted to
detective fiction just because the genre’s structure and themes so often echo
96 Shawn Rosenheim
central psychoanalytic scenarios. What looks like Poe’s eerie anticipation

of psychoanalytic motifs may say as much about generic as about psychic
structure. Certainly, the literary interest of Freud’s case studies depends
in no small part on an essentially cryptographic sense of power over the
body. Despite Freud’s frequent attempts to distance himself from writers
of fiction, his early conception of psychoanalysis as “the task of making
conscious the most hidden recesses of the mind” (Freud 1963a, 96), of
rendering the body transparent to language, is driven by the same themes
of cryptographic interiority at play in Poe’s detective fiction. And Dupin’s
boast that “most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms”
(Poe 1984b, 401) is actually a more modest version of Freud’s famous dec-
laration in his study of Dora: “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may
convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent,
he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore”
(Freud 1963a, 96).
Although critics have remarked on the embarrassing frequency with
which detective stories draw on stock psychoanalytic imagery, no one has yet
called attention to how thoroughly “Rue Morgue” seems to gloss the analytic
process itself. Freud describes the “essence of the psychoanalytic situation”
as follows:
The analyst enters into an alliance with the ego of the patient to
subdue certain uncontrolled parts of his id, i.e., to include them in
a synthesis of the ego. . . . [If ] the ego learns to adopt a defensive
attitude towards its own id and to treat the instinctual demands of
the latter like external dangers, this is at any rate partly because it
understands that the satisfaction of instinct would lead to conflicts
with the external world. (Under the influence of its upbringing,
the child’s ego accustoms itself to shift the scene of the battle from
outside to inside and to master the inner danger before it becomes
external.) (Freud 1963b, 253)
Freud’s clinical observations would serve almost equally well to describe the
sailor’s visit to Dupin, with Dupin standing in for the analyst, the sailor for
the analysand, and the orangutan as a figure for the remembered “primal
scene.” In Dora, Freud notes that “the patients’ inability to give an ordered
history of their life insofar as it coincides with the story of their illness is
not merely characteristic of the neurosis,” but is, in fact, a defining feature of
mental illness; and Freud’s essential test for recovery simply is the patient’s
newfound ability to narrate his or her life, to “remove all possible symptoms
and to replace them by conscious thoughts” (Freud 1963a, 31, 32). In this
case, the sailor must recount under duress the story of the crime, which is
formally parallel to the dreams that provide the analytic material for Freud’s
case studies. His wish to hide his knowledge makes sense in terms of the
plot, but it is less easy to explain away Dupin’s insistence, at once solicitous
and stern, that the sailor narrate what he knows. Dupin, one might say,
enters into an alliance with the sailor in order that he might “subdue certain
uncontrolled parts of his id,” unmistakably represented by the ape. As a
corollary, Dupin repeatedly insists that the sailor acknowledge the beast as
his own: “Of course you are prepared to identify the property?” (Poe 1984b,
427), even as he declares that the sailor is both innocent and complicit: “You
have nothing to conceal. You have no reason for concealment. On the other
hand, you are bound by every principle of honor to confess all” (ibid., 428).
Pressed to take a reward for ostensibly recovering the ape, Dupin continues
the same theme: “You shall give me all the information in your power about
these murders in the Rue Morgue” (ibid., 427).
Forced at gunpoint to answer, the sailor responds first by losing the
ability to articulate (“The sailor’s face flushed up, as if he were struggling
with suffocation. . . . He spoke not a word” [Poe 1984b, 427]), and then by
threatening compensatory violence (“He started to his feet and grasped his
cudgel” [ibid.]), as the story of the ape homeopathically reproduces itself in
the sailor’s telling. The stress of confession threatens to produce a repetition
of the original crime, but Dupin’s mixture of firmness and kindness (“I per-
fectly well know that you are innocent of the atrocities in the Rue Morgue.
It will not do, however, to deny that you are in some measure implicated in
them” [ibid., 427]) permits him to redirect his symptomatic repetition into
narrative—precisely the result of a successful analytic intervention predicted
by Freud. The sailor explains how, having brought the ape from Borneo to
Paris in order to sell it for profit, he returned one night to find that the
orangutan had escaped into his bedroom,
into which it had broken from a closet adjoining, where it had

been, as was thought, securely confined. Razor in hand, and fully
lathered, it was sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the
operation of shaving, in which it had no doubt previously watched
its master through the key-hole of the closet. Terrified at the
sight of so dangerous a weapon in the possession of an animal so
ferocious, and so well able to use it, the man, for some moments,
was at a loss what to do. He had been accustomed, however, to
quiet the creature, even in its fiercest moods, by the use of a whip,
and to this he now resorted. Upon sight of it, the Ourang-Outang
sprang at once through the door of the chamber, down the stairs,
and thence, through a window, unfortunately open, into the street.
(Ibid., 428–29)
98 Shawn Rosenheim
Having only heard up to this point about the animal’s “intractable ferocity,”
this image of the orangutan is rather touching; even when the ape imitates
“the motions of a barber” with the Mmes L’Espanaye, its purposes, we are
told, are “probably pacific” (ibid., 430). Poe offers us a Darwinian revision
of Freud, a primate scene in which the ape—still “in the closet,” forced to
peep through a keyhole—sees its master shaving, and tries to imitate him.
Shaving codes the body as a part of culture, not nature; and as in David
Humphreys’s contemporary poem “The Monkey” (printed in Duyckinck
and Duyckinck 1875, 1:392), the ape takes up the razor out of a wish to be
human.11 But without language, the developmental scenario implied by the
ape’s mimicry stalls: whatever its “imitative propensities,” as a mute, the ape
cannot readily make its intentions known. The ape’s frustrated turn from
gesture to violence reveals the abject inadequacy of mimesis in comparison
with speech. Unable to manipulate abstract symbols, the ape takes out its
rage on the flesh; and while the story’s focus on injured mouths and throats
may be an instance of displacement upward, it is also a direct attack on the
organs of speech. The orangutan represents both Bonaparte’s murderous
infant, poised at the moment of discovering sexual difference, and a limin-
ally human, highly evocative image of the body’s resistance to signification.
These elements are synthesized in a Lacanian revision of the primal scene
as the entry into signification. Poe’s use of the orangutan serves as his own
myth of human origins, which condenses within itself both individual and
evolutionary history, both linguistic and sexual desire.
Thanks to Dupin’s narrative therapy, the sailor is afforded the oppor-
tunity to break the cycle of repetition through the type of analytic transfer-
ence that, in Brooks’s words, “succeeds in making the past and its scenarios
of desire relive through signs with such vivid reality that the reconstruc-
tions it proposes achieve the effect of the real” (Brooks 1987, 13). Although
it is meaningless to speak of curing a fictional character, this protoanalytic
scene is one way in which Poe stages the reader’s textual cathexis, though
such a proleptic parody may suggest that, like “Rue Morgue” itself, the
psychoanalyst’s function is to manufacture a narrative rather than to reveal
one. The sailor’s mistake has been to assume that once he had succeeded
in lodging the ape at his own residence, the danger that it posed was over.
The sailor has yet to learn to “treat the instinctual demands of the [id] like
external dangers.” Hence, the captive ape escapes from the sailor, forc-
ing him to face the violent consequences of its acting-out. The process of
admitting his possession of the ape is a precondition for its taming, which
requires that the sailor objectify and confront as an external danger (“no
mean enemy”) the fact of the bodily unconscious. The recapture of the
erstwhile brute (a story Poe does not even bother to recount) represents
the sailor’s psychic reintegration. As Freud writes: “The struggle between
physician and patient, between intellect and the forces of instinct, between
recognition and the striving for discharge, is fought out almost entirely on
the ground of transference-manifestations. This is the ground on which
the victory must be won, the final expression of which is lasting recovery
from the neurosis. . . . in the last resort no one can be slain in absentia or
in effigie” (Freud 1963b, 114–15). By implication, literature might be said
to stage in effigie just such ego-training sessions, teaching the reader “to
shift the scene of the battle from outside to inside”: from behaviors to an
internalized encounter with the text.
Once the sailor confesses, and thereby owns up to his implication in
the killings, the story is finished; the narrator has “scarcely anything to add,”
and hastily concludes by noting that the ape “was subsequently caught by the
owner himself, who obtained for it a very large sum at the Jardin des Plan-
tes. Le Bon was instantly released, upon our narration of the circumstances
(with some comments from Dupin) at the bureau of the Prefect of Police”
(Poe 1984b, 431). Since the real story of “Rue Morgue” concerns the pro-
duction of uncanny effects in the reader, Poe has no qualms about violating
the principles of narrative construction. Instead, the extreme brevity of the
denouement, and the untidiness of the story’s conclusion, remind us that
Poe’s characters are merely puppets, technical apparatuses deployed in the
attempt to intensify our affective transference onto his tales. Although the
allegorical reading sketched here could be elaborated further, the parallels
between Freud’s method in the case studies and Poe’s narrative are clear. The
elaborate sexual symbolism, the fetishization of analysis, the literalization
of the “talking cure,” and, above all, the story’s peculiar staging of meta-
phor and metonymy are coordinated devices through which Poe enhances
the reader’s identification.
Thus far, the reader has had little incentive to identify with anyone
except Dupin. But though Dupin’s cryptographic power is specifically predi-
cated on his linguistic prowess, the resolution of this case is not a matter of
language alone. Instead, Dupin now finds himself confronting the tangible
world, carefully measuring the “impression” made by the orangutan’s fingers
on Camille L’Espanaye’s neck against the span and pattern of a human hand,
only to find that the prints on the strangled woman are not even approxi-
mately the same (“ ‘This’ I said, ‘is the mark of no human hand’ ” [ibid., 423]).
Dupin continues his physical investigation: “Besides, the hair of a madman
is not such as I now hold in my hand. I disentangled this little tuft from the
rigidly clutched fingers of Madam L’Espanaye. Tell me what you can make
of it: ‘Dupin!’ I said, completely unnerved, ‘this hair is most unusual—this
is no human hair’ ” (ibid.). Recall that in the opening paragraph of the story,
the analyst is said to glory “in that moral activity which disentangles”: just the
word Dupin uses to describe the process of physically extracting his tuft of
100 Shawn Rosenheim
hair from the “rigidly clutched” hand of the corpse. For all the text’s insis-
tence on the separation between the pleasures of the strong man and those
of the analyst, the solution of the Rue Morgue murders requires that Dupin
make forceful, even violent, contact with the traces of the ape.
After producing his assembled physical evidence, Dupin asks the nar-
rator: “What impression have I made upon your fancy?” repeating as a met-
aphor the word used to refer to the uncanny and inhuman marks left on
the dead woman’s neck. Prior to the moment in which Dupin histrionically
reveals the orangutan as the culprit, the reader’s body has been anesthe-
tized by Dupin’s disembodied analytics (an anesthetization also evident in
Dupin, who in moments of excitement becomes “frigid and abstract,” his
eyes “vacant in expression” [ibid., 401, 415]). In the “creeping of the flesh”
that follows (ibid., 423), the narrator’s body identifies with the ape through
Dupin’s recreation of the crime, revealing that he, too, through his direct
somatic response, is implicated in the narrative to which he listens. “A symp-
tom,” writes Lacan, is “a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a
signifying element” (Lacan 1977, 166); and in the moment when the reader’s
skin shivers in sympathy with the narrator, we witness the overthrow of the
metonymic order. In the shift to the metaphoric, in the symptomatic repro-
duction within the reader’s body of a sensational response, the reader reveals
his collaboration with the ape. Through the creation of this response, Poe
circumvents Freud’s complaint that in analysis “the patient hears what we
say but it rouses no response in his mind” (Freud 1963b, 251). To rouse the
mind, a text must also arouse the body: only through the symptomatic com-
mitment of the reader’s flesh can the text realize its transferential effects.
Appropriately, it is the knowledge of his own embodiment that permits
Dupin to solve the mystery of the L’Espanayes’ deaths. This is the impli-
cation of Dupin’s final comments on the Prefect, in which he takes pains
to emphasize the futility of the latter’s “bodiless” wisdom: “In his wisdom
is no stamen. It is all head and no body, like the pictures of the Goddess
Laverna—or, at best, all head and shoulders, like a codfish. But he is a good
creature after all. I like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by which
he has attained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has ‘de nier
ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas’ ” (Poe 1984b, 431). Though figured
as a “creature,” it is just the Prefect’s failure to negotiate between head and
body that prevents him from imagining the animal nature of the killer. As
a kind of walking bust, all head and shoulders, the Prefect, not Dupin, is an
emblem for excessive rationality, unable to accommodate the ape’s physical
presence. By contrast, Dupin twice notes his admiration for the animal. “I
almost envy you the possession of him,” he admits to the sailor (Poe 1984b,
431); and we may suppose that Dupin longs for the animal’s intense physi-
cality, even as he revels in the physical effects, the “creeping of the flesh,” he
produces in his listeners. (Once more, Dupin appears as a stand-in for Poe,
who also relies for his very bread and butter on the ability to conjure iden-
tification.) “Where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself
have woven for the express purpose of unravelling?” Poe asked of Cooke;
we may now be able to answer that it lies in having in the meantime caught
something in that web. In the present case, Dupin’s greatest exertions are not
to catch the monkey, but its owner, lured in by the text placed in the news-
paper. Just so with the story’s readers: drawn in by another piece of paper, by
another thread or web, we find ourselves trapped within its self-dissolving
structure, as any assumptions about the nature of analysis are undone by our
own somatic performance.
As “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” concludes, the divergent senses
of the word “stamen” crystallize its irreconcilable oppositions:
“stamen, n.; pl. stamens rare stamina, [L., a warp in an upright

loom, a thread; lit., that which stands up, from stare, to stand.] 1.
a warp thread, especially in the ancient upright loom at which the
weaver stood upright instead of sitting. [Obs.] 2. in botany, the
male reproductive organ in flowers, formed principally of cellular
tissue.12
Insofar as “stamen” refers to the male generative organ of a flower, it

marks the (male) reader addressed by the text; call this the Freudian read-
ing, in which to have a male body seems inseparable from complicity in the
orangutan’s gendered violence. But the first meaning, now obsolete, indicates
the warp thread in a loom; and through familiar paths (loom, weaving, text),
we arrive at the stamen as the narrative thread running throughout Poe’s text.
The story’s overdetermined treatment of heads and bodies, words and things,
analysis and its effects, implies the close association of the origins of narra-
tive with the discovery of sexual difference, though it is impossible to tell
which came first. Instead of reinforcing an evolutionary hierarchy that would
separate us from our simian relations, the cryptographic narrative structure
of “Rue Morgue” acts to remind us of our corporeal investment: through
the story’s enacted rhetoric, the reader lives out the distance between the
tale’s opening metaphor and its closing one—between the simile comparing
analysis and the strong man’s pleasure, which safely separates its terms even
as it joins them, and the metaphor of the stamen, which reveals the degree to
which the reader, too, finds himself hopelessly entangled.
No t e s
1. It is a cliché of detective-fiction criticism that its most avid readers are profes-
sionals distinguished for their own analytic abilities—doctors, lawyers, and the like.
102 Shawn Rosenheim
W. H. Auden, one remembers, was a compulsive reader of detective fiction, as is failed

Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork, who consumes at least one a day.
2. The deception is accomplished by thrusting “a stiff piece of whalebone”
down the throat of the corpse and doubling it over in the wine cask, so that it springs
up when released. As for Mr. Shuttleworthy’s impressive accusation, the narrator
“confidently depended upon [his] ventriloquial abilities” (Poe 1984b, 742).
3. “It is not a situation comprising words that becomes repressed; the words
are not dragged into repression by a situation. Rather, the words themselves, expressing
desire, are deemed to be generators of a situation that must be avoided and voided retroac-
tively” (Abraham and Torok 1986, 20). For hints of a cryptonymic reading of Poe’s
writing, see Riddel 1979.
4. Webster’s New Twentieth-Century Dictionary, s.v. “analysis.”
5. I use the male pronoun as a way of recognizing how extremely “The
Murders in the Rue Morgue” genders its readers. While it would be profitable to
investigate how the female reader locates herself in Poe’s text, I am concerned here
to elucidate the dominant assumptions of the genre, which begins with this story.
6. For a collection of eighteenth-century treatments of feral children, see
Malson 1972, which includes Jean Itard’s famous treatment of the Wild Boy of
Aveyron. Shattuck 1980 offers a detailed but dull interpretation of Itard’s work.
The idea of a criminal orangutan was not original to Poe: Peithman records that
Poe “very likely saw an article, ‘New Mode of Thieving,’ in the Annual Register
for 1834 . . . which tells of an ‘extraordinary burglary’ in which a woman entering
her bedroom is attacked by a ‘Monkey (or a Ribbed-face Baboon) which threw her
down, and placing his feet upon her breast, held her pinned firmly to the ground.’ ”
The animal, it turns out, belonged to “itinerant showmen” from whom it had “been
let loose for the sake of plundering” (Poe 1981a, 196–97).
7. Cuvier actually boasted about the superiority of his method to that of the
detective: “This single track therefore tells the observer about the kind of teeth; the
kind of jaws, the haunches, the shoulder, and the pelvis of the animal which has
passed: it is more certain evidence than all of Zadig’s clues” (Coleman 1964, 102).
Voltaire’s novel is typically cited as the source for the detective’s method, in the
inferential reasoning by which three brothers perfectly describe a horse they have
not seen, relying only on the circumstantial traces that remained.
8. Foucault suggests the intellectual ties between Dupin and Cuvier by using
a quotation from Schlegel: “the structure or comparative grammar of languages fur-
nishes as certain a key of their genealogy as the study of comparative anatomy has
done to the loftiest branch of natural science” (Foucault 1973, 280).
9. Sedgwick’s emphasis on male homosocial desire initially seems like a
promising way of reading Poe’s detective stories, which manifest many of the gen-
dered conventions—including the doubling of criminal and detective, the detective’s
social and physical alienation, and the violence directed against female bodies—that
have long characterized crime fiction. Yet Poe’s homosocial pairs keep turning
into repetitions of a single self (Dupin and the narrator, Dupin and Minister D—,
D— and his imagined brother), without the triangulation of difference needed to
set sexual desire in play. On the Gothic and male homosociality, see Sedgwick 1985,
83–117.
10. Reacting against this type of tropic determination, Geoffrey Hartman
warns critics not to move too quickly from rhetorical analysis to narrative sig-
nificance: “The detective story structure—strong beginnings and endings and a
deceptively rich, counterfeit, ‘excludable’ middle—resembles almost too much that

of symbol or trope. Yet the recent temptation of linguistic theorists to collapse nar-
rative structure into this or that kind of metaphoricity becomes counterproductive
if it remains blind to the writer’s very struggle to outwit the epileptic Word” (Hart-
man 1975, 214). Hartman’s caution is well taken, but the meaning of the detective
story’s rhetorical form lies primarily in its somatic effects on the reader, and not in
its unsustainable claims to revelation.
11. Attempting to imitate its master, Humphreys’s animal accidentally cuts its
own throat (Poe 1981a, 197). Poe habitually associates hair, the sexualized body, and
violence. The first thing discovered at the crime scene are “thick tresses—very thick
tresses—of grey human hair . . . torn out by the roots,” “perhaps half a million of
hairs at a time” (Poe 1984b, 422); and Marie Rogêt’s jilted paramour identifies her
body by stroking her arms to see if they have her characteristically luxuriant hair.
12. Webster’s New Twentieth-Century Dictionary, s.v. “stamen.”
JOHANN PILLAI
Death and Its Moments:

The End of the Reader in History
On its own account, historiography takes for granted the fact that it has
become impossible to believe in this presence of the dead that has orga-
nized (or organizes) the experience of entire civilizations; and the fact too
that it is nonetheless impossible “to get over it,” to accept the loss of a
living solidarity with what is gone, or to confirm an irreducible limit.
—Michel de Certeau1
All history, moreover, must more or less blindly encounter the problem
of a transferential relation to the past whereby the processes at work in
the object of study acquire their displaced analogues in the historian’s
account.
—Dominick LaCapra2
A historiographical paradox leads me, in what follows, to perform a

reading of a “tale,” a narrative which declares as such its fictiveness, in its
relation to history, which it purports to transcend or slide past. 3 It is not
my intention here simply to identify or reconstruct the historical conditions
under which the tale was produced, nor to relate it to the various times
of its reception, nor again to describe its putative extratextual referents.4
My concern is rather with the temporal mode of “modernity”—by which I
mean the contemporary readability, the presentness—of a text which has left
From MLN 112, no. 5 (December 1997): 836–875. © 1997 by The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
105
106 Johann Pillai
its moment of origin and floats before a reader in any age, apparently with
no strings attached; that is, with the historiographical relation between the
narration of a fictional tale and the critical performance of reading it.5
This relation, in its most general terms, has two fundamental aspects.
First, the understanding that a tale is a narration of events—real, ideal or
imagined—and hence establishes, within its own temporality, logical, causal,
figurative, and other kinds of relations between signs of objects, subjects, and
events. The tale thus functions in itself as a story or history of “what it is
about.”6 A second aspect concerns the act of reading the tale, an act which
simultaneously constitutes the tale as a history, and (in doing so) establishes
itself in a metahistorical relation to the tale. The performance of reading thus
takes as its point of origination the text of the tale which it has itself consti-
tuted as origin. The circularity of this relationship is the abyssal ground of
what is commonly articulated as a battle between literary theory and literary
history, or simply as crisis.7
To read the tale critically is to read in the mode of crisis, to participate
in a hearing without a sentence being pronounced: for the tale demands that
its reader recognize from the outset its status as fiction—and accordingly sus-
pend, while reading, the arbitrarily established conventions by which we are
accustomed to distinguish between the conventions of reference, the levels
of understanding termed “literal” and “figurative.” It is precisely this elision
of difference which enables both the mythopoeic distancing of the events
referred to in the tale from a past “historical reality” and the historical real-
ization of these events in the experiential time of the reader. The historical
conditions of the tale, in short, are located in the present of its being told and
heard—in its lived presentness to a reader in any age.8 And it is the herme-
neutic relation of the narrative voice of the tale to the narrative voice of criti-
cism that determines this paradoxical temporality; its articulation requires
the reading, not only of a tale—Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” will serve as
example—but also, in the space before and after the tale, the full and expres-
sive silence which precedes the beginning and succeeds the end, of reading.
“The Tell-Tale Heart”—the title—is first of all, and by convention, an index,

pointing to what the tale will be about. Simultaneously, however—it is here
initially that the literal/figurative distinction must be suspended—it labels
or names, confers an identity on the text it signifies9, and thus this text
which confronts the reader can be, is, nothing but the heart itself, palpable
and red—not read as a representation of a heart, but the very bodily organ
responsible for circulation, the seat of emotion, of passion, of the affections.
It is the organ which sustains life—and yet, paradoxically, a heart on its own
Death and Its Moments: The End of the Reader in History 107
seems to imply its own extraction from a body; it may produce no circula-
tion, may or may not beat. Beyond what it is, too, lies the question of what
it does, for this is a heart which tells a tale—a “tell-tale” heart; and by the
same token an informing heart, a give-away, a tattler; a warning, betrayer,
traitor. The tale it will tell is also—for such is also the function of a title
to indicate—about the tell-tale heart; it is an organ which tells the story of
itself. The narrative voice which tells the tale is no less the voice of the tale,
both the subject and the object of its own narration.
This circular, abyssal self-mirroring—by which the tale names itself
as an organ without a body,10 a fragment which tells a tale about a frag-
ment which tells a tale—might appear on the surface to close it off from any
attempt to situate it within an external historicity. The first word of the text,
however—“True!”—indicates otherwise; it situates what follows within the
factual context of a (granted) past history:11
nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but

why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my
senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense
of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth.
I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?12
The apostrophe—and certainly the entire narration is an extended apostro-

phe—prosopopoeically gives face to its addressee, locates the time of nar-
ration in the present of the reader. Or rather, in the present of an implied
reader, an invisible addressee who might, or who has already, diagnosed the
narrator—“why will you say . . .?” The dread and anxiety of the narrator
reflect his (her?) being ill at ease, the victim of a dis-ease.13 But the question
is taken up again: “How, then, am I mad?” How, indeed, are we to read this
question? What reader could conclude at this point that the narrator is mad?
These apostrophic questions, their implicit answers, serve to close the text off
from the actual reader in another sense by insisting, counterproductively, that
the narrator is not mad but has been, or will be, categorized as such regard-
less; the narrator’s rationalizations attempt to breach—while simultaneously
his denials reinforce—the virtual barrier of the disciplinary separation14 by
which the reader maintains a sense of security (sane, empirical) in relation to
the text, is able to demarcate the limits of the text as fiction. Thus, paradoxi-
cally, the typical reader of this text on the one hand takes the narrator at his
word, believes that the tale describes the commission of a murder; while on
the other hand is convinced of the insanity of the narrator, refusing to believe
the latter’s arguments in his own defense.15 To consider the narrative as “true!”
in both respects—the rationalizations and the denials—would be to breach
the demarcation between the perceived criminality and insanity of the events
108 Johann Pillai
related in the fictional text, and the culturally constructed sanity and morality
of the historical reality which the reader is living.
This typical, automatic response—which believes the narrator’s descrip-
tion of events, but refuses to believe his evaluation of them—not only reflects
a culturally determined delimitation of a madness/sanity boundary but also
indicates a confusion of fiction and reality on the part of a reader who, miss-
ing altogether the nature of the tale’s fictionality—which necessitates a sus-
pension of these differences—arbitrarily reads some parts of the text literally,
and treats others as metaphorical.16 To read the tale as a tale means to take
its internal logic as simultaneously, and at all times, both literal and figura-
tive, historical (in the sense of the perceptual, experiential reality it provides
in the present of the reader) and fictional. Thus, for example, in reply to his
own apostrophe, and as if to refute the purported diagnosis of madness, the
narrator claims that the dis-ease “had sharpened my senses . . . not dulled
them.” By senses, initially, one assumes a reference to wits, mental faculties:
he is mentally alert (sharp) and hence not mad. But the further qualification
regarding his sense of hearing suggests that the narrator’s claim to sanity is
based on a certain sensory acuteness; a moment later, this is carried to the
point of being supersensory: he hears all things in heaven and earth, and many
in hell. There are no grounds for privileging these qualifications one over the
other in terms of credibility; taken together in the res gestae they show state
of mind, while simultaneously warning the reader not to mistake an extraor-
dinary sense of hearing for madness—that is, not to misjudge the narrator.
For this is also a judicial or diagnostic hearing, at which the narrator
makes his apology, and where the reader is instructed to hear fairly, to “Hear-
ken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”
The reader is invited to sharpen his or her senses, to hear what the narrator
hears in heaven, earth and hell; in short, to become like the narrator on levels
mental, sensory and supersensory, cross the boundary between history and
fiction.17
In what follows, the nature of this boundary begins to be defined. The
narrator establishes initially that the events under consideration have no
identifiable motive—no cause or origin:
It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but

once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was
none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never
wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no
desire.
The “idea,” which arises spontaneously, is ghostly and persistent, and of

obscure purpose (“object”) as well as origin. At its heart there is not passion,
but love—the two assertions cancel each other out. Neither revenge nor
desire is the motive, and yet there is one consistent characterization of the
narrator’s state of mind: he is “very, very dreadfully nervous.” The fear, the
dread of the narrator is projected, embodied, finds its expression, and is
figured forth, in the image of the old man’s eye:
I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! 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.
These two consecutive passages reveal the predicament of presentness,

the temporal mode of modernity which characterizes the tale, in that they
stage the twofold and paradigmatic founding gesture of historiography—and
then its negation: first, the positing of an (absence of) origin for the narra-
tive which will follow, and the figuration of that archic absence as an alter-
ity—“his eye,” the eye of the other—which legitimates the narrated events;
secondly, the eschatological projection, into the future, of the figured origin
as the end and purpose of the narration, as an eschaton which legitimates it
in retrospect; and finally, the proposed negation of this twofold gesture by
the elimination of the eye, the very figure which defines and determines the
historiographical operation of the narrator. “The Tell-Tale Heart” thus both
affirms and denies its status as a narrative of historical events, and in this
gesture establishes its modernity as a textual space both within and without
history.18
The consequences of such a temporal paradox can only be unsettling for
the act of reading, if we hearken to the complex relation betokened by the
homophonic and homonymic play on eye/I, between the narrative I and the
eye/I of the other, the old man.19 It is this singular eye/I which is simultane-
ously the narrating subject, the object of the narrative, and the origin and
telic end of the narration. At stake in the death which is to come—on the
level of sound, on the crucial level of hearing—is the (self-)elimination of the
very “I” which speaks, of the narrative voice itself—and, by extension, since
the reader is implicated in this eye/I persona in the act of reading and writ-
ing which retells the tale, in the act of hearing which replicates the narrator’s
disease: what is at stake is precisely the critical relation between fiction and
history—the end of the reader.
The narrator’s dread is hypostatized prosopopoeically in the eye: its
resemblance to the eye of a carrion-eating bird suggests that death is immi-
nent; its association with the gaze of the old man, that the death awaited
is that of the narrative voice. Here too, perhaps, we have the first sign of
110 Johann Pillai
the absent body of which the tell-tale heart posits itself as an organ and a
metonymy—and yet, curiously, is not—that film which veils the pale blue
eye of the old man: is it not the very film of death, the dimming vision of
dying eyes? The narrator’s blood runs cold, in a turn of phrase which both
expresses his fear and dread, and foreshadows a killing in cold blood. It also
suggests the cold temperature of a corpse and hence the consanguinity of the
narrator and the old man. The narrative I decides “to rid myself ” of the eye
of the other, for paronomastically that eye/I is his own; we shall see (for we
are not only to “hearken,” but to “observe”) that the stakes are indeed high
in exchanging glances with his, for it is our own eye/I which is implicated in
the narrator’s apostrophe:
Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing.
But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I
proceeded—with what caution—with what foresight—with what
dissimulation I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man
than during the whole week before I killed him.
In the first place, the narrator’s initial apostrophe—“why will you

say . . .”—is now qualified: “You fancy me mad.” If this fancy is deluded,
then the contemptuous “madmen know nothing” is a thrust at the reader
(“you”) as well as the narrator (“I”), for determining the limits of madness
depends on the gaze of the reader, on our ability to see; twice we are told:
“you should have seen. . . .” The reader’s judicial gaze becomes a critical fac-
tor in the middle term of the convoluted enthymeme which governs the tale,
and of which the major premise is that madmen know nothing. What will
dispel the fancy of madness is our seeing now not only “how healthily—how
calmly” the tale is told, but “how wisely” its events take place, and with what
foresight—the ability to provide for, but also see into, the future. Indeed, the
very nature of the event described as the murder of the old man by the nar-
rator (“. . . I killed him”) is thrown into question by the playful linguistic
exchange between eye and I which establishes a scopic reciprocity between
the two: the narrator’s phrase “to take the life of the old man” suggests not
simply killing, but substitution and resemblance—taking on his life.
It is this exchange which is revealed in the thanatoptic premeditation
that follows:
And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and
opened it—oh, so gently! And then, when I had made an opening
sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed,
so that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you
would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it
slowly, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man’s sleep.
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. Ha!—would
a madman have been so wise as this? And then, when my head
was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously—oh, so
cautiously—cautiously (for the hinges creaked)—I undid it just so
much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye. And this I did
for seven long nights—every night, just at midnight—but I found
the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for
it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye. And every
morning, when the day broke, I went boldly into the chamber, and
spoke courageously to him, calling him by name in a hearty tone,
and inquiring how he had passed the night. So you see, he would
have been a very profound old man, indeed, to suspect that every
night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept.
Here several structures of repetition combine. There is, first, a temporal

movement, which becomes increasingly more precise, and also more mea-
sured: “every night, about midnight . . . every night, just at midnight . . .
every night, just at twelve. . . .” The duration of events staged in the narra-
tor’s description of his movements—“oh, so gently! . . . slowly—very, very
slowly . . . cautiously—oh, so cautiously . . .”—takes up the pace of his deci-
sion to kill the old man “by degrees—very gradually,” his proceeding “with
what caution.” The metrical style of the narration is itself an indication of
“how healthily—how calmly” the narrator can tell the whole story.
But there is another kind of repetition here, to which this temporal
movement lends its measure. The narrator “opened” the door, “made an
opening,” put in a lantern “all closed, closed.” He placed his head within the
opening, and then “undid the lantern”—that is, opened it. For seven days, he
could proceed no further, because he found “the eye always closed.” There is
also a contrapuntal movement of physical penetration and withdrawal here
which echoes the mental penetration of the narrator when “the idea entered
my brain”;20 as the idea haunts the narrator, so he, by day and night, haunts
the old man: “I put in a dark lantern . . . no light shone out . . . I thrust in my
head . . . I thrust it in. . . .” What, then, is the nature of the space—of the
inside and outside—of these events? What is implied by the measure of the
narrator’s words, by the opening and closing they describe?
These characterizations establish, first, the interchangeability of head,
lantern and chamber—even the apparently insignificant reference to creaking
hinges connotes, by association, both the panel of the lantern and the door
of the chamber—since knowledge of and in each is determined by optical
perception; it is light which enables the narrator to see. The events described
112 Johann Pillai
take place in a chamber, but the space of the chamber is coextensive with the
space of the narrator’s head, for these events are recounted in the light of his
memory—perhaps his hallucination, perhaps his dream. This space is also
coeval with the space of the text of the narration, and the physical space of
the pages into which we, as readers, are looking—both through the narrator’s
eyes and as critical observers of the narrator. The optical thresholds—the
door, the panel of the lantern—which mark the difference between inside
and outside mark, no less, the separation between the eye/I of the reader and
the eye/I of the narrator.
“His door,” “the room,” “the chamber,” are architectural commonplaces,
but a “chamber” is also the cameral seat of a judge conducting a hearing out
of court. And chambers define the brain, the eye—and the heart: the upper
cavities, or auricles, derive their name from the Latin word auris, or ear. We
return, then, to the narrator’s—and the judicious reader’s—extraordinary
sense of hearing: in the opening and closing, the in/out movement of the
narrator’s actions there must be heard a pulsing, systolic and diastolic: the
textual heartbeat of a system of circulation.
The nature of this circulation does not appear to be bodily; indeed
luxation from all physical contexts, or the positing of the body as absent,
appears to be the very premise of the tale’s title, and apart from a few dis-
jecta membra—the narrator’s hand which opens the door, his thumb which
in a moment will slip on the metal fastening of the lantern—no physi-
cal features are given in the tale which would permit the identification
of its narrator or characters. The two organs whose senses circumfuse the
economy of the text are the ear (the sense of hearing) and the eye (the
sense of sight). What circulates in the economy of the tell-tale heart and
its reading—through the valvular opening and closing of doors and panels,
through the ebb and flow of the narrator’s movement and vision—is light,
which enables the scopic exchange of the gaze, the eye; and contermi-
nously—through the caesurae and hiatuses of the narrative voice, through
the space between narrator and reader—its homologue, sound: the specular
exchange of the subject, the I.
Thus are implicated, in the thin ray of light released by the narra-
tor to enable vision, three gazes: not only the narrator’s, and that of the
old man, 21 but the apostrophized reader’s as well: “So you see, he would
have been a very profound old man, indeed, to suspect that every night,
just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept.” 22 It is in following
the injunction to “Hearken! and observe,” in the critical acts of hearing and
seeing, that the reciprocal nature of the relation between narrator and
reader is realized; indeed, the very laugh he attributes to the reader—“you
would have laughed . . .”—is expressed by the narrator himself in a singular
exclamation: “Ha!” And when he asks, not altogether rhetorically, “would a
madman have been so wise as this?” it must be remembered that one of the
measures of wisdom is foresight.
Now presumably, taking the life of the old man, if we assume the tra-
ditional interpretation of this event as a murder, could be achieved easily
enough while the old man is unconscious: we are told of the “old man’s sleep:”
that “he lay upon his bed,” that the narrator “found the eye always closed,”
that “I looked in upon him while he slept.” But the act which the narrator
contemplates is not, cannot be murder, and it is precisely for this reason that
when the eye is closed he finds it “impossible to do the work”—which will
“rid myself of the eye/[I] for ever”—which entails a blinding and self-negat-
ing act of narrative and historiographical suicide.
What is in fact required for the narrator to proceed is the penetration
by light of the old man’s eye: it is necessary, for “death” to occur, that the old
man’s eye be open, able to see. It is this eye which vexes the narrator, afflicts
him like a disease; for it is indeed a dis-ease, ultimately, by which the narra-
tor is vexed: not a sickness as such, but the dread of a specular subject which
refuses to die, an EVIL EYE/I, which, mirrored back in the gaze of the
narrator, always declares: “I/EYE LIVE!”
These observations are all prefatory to the night of the central event of
the tale, when the narrator makes his move:
Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening
the door. A watch’s minute hand moves more quickly than did
mine. Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own
powers—of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of
triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little,
and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly
chuckled at the idea; and perhaps he heard me; for he moved on the
bed suddenly, as if startled. Now you may think that I drew back—
but no. His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness (for
the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers), and so
I knew that he could not see the opening of the door, and I kept
pushing it on steadily, steadily.
I had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my
thumb slipped upon the tin fastening, and the old man sprang up
in the bed, crying out—“Who’s there?”
In this controlled slowness of movement23 the narrator feels his powers,

his sagacity—the wisdom of foresight—but his estimation of the old man is
thrown into question when he assumes the latter will “not even . . . dream of
my secret deeds or thoughts.” Like a suspicion, a dream is—if not an intan-
gible thought—a vision, a sight, a seeing during sleep; and at this very moment,
114 Johann Pillai
the old man “moved on the bed suddenly, as if—”—as if, indeed, he is aware
of the other’s thoughts. Although the narrator tries to explain this in terms of
his chuckle—“perhaps he heard me” (and let us not forget the narrator’s own
extraordinary sense of hearing)—he is able to know, remarkably, what the old
man is dreaming. And whence that attribution of fear to the old man—“as
if startled”? No sound, in fact, is made by the narrator; he merely chuckles
“at heart,” “fairly.” Similarly, in a room with shutters “close fastened” like his
lantern,24 the narrator is able to attribute “fear of robbers” to the old man, a
fear which recalls his own dreadful nervousness. He also knows what the old
man can see: “I knew that he could not see the opening of the door.” As the
“idea” enters the narrator’s brain and he the room, as he knows the mind of
the old man, so, now, his own “secret deeds or thoughts” appear to enter the
old man’s. The relation between the two is indeed puzzling, and the pressing
question, the central problematic of the text, is that of the narrator’s identity,
which is posed suddenly, fearfully, by the old man: “Who’s there?”
To this critical question the narrator makes no reply, but in what fol-
lows, the relation between narrator and old man is elaborated with surprising
sympathy:
I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move
a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. 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.
Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of
mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief—oh, no!—it
was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the
soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many
a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled
up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the
terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the
old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart. I knew
that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise,
when he had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since
growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless,
but could not. He had been saying to himself—“It is nothing but
the wind in the chimney—it is only a mouse crossing the floor,”
or “it is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp.” Yes, he
has been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions; but
he had found all in vain.
The narrator keeps silent; and so must the old man, for despite the former’s
acute sense of hearing, he does not hear him lie down. And he knows that
the old man is still sitting up, doing what he himself is best at: listening,
“just as I have done.” In this dreadful silence, punctuated by the ticking
of death watches, 25 a sound is heard; and the narrator identifies it with
absolute certainty: “I knew it was the groan . . . I knew the sound well . . . I
knew what the old man felt.” And the reason (dreadfully nervous) he is able
to identify this sound of “mortal terror” and “awe” is that at the same time
that it emanates from the old man, just at midnight, it wells up “from my own
bosom.” The voice of the old man is thus doubled, in a “dreadful echo,” in
the narrator’s own voice. 26
The groan is “stifled”; it is no longer clear from which soul it emanates.
The effect of this loss of breath, this unspeakable suffocation, is to increase
“the terrors that distracted me”—and here the narrator’s dis-traction suggests
not merely lack of concentration, but a pulling asunder, a physical dismem-
berment; it also characterizes a mind torn in different directions, whence
mental derangement, madness.27 Since as readers we too—even though no
sound is actually uttered—have been privy to the singular laugh (“Ha!”) of
the narrator, we must take this matter under advisement; if and indeed the
old man hears the narrator chuckle “at heart,” then must his own hearing be
likewise extraordinary.
We are told that, like the narrator’s, the old man’s fears have been
“growing upon him.” Like the narrator, the old man has been “trying to
fancy them causeless . . .”28 and, simultaneously, in a repetition of the narra-
tor’s figuration of origin, fancying their causes: the wind, a mouse, a cricket.
These fancies are not altogether aleatory—the “wind” carries in its connota-
tions the breath of the narrator and of life; “mouse” is etymologically related
to the “muscle” which the narrator does not move;29 and the sound made by
the hinges of the lantern, that creak, not only means, in an archaic sense, to
utter a vulturine croak, but also describes the strident sound of insects, the
creak of crickets and refers, by extension, to a death watch—but, we are told,
futile to indulge:
All in vain; because Death, in approaching him, had stalked

with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim. And
it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that
caused him to feel—although he neither saw nor heard—to feel
the presence of my head within the room.
When I had waited a long time, very patiently, without hear-
ing him lie down, I resolved to open a little—a very, very little
crevice in the lantern. So I opened it—you cannot imagine how
stealthily, stealthily—until, at length, a single, dim ray like the
thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and full upon the
vulture eye.
116 Johann Pillai
The old man’s attempts—to “fancy [his fears] causeless,” and then
to name and figure the origin of his fears—are to no avail because of the
impending moment which will, in theory, negate cause and origin—the
moment of Death. This is a moment neither seen nor heard, only felt—for
Death stands without the narrative economy of light and sound marked by
eye and ear, as its legitimating ground, as its origin and end; and within
that economy, as an enveloping influence, a shadow which—unlike an optical
shadow, a visible figure cast by the form of a body, interrupting light—must
therefore appear unperceived, a figure personified. Death is thus behind and
foregrounds every move of the narrative voice: as the narrator stalks the old
man, so Death; as the narrator is preceded by a dark lantern, so Death, “his
black shadow before him.”
In the confusion of this approach, the antecedents of “his,” “him” and
the “victim” cannot be differentiated—for whose is the shadow? To whom
does it appear? And who the victim? Indeed, as Death, old man and nar-
rator become for a moment indistinguishable, the focus of the narration
shifts—from the narrator’s feelings to those of the old man as they are
known and felt by the narrator. The Old Testament psalmist’s dauntless-
ness in the valley of the shadow of death 30 is ironically both gainsaid—in
the awe and fear shadowing both narrator and old man—and affirmed,
for if, as they dreadfully echo each other’s voices, old man and narrator
shadow each other, then Death is both the subject and object of the nar-
rative action, both slayer and victim. The outcome of such a self-negation
of death can only be a new subject within and without history, a subject
which, in spite of itself—and terrifyingly to the reader whose commentary
must in its execution echo and shadow the voice of the tale—declares,
“I live!”
The narrator waits, “without hearing” and unable to see—as the old
man, “neither saw nor heard”—and a crack is opened in the lantern. The
crevice releases light; the narrator’s eye opens; by this light he will see. His
furtiveness—“stealthily, stealthily”—is transparent, for stealth refers to the
practice of stealing, and the chamber is in darkness, the shutters drawn,
through fear of robbers: as the narrator’s fears are figured in the eye/I of the old
man, so the latter’s are answered in the eye/I of the narrator. As the lantern
opens, enabling the narrator’s vision, a ray of light is released like a spider’s
thread—the thread of Arachne, by which suicide is aborted into life. 31 The
gaze is a predatory act, light the medium of predation; and the vision of the
gazing I is reciprocated by the sudden sight of the vulture eye:
It was open—wide, wide open—and I grew furious as I gazed

upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness—all a dull blue, with a
hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but
I could see nothing else of the old man’s face or person: for I had
directed the ray as if by instinct precisely upon the damned spot.
Light enters the eye of the old man, but it is the narrator’s gaze which is
described. By neither madness nor passion is he seized, but dread of the veil
videlicet, that hideous surface which marks the coincidence and refraction
of his and the old man’s gaze.32 The old man’s “face or person” is invisible,
for the focus, instinctive and inevitable, is on the subjectivity represented by
the eye/I, the damned spot33 which marks the state and position—moral,
mental, topographical, temporal—of the narrative I/eye relative to (across
the disciplinary boundaries between the historical and the fictional, the
literal and the figurative) the listener and observer; marks, in short, the
beginning and the end of the tale, the critical state of the eye/I which is the
very subject of the tale.
Two gazes hang in suspense on a thread of light; now, and in this long
moment, the narrator becomes conscious of a sound, a rhythmic beat which
has hitherto remained subliminal:
And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness
is but over-acuteness of the senses?—now, I say, there came to
my ears, a low, dull, quick sound such as a watch makes when
enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well too. It was the beating
of the old man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum
stimulates the soldier into courage.
As eye confronts eye, the tell-tale heart is heard within “The Tell-Tale
Heart”: it is a sound described and figured within—as an abyssal echo
of—the sound of the narrator’s own voice. And indeed, the narrator “knew
that sound well too;” he admits a familiarity with the old man’s heartbeat
which one would have only with one’s own. 34
The effect of “the beating of the old man’s heart” is thus that it—elid-
ing the differences between the narrator’s self and the other’s—“increased
my fury”; the heartbeat can only be compared to “the beating of a drum,”35
for what increases the narrator’s fury is the resonance of the extraordinarily
sensitive barrier responsible for his acuteness of hearing: a tympanic mem-
brane stretched across the abyss between the voice of the tell-tale heart and
its echo; an eardrum which reverberates in time to the measure of the heart’s
low/dull/quick sound. 36 As the narrator’s fury increases, the measure of tale-
telling builds: less calm, more repetitive; less healthy, more strident.
But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I tried
how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eye. Meantime the
118 Johann Pillai
hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker,

and louder and louder every instant. The old man’s terror must have
been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment!—do you
mark me well? I have told you that I am nervous: so I am. And
now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that
old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable
terror. Yet, for some minutes longer I refrained and stood still. But
the beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst.
And now a new anxiety seized me—the sound would be heard by
a neighbour!
The narrator refrains, 37 both movement and breath stifled. His gaze
wavers; he attempts to keep the light steady; the palpitations increase. The
ominous beating sound—one of many the narrator hears “in hell”—is also
audible to the reader38 —as the rhythmic repetition, “quicker and quicker,
and louder and louder,” of the tell-tale heart. And now, at the moment
when their identities appear to have merged, a subtle distance is intro-
duced in the reciprocal vision of the narrator and old man. Rather than
declare his knowledge that “the old man’s terror” was extreme, the narrator
conjectures—the italics stress this—that it “must have been extreme.” As
the sound grows louder, he demands, “do you mark me well”?39 To mark
is to hear, to hearken; it is also to delimit a boundary, differentiate: we are
asked, in short, to recognize the “me” which speaks, to answer the old
man’s question, “Who’s there?” And indeed, the “dreadful silence” recalls
the “dreadful echo” of the shared groan—but the heartbeat, which the
narrator “knew . . . well” a moment ago, has now become so strange. This
sound, which but an instant past was likened to the soldier’s stimulus to
courage, now ironically causes “uncontrollable terror”; there is an emphatic
shift from the old man’s terror to the narrator’s own, and a “new anxiety”
seizes the narrator (“me”).
Not that he may be heard by the old man, but that his preternatural
sense of hearing may be shared by a neighbor. It is the possibility of a social
intrusion, the intrusion of a third party in the narrator’s private and specular
vision40 that precipitates him into action:
The old man’s hour had come! With a loud yell, I threw open the
lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once—once only. In
an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over
him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done. But, for many
minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did
not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall. At length it
ceased. The old man was dead. I removed the bed and examined the
corpse. Yes, he was stone, stone dead. I placed my hand upon the
heart and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation. He
was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more.
What occurs here has a striking symmetry: both narrator and old man utter
a cry—there is a yell, and also a shriek. The narrator underscores the singu-
larity of the old man’s shriek by doubling it in his repetition: “once—once
only.” And instead of throwing open the door, he throws open the lantern:
coinciding with the yell and the shriek is a flash of light, a blinding moment
of sight. There is, however, no detailed description of a murder, no sudden
moment of death41—the crucial act of physical violence is glaringly and
conspicuously omitted.
Eventually, as the narrator becomes calmer, the danger of the heart’s
being audible to a neighbor of extraordinary hearing decreases—until finally,
after “many minutes,” the heartbeat stops. The heavy bed—burden of sleep
and dreams—is “removed” with no apparent effort, its plane a plane of reflec-
tion between the narrator and the old man—or metempsychosis—whose
thoughts, dreams, and even pulses, seem to synchronize. The old man,
we are told no less than thrice, is dead;42 the owner of the vulture eye has
himself become carrion. Or so it would appear. For in the uncanny light of
resemblance between narrator and old man, what certainty is there that “the
heart” upon which he places his hand is not the narrator’s own? that the
“muffled sound” has not been the subsiding of his own heartbeat quickened
by “uncontrollable terror”? And if from the narrator’s own heart “no pulsa-
tion” can be felt, then who has died? whose voice speaks? what dread voice
narrates the tale?
For if the narrator has, as he claims, rid himself of the eye/I forever—
“His eye/[I] would trouble me no more”—one would expect the narrative to
end here. Yet (for reasons which will soon become clear) it does not, proceed-
ing immediately to an explicit scene of physical dismemberment:
If you still 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. I then replaced the
boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye—not even
his—could have detected anything wrong. There was nothing to
wash out—no stain of any kind—no bloodspot whatever. I had
been too wary for that. A tub had caught all—ha! ha!
120 Johann Pillai
The narrator has built part of his defense against the accusation of madness
on his sagacity, and one of its measures is his ability to dissimulate. The
body—a disarticulated head, arms and legs—is introduced briefly as corpus
delicti before being concealed from human detection.43 No mention is made
of the heart or its beat; and there is “no stain . . . no bloodspot,” for suddenly
humanized in death, the damned spot of the vulture eye can no longer be
seen; the subjectivity represented by the old man’s I has been incarnated,
killed, dismembered and interred. It would seem that the narrator has put
an end to “the terrors that distracted me”—and yet an acute sensibility might
notice, sotto voce, an ominous doubling of that singular chuckle we heard
earlier into almost an ironic laugh: “ha! ha!”
Some four hours have passed in dissimulation—“the night [has]
waned”44 —since midnight, when the groan of mortal terror was heard, and
a knock at the door signals the neighbor’s intrusion that the narrator had
anxiously and fearfully anticipated:
When I had made an end of these labors, it was four o’clock—

still dark as midnight. As the bell sounded the hour, there came
a knocking at the street door. I went down to open it with a light
heart,—for what had I now to fear?
There entered three men, who introduced themselves, with
perfect suavity, as officers of the police. A shriek had been heard
by a neighbour during the night; suspicion of foul play had been
aroused; information had been lodged at the police office, and
they (the officers) had been deputed to search the premises.
The appearance of the three policemen—identical in number, signifi-

cantly, to the “three planks” under which the corpse is concealed—marks a
sudden expansion of the events described by the narrator into a volume of
social space. The focus on the old man’s chamber has broadened to place it
in perspective in “that old house”; the possibility of a neighbor, and now the
“street door” and “police office,” suggest encounters and sights in an orga-
nized world beyond darkness and closed shutters.45 The reason for this soci-
etal intervention in the narrator’s world is that a sound has been overheard by
a neighbor: not the heartbeat the narrator feared, but “a shriek”—and thus,
curiously, not the voice of the narrator, who gave a “loud yell,” but the voice
of the old man:
I smiled,—for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen wel-

come. The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream. The old man,
I mentioned, was absent in the country. I took my visitors all over
the house. I bade them search—search well. I led them, at length,
to his chamber. I showed them his treasures, secure, undisturbed.

In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the
room, and desired them here to rest from their fatigues, while I
myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my
own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse
of the victim.
The narrator welcomes and disarms the officers with comparable sua-
vity: with the old man absent in the country, only he himself could have been
overheard.46 Confirming our suspicions, he claims the old man’s shriek as his
own; in the same breath he suggests that all that has occurred has occurred
in a dream—a text produced in his own sleep. He then displays a surprising
familiarity with the old man’s treasures, confidently inviting the policemen
to rest in the latter’s own chamber, where his corpse is encrypted.47 And
now, in an extraordinary moment, the narrator faces his inquisitors upon the
very spot below which the body has been concealed, a scene which brings
together simultaneously the entire series of reflections and refractions which
have structured the text: narrator | old man; narrator | reader; eye | eye; I | I;
self | other; sleep | waking; yell | shriek; inside | outside; presence | absence;
dissimulation | truth; fiction | fact; figurative | literal; sanity | insanity; ner-
vous | mad.
The bar (“|”) which here represents the fold between these possibili-
ties is in some cases a physical barrier—as when it stands for the heavy bed,
with the narrator on top and the old man pressed below; or for the three
planks of the floor, with the narrator seated above, and the old man dismem-
bered below. It may be architectural or mechanical: the chamber or street
door between inside and outside space, the window shutters or lantern panel
on the hesitant threshold of darkness and light; physiological: the veil over
the eye, the tympanum of the ear; psychological or philosophical: the line
between dreams and consciousness, or truth and falsehood, fact and fiction,
self and other. It may stand for rhetorical difference, such as that between
a shriek and a yell; for an ideological or societal barrier between legitimate
action and crime, or what is accepted as truth and what as metaphor; for
historical distance, such as the hermeneutic space between the reader and the
text; or for a limit of systematic thought, as in the case of disciplinary barriers
drawn by the clinical or legal professions to separate health from sickness, or
sanity from madness.
The number of policemen corresponds to the number of floorboards
below the narrator because they have the same function: although they
are portrayed sitting and talking with the narrator, the three men are not
physical characters; rather, they are figures of society, of the internalized law
which separates the narrator from himself, separates what is superficial from
122 Johann Pillai
what is latent, what exists within the limits of systematic thought from what
is unthought, the social and historical self from absolute alterity. The three
floorboards and the three men thus do not react; they simply mark a limit,
social and psychological, the bar (“|”) between self and other:
The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was

singularly at ease. They sat, and while I answered cheerily, they
chatted familiar things. But, ere long, I felt myself getting pale
and wished them gone. My head ached, and I fancied a ringing
in my ears: but still they sat and still chatted. The ringing became
more distinct:—it continued and became more distinct: I talked
more freely to get rid of the feeling: but it continued and gained
definitiveness—until, at length, I found that the noise was not
within my ears.
The narrator’s singularity continues to draw attention to the absence of the

old man, and his paleness and headache reveal his internal tension,48 which
manifests itself psychologically and physiologically as a fancied “ringing
in my ears.” The sound becomes more distinct and yet more distant, as it
is casually, almost accidentally, revealed to be a feeling whose source is, in
fact, outside his ears; the effect of this tympanic tension between inside and
outside is to stimulate the narrator to speak:
No doubt I now grew very pale—but I talked more fluently, and

with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased—and what could
I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound—much such a sound as a watch
makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath—and yet the
officers heard it not. I talked more quickly—more vehemently;
but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles,
in a high key and with violent gesticulations, but the noise steadily
increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and
fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observation of the
men—but the noise steadily increased. Oh God! what could I do?
I foamed—I raved—I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had
been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over
all and continually increased.
As the sound from within and without the narrator’s ears increases, it is
echoed and reflected in the increasing fluency, pitch, speed and intensity
of his own narration. This voice—the voice of “The Tell-Tale Heart”—now
describes its own collapse as the narrator is rapidly disarticulated into three
uncontrollable, twitching fragments: first, his speech, which proceeds from
his head: fluent, heightened, quick, vehement, high-pitched, foaming, rav-

ing, swearing. Second, his arms: gesticulating violently, swinging the chair.
Finally, his legs: arising, furiously and excitedly “pac[ing] the floor to and
fro with heavy strides.” This disarticulation, this dis-traction (preceded by a
gasp for breath), is an experience on the level of narrative voice, of what has
been described by that voice and enacted as the physical dismemberment of
the old man: “First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and
the arms and the legs.”
Previously at pains to establish that it was not the voice of madness, the
narrator’s voice is now vehement,49 and the “I” paces the floor, foaming and
raving. All that separates the dissevered parts of the narrative voice from the
severed limbs of the old man is the thin bar (“|”) of three floorboards—the
bar which marks the limit between speech and silence; the bar at which the
narrator must be heard:
It grew louder—louder—louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly,

and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God!—no,
no! They heard!—they suspected—they knew! they were making a
mockery of my horror!—this I thought, and this I think. But any
thing was better than this agony! Any thing was more tolerable
than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer!
I felt that I must scream or die!—and now—again!—hark! louder!
louder! louder! louder!—
The three men smile, as the narrator smiled a moment ago, and
their smiles are hypocritical—grinning thespian masks.50 The narrator’s
despair—“Oh God! . . . Almighty God!—no, no!”—and agony come from
the fear that what is concealed may be made known, that the three men’s
demeanor re-presents and mirrors, mocking and deriding, his own dis-
simulation. It is his suppression of knowledge of the old man which threat-
ens to burst through; and silence would seem to be the wisest course. Yet,
paradoxically, the narrator feels that there are only two options: “I must
scream or die.” This feeling seems inexplicable—the narrator has confessed
no guilt, no remorse has been admitted, and the entire narration has been
based on a justification of the sanity of his actions—until one recalls the
moment of “death,” when the narrator leaped into the room and confronted
the old man. The reason for the policemen’s visit soon afterwards was that
“[a] shriek had been heard by a neighbour during the night”; there no men-
tion is made of the narrator’s “loud yell,” and here no conclusion can be
drawn but this: that the yell and the shriek sound as one voice. And that
the narrator is closer to the truth than he admits when he claims that the
shriek was his own in a dream.
124 Johann Pillai
The moment when the narrator must “scream or die” is now suspended
on the brink of identity or difference: it is a moment of uncertainty suspended
on the bar between narrator and old man, a wavering between the presence
and absence of the old man’s voice within the narrator’s voice. The moment is
resolved dramatically in the crisis of the narrator’s final words, where a com-
plex network of relationships is suddenly unravelled: the narrator ironically
accuses the policemen of his own act of dissimulation, confesses his own
commission of the deed, and calls for an unveiling or unmasking—a removal
of the floorboards which will reveal the old man’s presence. In the same
punning breath, he calls on his listeners to hearken—“hear, hear!”—and
distances himself from his own narration, from the voice of the “Tell-Tale
Heart,” by referring to it in the third person—“his heart.” All of this happens
without warning, in a sudden, bone-chilling, singular shriek—by which the
yell of the narrative voice becomes possessed by its other, comes to its end in
the I of the old man:
“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear

up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous
heart!”
II
Forgiven be the reader whose reason is stretched, whose blood runs cold, on
hearing these last words. The end of the tale, the climactic shriek, plunges
and recedes in a sudden void before the critical eye. A murder is committed;
the killer possessed; a dead voice speaks through a living mouth. A death
has occurred—a suicide; a disembodied voice speaks from beyond the grave.
No murder may have taken place, no death—or else it may be a corpse’s
voice which shrieks at the end of the tale. The narrator has taken the old
man’s life; the narrator has disappeared; only the old man remains. Narrator
and old man are the same—or are not the same at all. There neither is, nor
ever was, an old man. Nothing has happened in the tale; or if it has, it was
only a dream, the old man’s or the narrator’s. A second reading must recog-
nize the voice of the narrator as that of the old man. What judgment can be
passed, now that it is no longer clear that a crime has been committed, that
any event within the space of narration has not been a hallucination, and no
longer certain from the close of the tale what can be said of it when it began?
What has happened in the tale, and what, in its reading, must be the end?
The narrator’s shriek confronts the reader with a synesthetic image
in light and sound. Striking our eye, impinging on our eardrums, is the
homophonic imperative to “hear, hear!”—which is also a deixis, a pointing
out in space—both here and here!—of the hideous site of the tell-tale heart.
Visually, unspeakably, the image is the sight of a heart cut out from a body,
and soul: beating, living, palpitating, red. The space of the end unfolds before
us in mingled horror and vertiginous fascination, a moment not adequated
by speech.51 Here, and in this space, reader and narrator share a present, for
the latter’s cries have brought the events of the narrative’s past into the time
of its reading: “and now—again!—hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!” The
tale thus ends in the past of its narration and simultaneously in the present
of its reading: now the reader must construct the sequel to the tale; now its
consequences must by implication follow. These events, projecting forward
beyond the end—on a literal level the charge of madness; arrest, questioning
and confinement, perhaps—must then become the past, precede the tale’s
beginning, for the end of the tale has placed the reader in its narration’s past,
facing a future which is already a figment of the narrator’s memory.
As the critical “I” stands on the brink of this temporal vortex, drawn
inexorably down into the maelstrom’s eye of narrative time, ghostly echoes
and fleeting associations suggest a momentary diversion, a respite, in two of
Poe’s other tales. The narrator of “The Black Cat” speaks from a “felon’s cell
. . . for tomorrow I die and today I would unburden my soul”; it is in order to
provide “a cause for my wearing these fetters and for tenanting this cell of the
condemned” that the speaker in “The Imp of the Perverse” narrates.52 The
incarceration of the “Tell-Tale Heart”’s narrator is implicit in the denials of
his own madness and in his final confession to officers of the law. In all three
cases, the narration is an act of speech—suspended on the threshold between
life and its radical other. Thus the “Cat” narrator is “consigned . . . to the
hangman”; the “Imp” ends with a rhetorical question: “To-day I wear these
chains, and am here! To-morrow I shall be fetterless!—but where?” Between
the here of today and the where of tomorrow—when presumably the narrator
will be damned, executed, or found to be mad—the difference is both spatial
and temporal, marked by the physical and conceptual boundaries of the cell
which both contains and compels the act of narration.
The “I” of “The Black Cat” confronts its other in the eye of a black cat:
“I took from my waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor
beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket. I
blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity. . . .” Here two
acts conjoin as one—the act of telling or penning the tale and the act of
penknifing the eye/I of the other, (self-)mutilation or ommacide—in the atro-
cious performative of narration. The deed is consummated in a “death scene”
where the cat is hanged, executed by the suspension of breath and speech;
damnation physical and symbolic is then visited upon the narrator, in the
form of flames which consume his worldly wealth and leave, at the head of
his bed, a gigantic image in bas-relief of a hanged cat. A second, identical,
one-eyed cat appears thereafter to vex him, marked in white fur upon its
126 Johann Pillai
chest the gallows, a symbol of death and resurrection.53 When the narrator
finally strikes, the blow of his axe is displaced from the cat (which vanishes)
to his wife, whose corpse he walls up in the cellar. He is calm when the law
arrives—“I scarcely knew what I uttered at all”—but as the officers are about
to leave, the narrator raps on the wall with a cane, precisely on the spot where
his wife is immured:
I was answered by a voice from within the tomb!—by a cry, at

first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then
quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream,
utterly anomalous and inhuman—a howl, a wailing shriek, half
of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out
of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony
and of the demons that exult in the damnation. . . . Swooning, I
staggered to the opposite wall. . . . In the next [instant] a dozen
stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse,
already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before
the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended
mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft
had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had
consigned me to the hangman.
The tale ends with the shriek of the narrator’s alter ego—figured as
the black cat and represented metonymically by a single I/eye and a mouth
whose words are red and read. The voice which finally betrays the narrator
of “The Black Cat” is his own, but in it a difference, a strangeness, has been
introduced, “anomalous and inhuman,” and in which the narrator cannot
recognize himself. It is for this reason that the voice of the cat is described
as at the same time the voice of the damned and the voice which exults in
damning. Just as the “Tell-Tale Heart” ends in the old man’s shriek, here the
narrator will become the other, take on the life of the hanged black cat and
in his turn be hanged.
In the premeditated murder of “The Imp of the Perverse,” the relation
of stalker to stalked is explicit, and not simply a relation of perpetrator to
victim—“I am one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Per-
verse,” the narrator declares—but a complex of exchanges involved in the act
of reading. Both the narrator and his victim read, prefiguring and implicat-
ing—“I need not vex you with impertinent details”—our own narrative. The
brief “murder scene” thus describes not an act of violence, but the substitu-
tion of the narrator’s light for the reader’s, a pharmaceutical replacement of
the air in the victim’s ill-ventilated apartment by air of the narrator’s own
making:54
At length, in reading some French memoirs, I found an account of

a nearly fatal illness that occurred to Madame Pilau, through the
agency of a candle accidentally poisoned. I knew my victim’s habit
of reading in bed. I knew, too, that his apartment was narrow and
ill-ventilated. But I need not vex you with impertinent details. I
need not describe the easy artifices by which I substituted, in his
bed-room candle-stand, a wax-light of my own making for the one
which I there found. The next morning he was discovered dead in
his bed. . . .
Unsuspected, the narrator inherits his victim’s estate and enjoys years
of “absolute security”—until, at length, he comes to be haunted by a thought
“like the ringing in our ears,” a temptation to confess: “And now my own
casual self-suggestion, that I might possibly be fool enough to confess the
murder of which I had been guilty, confronted me, as if the very ghost of
him whom I had murdered—and beckoned me on to death.” The narration
ends with the narrator’s betrayal by his own voice, which breaks into social
space out of a confinement here revealed to be psychological. The limits of
containment are breached, and a shortage of breath, a gasp, a swoon, pre-
ludes the end:
I walked vigorously—faster—still faster—at length I ran. I felt a

maddening desire to shriek aloud. . . . I still quickened my pace.
I bounded like a madman. . . . At length the populace took the
alarm, and pursued me. I felt then the consummation of my fate.
Could I have torn out my tongue, I would have done it—but a
rough voice resounded in my ears—a rougher grasp seized me
by the shoulder. I turned—I gasped for breath. For a moment I
experienced all the pangs of suffocation; I became blind, and deaf,
and giddy; and then some invisible fiend, I thought, struck me with
his broad palm upon the back. The long-imprisoned secret burst
forth from my soul. They say I spoke with a distinct enunciation,
but with marked emphasis and passionate hurry, as if in dread of
interruption. . . . Having related all that was necessary for the fullest
judicial conviction, I fell prostrate in a swoon. . . .
The three tales taken together, “Imp,” “Cat” and “Heart,” present a
composite narrative pattern in its several dimensions. On the simplest level,
each tale is told by an unnamed narrator (“I”), and features a second charac-
ter who is the narrator’s figurative double or alter ego: the old man, the black
cat, the victim who reads. The narrator’s voice speaks to an implied reader
(or engages in an internal monologue) initially in a self justifying mode of
128 Johann Pillai
confession, and describes a “murder” of the narrator’s other. The dead other
is then interred—under floorboards, behind a wall, as a “long-imprisoned
secret” in the narrator’s mind. Eventually, in a social space—policemen, the
crowd in the street—the narrator is driven by an irrepressible urge to betray
himself, and does so by a second narration within the tale, the other’s voice:
the cry of the black cat, the shriek and heartbeat of the old man, the narra-
tor’s own voice unknown to him—“they say I spoke with a distinct enuncia-
tion . . .”—in confession.55
Each narrative places in relief its own voice, as a radical alterity within
this compelling moment of speech; the moment staged as a death scene is
thus revealed to be a scene of recognition in which the subject and object
of narration confront each other, exchange identities, and yield to differ-
ence. The relation enacted in each tale—between subject and object, or the
act of narration and the acts described by narration—is grounded, strangely
and irreducibly, in a quality, tendency, feeling or character, which the “Cat”
narrator identifies as “the spirit of PERVERSENESS,” and the “Imp” as “a
paradoxical something:”
. . . one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the

indivisible primary faculties or sentiments, which give direction
to the character of Man[;] . . . a perpetual inclination, in the teeth
of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because
we understand it to be such[;] . . . [an] unfathomable longing
of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature. . . .
(“Cat,” 225)
. . . an innate and primitive principle of human action, . . . a mobile

without motive, a motive not motiviert. Through its promptings we
act without comprehensible object; . . . through its promptings we
act, for the reason that we should not. . . . (“Imp,” 281)
These characterizations locate perversity, in its role as the founding and self-
undermining ground of the tales’ telling, within the compass of the funda-
mental trope of irony:56 the relation between narrator and old man appears
in this context as a doubling within the sign “I” of the narrating subject—I
= (self | other)—where the bar or veil separating self from other is a plane
of infinite reflection between the subject and its self-perception as object,
a crevice or space marking the disjunction between an I and an I which do
not altogether see eye to eye.
This relation finds its paradigmatic moment in death; it is the play of
irony in the narration of death which is staged in these three tales. The “death
scene” in the “Tell-Tale Heart” should be the end of the narration, a moment
where difference is erased and beyond which there is no further possibility

of language. The moment appears, however, as a staging within the language
of narration, of the end of narration—a staging in language of the impos-
sibility of language. An irreducible difference is thus introduced—the veil
which prevents recognition, the fine line between a shriek and a yell—even
in Death, which becomes a sign. Death—where the bar of difference must
disappear, and self and other become one—is prevented at the moment it
occurs from being itself; it is recovered, absorbed, circumscribed by language
and folded back on itself in the ironic doubling—(shriek | yell)—of the nar-
rative voice.
The dissolution of language which must follow the moment of death is
then enacted both in and as the language of narration: within the narration
as a description of the dismemberment of the old man, and—doubling and
repeating this dismemberment—as the narrator’s voice, which itself becomes
disarticulated in the act of narration. Even as it asserts its singularity, the
narrator’s voice doubles and folds in upon itself: the “corpse,” the “body”
described in the text is at the same time doubled as the body of the text; it
coincides physically with the textual space of its narration. What confronts
the reader is the corpus of the old man: a textual avatar or embodiment of the
old man’s (dead, absent) voice as a presence in the narrator’s, the sound of the
tell-tale heart in the sound of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
It is a sound always stifled, like the beat of a watch muffled in cot-
ton, because the temporality of the narrative voice—its yell—is caught on
the threshold of an absolute moment of language, between screaming and
dying, between narration and its impossibility. The space of the narrative,
its duration, is doubled back upon itself and negated as the narrating subject
collapses into its own object; as the “I” falls back from death into the abys-
sal voice of the other. The return of the dead occurs as a necessary event, of
and in the language of the tale, for Death cannot signify itself without being
other than itself, and it is this—the appearance of the end of language in the
middle of language—which is reflected—“I live!”—in the gaze of the old
man’s evil eye.
This apparition, like a burst of dark laughter, confronts the reader across
the chasm which falls between literature and criticism. The act of reading
abolishes chance, for it draws the reader into an inevitable hermeneutic rela-
tion with alterity within the sign of Death: the recognition scene of narrator
and old man is ultimately enacted between the I/eye of the narrator and
the I/eye of the reader, as the transferential relation of the narrative voice
of the tale to the narrative voice of criticism. The narrative I’s gestures are
doubled—perversely, allegorically57—by the critical I: in our act of quota-
tion, which foregrounds the voice of the narrator; in the cutting, pasting and
articulation of the “Tell-Tale Heart” within a narrative of criticism, which
130 Johann Pillai
echoes the narrator’s dismemberment of the old man; in the (deictic, exem-
plary) introduction of evidence to sustain the argument of criticism, which
repeats the narrator’s gesture of “hear, here!” Death—its sign—envelops the
act of reading, wherein narrative I and critical I exchange glances across a bar
which now appears as the space—linguistic, cultural, historical—between
reader and text.
Between the text and the reader’s eye, this space is physical; semioti-
cally, it also represents a temporal distance within the sign of Death: the
natural belatedness of criticism with respect to literature. The narrator of
the “Tell-Tale Heart” decides to rid “[him]self ” of the eye/I of the old man,
which is figured as the origin and eschatological end of the narrative: thus
Death—the confrontation/recognition/murder/suicide of the narrator’s oth-
er’s I/eye—becomes present in the middle of narrative time as a sign whose
full meaning would be the end of narrative time. The sign of Death is then
ironically emptied of its meaning and folded back on itself in a fell resur-
rection, betraying itself in the duplicitous shriek of the old man. This fold,
eliminating origin and end, precludes the possibility of narrative time, of
plot and of the narrative’s functioning as a history of what it is about. The text
of the tale thus appears without history and floats before the reader in his-
tory—hermetic, masqued, closed in on itself; a disembodied voice, a veiled I.
That it is cast adrift from its time of origin and present to a reader in any age
accords it the temporal status of myth;58 the tale is paradigmatically modern,
for it shares a present with any and every reader. As “primary text” the tale
becomes the mythic point of origin which legitimates the historiographical
operation of “secondary literature”—the figure of origin for the critical I.
The eye of the reader must then inevitably take up the gaze of the nar-
rative I, perversely continue the life of the narrative in the strange voice of
criticism, its afterlife.59 The act of reading “The Tell-Tale Heart” stages a
doubling of the reading subject across the bar of history—I (literature | criti-
cism). Not because it describes the horror of historical events is it a tale of
dread, but because it threatens the reader from across the chasm—threatens
to breach the boundary between the I of fiction and the I of criticism. For if
the text is an internal monologue, the critical eye penetrates into the mind of
the narrator when reading; the act of reading is also a process by which the
narrator’s secret deeds or thoughts enter the mind of the reader.60 And if,
again, the voice of the tale speaks from beyond the grave, its address throws
into question the spatial and temporal location of the reader in relation to the
“here!” from which it can be heard. What case can now be made for read-
ing—betrayed, indicted, arraigned by its own voice?
Two lines of argument appear for the critical subject. The first is
a “historicization” of the tale, where the frames of reference would be its
conditions of production and reception. A recognition that the conditions
of a text’s production in the past, even as they shape the present of its
reading, are reconstructed and themselves shaped by that reading, compels
an understanding of the tale’s present conditions of reception as prejudicial
in reconstructing its past.61 From this perspective, the relation of the tale to
the present centers not on its author or implied author, but on the occasional
identities of the narrative I and its implied reader as they are determined
for the space of a reading by the social and ideological contexts imposed
by the actual reader on the subject positions they represent: homosexual,
heterosexual, oedipal, biographical, feminist, marxist, postcolonial, etc.62
Armed with contemporary social and linguistic codes, preconceptions
about madness, conventions of interpretation; and imposing and intruding
ideologically on the tale, the reader—in the role of policeman or arbiter of
social law—patrols its neighborhood, marking the borders or limits of its
closure. Thus both the tale and its criticism are tethered to the specificity
of the historical moment of reading: localized, politicized, historicized,
explained.
The alternative critical path—precarious, partaking of the tale’s para-
doxical temporality—affirms the modernity of criticism as the mode of being
of the tale in its afterlife. Here, in this dread undertaking, the imperative of
criticism is to extend the life of literature beyond its natural end by sharing
its present and generalizing it beyond the specificity of its own historical
moment. A criticism founded on the primary myth of literature as its object
must itself be granted the temporality of myth: the critical I takes the life
of the narrative I, becomes both the subject and the object of its own nar-
ration. The primary mythopoeic gesture of modernity is thus given by the
“death of the author” and the “disappearance of the subject”; a modern criti-
cism acquires the ontological status of literature,63 and the reader—agent of
history and historical agent—two apparently incompatible roles: critically
demythologizing the tale by demonstrating the relevance of its myth to the
present, and at the same time preserving the myth in the afterlife of the tale
by refusing the present of criticism. This double gesture of literary theory,
perverse in the extreme, is fundamental to history and its writing; it does not
oppose itself to anything that would properly be called “literary history.” The
I of criticism, indeed, has no choice but to speak, gazing unblinkingly from a
tale of history condemned always to be present, to be here—literature.
No t e s
1. de Certeau, The Writing of History, 5.
2. LaCapra, History & Criticism, 11.
3. The tale, by its very formulation in a formal, fictional genre, appears to
sidestep the epistemological question of what “reality” it refers to. I consider the
determination of the tale’s frame of reference to be a function of the performance of
132 Johann Pillai
reading, following Jan Mukarovsky: “The change which the material relationship
of the work—the sign—has undergone is thus simultaneously its weakening and
strengthening. It is weakened in the sense that the work does not refer to the reality
which it directly depicts, and strengthened in that the work of art as a sign acquires
an indirect (figurative) tie with realities which are vitally important to the perceiver”
(Mukarovsky, 74–90; Newton, 36). From this perspective, the language of the tale
constructs and refers to a fictional world which assumes a certain reality for the
reader in the present; the “realness” this fictional world appears to have will depend
on the various factors which constitute the hermeneutic space between reader and
text: social, cultural, linguistic, psychological, and so on.
4. On the internal and heuristic coherence of fictions, see Vaihinger, The Phi-
losophy of As If. Necessary heuristic fictions, critical or readerly, include the assump-
tions that a text reflects the life of an author, a psychological state, or a social reality
at the time it was written. These approaches tacitly imply that fiction in a pure state
is impossible, since it requires the mediation of non-fiction; or that the language
of fiction can only be understood if it is grounded in the (supposedly extratextual)
ordinary language of non-fiction; in short, that fiction is always contaminated by
something to which it is radically different, and yet on which it depends, and which
appears in various formulations as “non-fiction,” “ordinary language,” “common
sense,” “truth,” or “reality” More explicitly constructed are approaches to literature
which read into a text from the past the moral or sociological concerns of “today,”
and which claim therefore to have demonstrated its universal, eternal, intrinsic or
literary value—when what has in fact been demonstrated is its susceptibility to criti-
cal appropriation and ideological manipulation.
5. I use “modernity” here in the very specific sense that “[i]t designates more
generally the problematical possibility of all literature’s existing in the present, of
being considered, or read, from a point of view that claims to share with it its own
sense of a temporal present” (de Man, “Lyric and Modernity,” 166). LaCapra’s for-
mulation of a “transferential relation to the past,” which appears in the epigraph to
this paper, is essentially a re-articulation in Freudian terms of one of the paradig-
matic gestures of deconstruction: the repetition and continuation, within criticism,
of the mode of being of its object, literature. LaCapra’s sense of “displaced analogues”
appears to correspond to de Man’s concept of “allegories of reading.” (See the latter’s
“Semiology and Rhetoric” and “Literary History and Literary Modernity.”)
6. This is a broad interpretation of what M. H. Abrams terms the universe of
a work of art: “. . . the work is taken to have a subject which, directly or deviously,
is derived from existing things—to be about, or signify, or reflect something which
either is, or bears some relation to, an objective state of affairs” (Abrams, 6). The
notion that a text can be history or the converse trivializes neither term; the factors
which establish a text’s status as a narration of fact or fiction are not intrinsic to
it; rather, they are the ideological, conventional limits placed on its possibilities of
interpretation by the community of its interpreters. For a selection of views on the
ethical and pragmatic necessities and consequences of limiting interpretive possibili-
ties, see Levinson and Mailloux, Interpreting Law and Literature.
7. For broad-ranging studies of the constitutive aspects of metahistorical
discourses, see de Certeau, The Writing of History, LaCapra, History & Criticism,
Rancière, The Names of History, and White, Metahistory. Suggestive engagements
in the long tradition of the theory-history debate are Jauss, “Literary History as a
Challenge . . .” and de Man, “The Resistance to Theory.” A detailed study of the
concept of crisis can be found in de Man’s “Criticism and Crisis,” where he argues
that “all true criticism occurs in the mode of crisis” (8).
8. Thus de Certeau: “On the one hand, writing plays the role of a burial rite,
in the ethnological and quasi-religious meaning of the term; it exorcises death by
inserting it into discourse. On the other hand, it possesses a symbolizing function; it
allows a society to situate itself by giving itself a past through language, and it thus
opens to the present a space of its own” (The Writing of History, 100).
9. See Valdes and Miller, Identity of the Literary Text, for a collection of
diverse and thoughtful essays on the nature of textual identity. An overview of some
of the assumptions involved in relatively broad definitions of textuality is provided
by various authors in Veeser, The New Historicism, and the editor’s closing essay in
Reader-Response Criticism (Tompkins, 201–32).
10. On the need to “imaginatively construct the body,” see Ortega y Gasset,
“The Difficulty of Reading.” The social implications of the organ without a body
are explored in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.
11. Our identification of the genre of the text has already constituted a judg-
ment of its truth-value; this prejudice must be bracketed momentarily, for the space
of our reading, if we are to reserve judgment on the narrator and examine the nar-
ration on its own terms.
12. The story is quoted in its entirety in this essay from Poe, Collected Works.
13. This is an archaic sense of the word, etymologically derived from Latin
dis- (privative) + esse, to be. (The derivations here and throughout this paper are
taken from The Compact Oxford English Dictionary and Webster’s Deluxe Unabridged
Dictionary, hereafter denoted OED/WUD.) My use of etymology here and elsewhere
in this essay calls for some comment. The question of whether or not the author,
Poe, intended the meanings which I attribute to his words is bracketed in this read-
ing because my focus is on the relationship between the text and the reader in the
present. This philological approach neither affirms nor denies the author’s intention;
it concerns itself rather with opening and enriching the possibilities of interpretation
in the tale by following the echoes and resonances of its language. The role of the
reader becomes more complex in consequence: the narrator’s apostrophe may address
a character who does not appear in the tale; or he may be talking to himself—in
which case the reader overhears a mental conversation or internal monologue. To
encompass these and other possibilities, I use the term “the reader” to refer to the
subject position occupied by the narrator’s listener, the position with which the
actual reader enters into a (negative, positive or neutral) relation.
14. The modes of classification and principles of exclusion by which systematic
thought—legal/penal, medical, and psychiatric—marks its own limit of separation
from what it cannot think, are explored “archeologically” in Michel Foucault’s Dis-
cipline & Punish, The Birth of the Clinic, and Madness and Civilization.
15. Most readers of this tale assume that the narrator describes an actual
murder; see, for instance, Frank, on the Gothic “I” in “Neighbourhood Gothic . . .”;
Witherington on the reader as voyeur in “The Accomplice . . .”; and the various
readings derived from psychoanalytic theory: Davis, “Lacan, Poe, and Narrative
Repression”; Rajan, “A Feminist Rereading . . .”; Sussman, “A Note on the Public
and the Private. . . .”
16. I use the word “arbitrary” here in Saussure’s sense, to suggest not ran-
domness or anarchy, but determination by (social) convention (Course in General
Linguistics, 68–69, 73.) Most readers of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” for example, assume
134 Johann Pillai
that the narrative voice is male, although the narrator’s gender is never specifically
identified (see note 62 below). This assumption may be conditioned by a number of
factors: knowledge of the author’s sex, or of that of typical narrators in his oeuvre;
the traditional, patriarchal treatment of narrators as male; or the attribution of an
active role to a masculine protagonist. A recognition that such prejudices are con-
ventions of reading reveals the strategies of closure employed by past generations of
readers of the tale.
17. Here it is not simply a matter of empathizing with the narrator; listening
to the voice of the text on its own terms involves a self-consciously critical act, the
recognition that, as Hayden White remarks in a commentary on New Historicism,
“one’s philosophy of history is a function as much of the way one construes one’s
own special object of scholarly interest as it is of one’s knowledge of ‘history’ itself ”
(White, “New Historicism,” 302).
18. For still classic surveys of eschatological models of history, see Bultmann,
History and Eschatology; Kermode, The Sense of an Ending; and Löwith, Meaning in
History.
19. The I/eye homophony is discussed in terms of its relationship to inter-
subjectivity and the concept of the double in Halliburton’s excellent book, Edgar
Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View. Other related studies can be found in Hamel,
“Un texte à deux voix”; and Williams, A World of Words. A detailed treatment of
the I/eye subject in general can be found in Lombardo’s Edgar Poe et la Modernité
(esp. 7–69).
20. Joan Dayan, in two passing references to this tale, acknowledges that the
heart which will beat under the floorboards “is of course the narrator’s own” (144),
and recognizes the “language of penetration” used here. She fails, however, to rec-
oncile this with her assertion that “Poe turns the protracted attempt to look into the
old man’s bedroom in order to kill him into a most secret and transgressive act of
love” (Fables of Mind, 225).
21. Etymologically, “suspicion” connotes mistrust, the act of looking askance;
Latin suspicere: sub, up from under, + spicere, to look at (OED/WUD).
22. In similar fashion, the narrator’s voice at daybreak becomes indistinguish-
able from the sound of the tell-tale heart—with its “hearty” tone and “courageous-
ness” (Latin cor, heart [OED/WUD])—which speaks first to the old man, but
ultimately to the reader.
23. The comparison of the narrator’s hand to the minute hand of a watch does
not merely or simply convey inordinate slowness of movement; it suggests, as well,
the personification of time in and as the figure of the narrator. In this comparison
converge, too, the ticking of the watch and the beating of the tell-tale heart with
the temporality of the events described in the text and of the voice of narration, for
metaleptically the “hand” is both that which writes and, by extension, the voice in
which that hand narrates. The echo of a familiar expression also resonates in the
text’s title: a tell-tale is a mechanical device used for recording or indicating temporal
measure; the tell-tale clock, for example, is a clock “with an attachment of some kind
requiring attention at certain intervals, by which the vigilance of a watchman may
be checked” (OED/WUD).
24. The narrator’s “thin ray” of light cuts through the “thick darkness,” evok-
ing traditional metaphorical associations: optical perception (to see meaning to
perceive or to understand) set against blindness or obscurity (incomprehension); or a
transition from ignorance to knowledge.
25. The “death watches in the wall” point, on the one (minute) hand, to the
narrator’s association with time; and, on the other hand, to the relation of this tem-
porality to death, a relation to ending which will find its articulation in the end of
the tale. A death watch is also, however, a vigil kept by the dead or the dying or those
who attend them; and both narrator and old man, by their wakefulness “night after
night,” are implicated in this act of seeing. On a third level—the most immediate
sense of the word—a death watch is an insect which makes a sound like the ticking
of a watch, and is considered superstitiously to be an omen of death.
26. Similarly, both narrator and old man share their vigil—“I knew that he
had been lying awake”—and echo each other’s dissimulation—“lying.” And since a
wake is a vigil or a death watch, it may be, in this dissimulation, that no death will
occur—nor has, in the past which the tale describes.
27. Latin distrahere, to pull apart (OED/WUD).
28. The shifting tenses here—“Yes, he has been trying to comfort himself with
these suppositions; but he had found all in vain”—indicate the temporal dilemma of
the narrative voice, fluctuating between the past of the old man and the present of
the narration, in which a third voice—the I/eye of the reader—is implicated, and
where the old man yet lives.
29. The word “muscle” is derived from the Latin musculus, “little mouse,” from
the shape of certain muscles (OED/WUD).
30. The reference is to Psalms 23:4. The “shadow” may also be seen here as a
Jungian, archetypal projection of the unknown self.
31. According to classical mythological accounts, the Lydian princess Arachne
competed with the goddess Athena in a weaving contest, and proved herself supe-
rior. Made to feel guilt and shame for her pride, Arachne attempted to hang herself,
but Athena prevented the suicide by turning her into a spider and the rope into a
cobweb. Thus the moment when Arachne should cease to weave is transformed into
a textual eternity where arachnids unceasingly (and to our knowledge, unknowingly)
fabricate webs which are allegorical narrations of the original myth. For various
versions of this myth, see Bulfinch, 91–93, and Graves, 98–99. Ovid’s account is
presented in prose and poetry respectively in Metamorphoses, trans. Innes, 134–38;
and The Metamorphoses, trans. Gregory, VI. v. I. 145, 163–167.
32. Certainly the narrator grows “furious,” a characterization which—ironiz-
ing his earlier denials—seems to indicate passion, madness, and the raging of a
disease whose symptom is a fearful chill; but these indications are occasional rather
than causal at this moment; and even the vexatious “dull blue” of the old man’s
eye serves here only to throw into relief the “sharpened” senses resulting from the
narrator’s disease.
33. This “spot,” medically speaking, suggests a speck on the eye symptomatic
of a disease; its damning implies judicial condemnation as well as, theologically,
a consignment to hell—where the narrator hears many things. But telling, too,
is the evocation of a moment when the somnambulous Lady Macbeth is able “to
receive at once the benefit of sleep and do the effects of watching”—symptomatic,
Shakespeare’s Doctor of Physic admits, of a “disease beyond my practice.” Indeed,
the narrator’s sympathy with the old man suggests the entire narration may be a
somniloquy. That the narrative assumes the textuality of a dream envisioned by
the narrator and pleads conversely, reciprocally—since the old man may indeed be
dreaming of his secret deeds and thoughts—that the narrator himself is figured in the
cycle of the old man’s dream. In this context, it is doubtful whether knowledge—of
136 Johann Pillai
secret deeds and thoughts, disclosed to the reader in the confidence of reading—can
remain material in calling the narrator’s power to account. Nor is it simply a matter
of extenuating circumstances or diminished responsibility, for the “damned spot”
here is not merely a physical object or location but a conceptual, alephic mark which
signifies bloodstain, consanguinity, moral stain, state of mind, self-consciousness of
guilt or fear—in short, the entire shifting network of relationships which surrounds
and informs the eye/I.
Curiously, the intertextual relationship between “The Tell-Tale Heart” and
Macbeth has not received any critical attention, although each text sheds some light
on the other: thus, Poe’s allusion to Act V, Scene I of the play suggests, among other
things, a female protagonist, sleepwalking, accountability and guilt, the blood of
a murder victim (“the old man”) which spreads metaphorically into a stain on the
conscience, and a complex relation between power and knowledge; or again, taking
structural elements as an example, Lady Macbeth’s taper is transformed into the
“Heart” narrator’s lantern, and the knocking she hears at the gate into the knock-
ing he hears at the door when the policemen arrive (Shakespeare, The Tragedy of
Macbeth, 115–18).
34. The narrator’s refutation of his reader’s judgment is here more pointed,
having progressed from “you say . . .” to “you fancy . . .” to “you mistake . . .”; and
while in the same glossing breath his sensibility is subtly characterized as overacute,
this admission of excess also has a different ironic effect: to indicate that what is
sensed and heard is of the order of the supersensory. The sound, both familiar and
unfamiliar, which comes to the narrator’s ears is dull, like the color of the old man’s
eye; and also quick, in contrast to the slowness of the narrator’s actions. It is akin to
the low stifled sound heard earlier—the groan of terror which arises from both the
old man’s and the narrator’s bosom. Death has indeed “enveloped the victim,” and
here it is the watch—which figures not only the heartbeat, the life of the old man,
but also the very temporality of the narrative voice, the historical life of the narrator
whose hand moves slower than a minute hand—which is enveloped, stifled. The
narrator’s relation to the old man, simultaneously close and murderously distant, may
be considered from a variety of perspectives, the most obvious being the homoerotic
and the Oedipal.
35. The soldier’s “courage” here recalls the bold and hearty tone in which the
narrator addresses the old man at daybreak (cf. n.22).
36. Some depths of the eardrum are sounded in Jacques Derrida’s “Tympan.”
Derridean “difference” and its variations suggest numerous critical frames within
which the relation between narrator and old man may be situated. One such frame,
which is not discussed here except by implication, is that which circumscribes the
relation between an author—in this case, Poe—and his or her literary persona (the
narrative “I”); some explorations of this frame are provided in Derrida, The Ear of
the Other.
37. Etymologically, to “refrain” connotes the reining in of a (soldier’s) horse:
Latin refrenare, to bridle, from frenum, bridle (OED/WUD). This is one of several
latent allusions to soldiering (cf. n.35, n.39, n.48; for their possible significance,
see n. 45).
38. The “tattoo” must be understood here not simply as a beat; it is also a
stained inscription marking the surface, or outer limits of the (still absent) body.
39. This question also inserts itself into a continuing chain of associations: in
addition to drawing attention to the “me” of the voice, mark evokes both “spot” and
“tattoo”—as well as the quotidian connotation of marking the time, and the soldier’s
of marking time.
40. For a discussion of the broader implications of this intrusion, see Sussman,
“A Note on the Public and the Private. . . .”
41. It is, in fact, only by implication, by the suggestiveness of the word “heavy,”
that the critical tradition has assumed the old man is being pressed or held down
by the bed. The narrator, in fact, smiles (as he earlier chuckled, and as we would
have laughed to see), that the deed is so far done; it is not yet completed, and the
heart actually continues to beat “for many minutes.” Its sound is muffled, like that
of the “watch . . . enveloped in cotton” and the “stifled sound” of the shared groan,
suggesting—but only suggesting—that what is taking place is a suffocation, a press-
ing of the old man (so that, like the narrator, he can scarcely breathe) to death. For
both narrator and old man have been likened to a timepiece: the former’s hand to a
minute-hand, the latter’s heartbeat to a watch.
42. The narrator’s turn of phrase—“I examined the corpse”—is clinical and
unemotional in its detachment, reminding us for a moment of how lucidly, “how
healthily—how calmly” he can tell his story.
43. Latin de (privative) + tegere; uncover (OED/WUD). Thus a “detective” is
one who uncovers.
44. The narrator remarks that “the night waned,” but there is no indication of
any more light in the chamber than is provided by the lantern, for the shutters are, as
always, “close fastened.” Even at four in the morning it is as dark as at midnight—but
when the narrator opens the door a few moments from now, he will do so with a
“light” heart. The playful, contrasting juxtaposition of light and dark in this pas-
sage suggests that “darkness” and “night” can be understood in context not simply
as physical phenomena, but as metaphors of truth (against the lightheartedness of
the narrator’s dissimulation) or of the burden of conscience (made light of by his
concealment of the corpse). On another level, the narrator’s “light” heart ironically
reflects the heaviness of the bed which he pulled over the old man.
45. The three men at the door are suave—their urbanity suggests a breadth of
social experience—and as police they represent the force of order in the polis or city,
a trinity of civil law. This legal intervention indicates one of many subtexts in the
tale: its underlying interrogation of the efficacy of law. As the reference to the Old
Testament (n.30), and later, the narrator’s exclamations—“Oh God! [. . .] Almighty
God!”—refer obliquely to divine law, so the scattered references to soldiers (see n.37)
point to the possibility of martial law, one alternative when civil law has broken
down.
46. The old man’s absence “in the country” implies the narrator’s presence in
the city or polis.
47. The narrator’s characterizations of his state of mind, however, seem to
belie his confidence: enthusiasm, connoting daemonic possession; triumph, evoking
Bacchic frenzy; and wild audacity—passion uncontrollable, madness, and distrac-
tion. Similarly, he projects his own tiredness onto the officers, inviting them to “rest
from their fatigues,” when in fact it is he who has been engaged in “labors” through
the night.
48. The narrator is “at ease,” a phrase which at first suggests relaxation, but
then recalls his dis-ease—and the military drill command which describes a state
less relaxed than standing “easy.” His singularity continues to draw attention to the
absence of the old man, and his pallor evokes the latter’s “pale blue eye.” He fancies
138 Johann Pillai
hearing a sound (as we fancied him mad, and as the old man tried to fancy his fears
causeless), a reminder of that “dreadful echo” resonating through the tale, and of
the bell which “sounded the hour,” coinciding with the policemen’s knocking on the
door and a hint that what the narrator is hearing may be imaginary.
49. The word vehement today means intense or severe, but derives from
roots (Latin vehere, to carry, + mens, mind) meaning “carried out of one’s mind”
(OED/WUD).
50. Greek hupokrites, actor; from hupokrinein, to play a part (OED/WUD).
51. The narrative’s play on the auditory imperative “hear” and the visual deixis
“here” may be seen as the staging of a hiatus or disjunction between the mediation
of representation and the immediacy of experience, or the sign and its referent. This
moment marks an apocalyptic transition from the end of narrative time to the time
of the reader, and finds its rhetorical and psychoanalytic analogues in the idea of the
“sublime” and “ekphrasis.” For expositions of these concepts, see Fry, “Longinus at
Colonus”; Weiskel, “The Logic of Terror”; and Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other.”
52. Passages quoted here of “The Black Cat” and “The Imp of the Perverse”
are taken from Poe, The Complete Illustrated Stories and Poems, 235–43 and 439–45,
respectively.
53. The word “gallows” is derived from the Middle English galwe, cross or
apparatus for hanging, from the Old English gealga (OED/WUD).
54. This substitution may be seen as a narrative parricide which constitutes
and supplements the “structurality” of the narration. The various permutations and
configurations of narrative pharmacology are explored in minute detail in Derrida’s
Dissemination.
55. The relation suggested here between the individual and society perhaps
calls for a socio-historical analysis of the narrator in terms of what Michel Foucault
calls the soul—“which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born
in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of the methods of punish-
ment, supervision and constraint. This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance;
it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and
the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power
relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and
reinforces the effects of this power” (Discipline and Punish, 29).
56. Hayden White characterizes the dialectical dilemma of historiographical
irony as follows: “In Irony, figurative language folds back on itself and brings its own
potentialities for distorting perception under question. . . . The trope of Irony . . .
provides a linguistic paradigm of a mode of thought which is radically self-critical
with respect not only to a given characterization of the world of experience but also
to the very effort to capture adequately the truth of things in language. It is, in short,
a model of the linguistic protocol in which skepticism in thought and relativism in
ethics are conventionally expressed” (Metahistory, 37–38). In a similar vein, Paul de
Man, following Friedrich Schlegel, comments: “Irony divides the flow of temporal
existence into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed
forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can
never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious
level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge
applicable to the empirical world. It dissolves in the narrowing spiral of a linguistic
sign that becomes more and more remote from its meaning, and it can find no escape
from this spiral” (“The Rhetoric of Temporality” 222).
57. I use “allegory” here in de Man’s sense: “The meaning constituted by the
allegorical sign can . . . consist only in the repetition (in the Kierkegaardian sense
of the term) of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the
essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority. . . . Allegory designates primar-
ily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the
desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference.
In so doing, it prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self,
which is now fully, though painfully, recognized as a non-self ” (“The Rhetoric of
Temporality” 207).
58. Here I am referring to Lévi-Strauss’s general characterization of the time-
frame of myth: “. . . a myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place in
time. . . . But what gives the myth an operative value is that the specific pattern
described is everlasting: it explains the present and the past as well as the future
[. . .] Whatever our ignorance of the language and the culture of the people where it
originated, a myth is still felt as a myth by any reader throughout the world” (“The
Structural Study of Myth,” 84–86).
59. I take the supplementary relation between literature and criticism to be
analogous to that quality of a text which Walter Benjamin calls “translatability”—by
which the original text calls for translation as its mode of being in its afterlife. Thus
“the language of a translation can—in fact, must—let itself go, so that it gives voice
to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement
to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio” (“The Task
of the Translator,” 79).
60. A general paradigm for a phenomenological approach to this relation
between reader and text is outlined in Georges Poulet’s analysis of “interior objects”:
“I am someone who happens to have as objects of his own thought, thoughts which
are part of a book I am reading, and which are therefore the cogitations of another.
They are the thoughts of another, and yet it is I who am their subject . . . Whenever I
read, I mentally pronounce an I, and yet the I which I pronounce is not myself. This
is true even when the hero of a novel is presented in the third person, and even when
there is no hero and nothing but reflections or propositions: for as soon as something
is presented as thought, there has to be a thinking subject with whom, at least for the
time being, I identify, forgetting myself, alienated from myself . . . Reading, then,
is the act in which the subjective principle which I call I, is modified in such a way
that I no longer have the right, strictly speaking, to consider it as my I. I am on loan
to another, and this other thinks, feels, suffers, and acts within me” (“Criticism and
the Experience of Interiority” 59–60).
61. This would be a pragmatic approach to criticism, prioritizing either the
past or the present as the determining field of meaning and ignoring or refusing to
engage the hermeneutical situation. Against this, Hans-Georg Gadamer suggests
that “[t]he real meaning of a text as it addresses the interpreter does not just depend
on the occasional factors which characterize the author and his original public. For
it is also always co-determined by the historical situation of the interpreter and thus
by the whole of the objective course of history. . . . The meaning of a text surpasses
its author not occasionally, but always. Thus understanding is not a reproductive
procedure, but rather always a productive one. . . . It suffices to say that one under-
stands differently when one understands at all ” (280). Similarly the present can only
afford occasional closures, because it too is only a moment in the flow of history:
“Indeed, it is even a question whether the special contemporaneity of the work of art
140 Johann Pillai
does not consist precisely in this: that it stands open in a limitless way for ever new
integrations. It may be that the creator of a work intends the particular public of his
time, but the real being of a work is what it is able to say, and that stretches funda-
mentally out beyond every historical limitation” (Warheit und Methode, 96, translated
and quoted in the “Editor’s Introduction” to Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics,
xxv and xxvi, respectively).
62. I regretfully employ these terms here in their most general (and perhaps
unfashionable) senses and usages, acknowledging that each implies a wealth of
diverse “isms” and approaches to texts which are outside the limited framework of
this essay. Gita Rajan has remarked, to take one example, that the narrator’s gender
is never explicitly identified in the text; this could, of course, be the case even when
the narrator asks, “would a madman have been so wise as this?” She then goes on to
declare, in the absence of gender markings, “that the narrator is indeed female . . .
I propose to dislodge the earlier, patriarchal notion of a male narrator for the story.
I argue, instead, that a gender-marked rereading of this tale reveals the narrator’s
exploration of her female situation in a particular feminist discourse” (Rajan, “A
Feminist Rereading. . . ,” 284). Predictably, Rajan, now occupying the subject
position of the narrator, prepares to “take the life of the old man”—in this case, a
“masculinist” reading of the tale by Robert Con Davis; and her reading of the tale
becomes a somewhat formulaic allegory of the relation between her own feminist
criticism and the tradition of masculinist criticism—an allegory which regretfully
does not question its own status as such, or the tale as its own myth of origin.
63. This is a point of departure for studying the implications of Paul de Man’s
question: “Could we conceive of a literary history that would not truncate literature
by putting us misleadingly into or outside it, that would be able to maintain the lit-
erary aporia throughout, account at the same time for the truth and the falsehood
of the knowledge literature conveys about itself, distinguish rigorously between
metaphorical and historical language, and account for literary modernity as well as
for its historicity? Clearly, such a conception would imply a revision of the notion of
history and, beyond that, of the notion of time on which our idea of history is based”
(“Literary History and Literary Modernity,” 164).
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BRETT ZIMMERMAN
Frantic Forensic Oratory:

Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”
I have no idea what Ezra Pound meant when he complained that Poe is
“A dam’d bad rhetorician half the time” (qtd. in Hubbell 20). Perhaps he
was referring to Poe’s literary criticism, but what concerns me here is the
rhetoric of one of Poe’s murderous narrators, for John P. Hussey is certainly
correct when he notes that “Poe created a series of rhetorical characters
who try to persuade and guide their readers to particular ends” (37). Let
us consider the protagonist of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” It has been custom-
ary to see that tale as a confession, but it becomes clear that the narrator has
already confessed to the murder of the old man who was his former living
companion. The tale, then, is not so much a confession as a defense: “The
Tell-Tale Heart” is actually a specimen of courtroom rhetoric—judicial, or
forensic, oratory. This is not to say that he is necessarily arguing in a court
of law; he may be speaking to his auditor(s) in a prison cell—but that he is
telling his side of the story to someone (rather than writing to himself in a
journal) is clear by his use of the word “you”; and that he is speaking rather
than writing is clear by his exhortation to “hearken” (listen) to what he has
to say. The important point is that his spoken account is forensic insofar as
that means a legal argument in self-defense. To this end, the narrator has
a considerable grasp of the techniques of argument but, like a damned bad
rhetorician, he fails in his rhetorical performance even while striving des-
From Style 35, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 34–49. © 2001 by Style.
143
144 Brett Zimmerman
perately to convince. That does not mean that Poe himself is a damned bad
rhetorician, for what John McElroy says of “The Black Cat” is equally true
of “The Tell-Tale Heart”: the story has “two simultaneous perspectives: the
narrative and the authorial” (103). The author, Poe, puts various rhetorical
figures of speech and thought, as well as argumentative appeals, into his
narrator’s explanations of the horrible events he has initiated, and then Poe
sits back with his perceptive readers to watch the narrator fall short in his
attempts at persuasion. The result is an irony that alert readers detect and
a conviction—on my part, anyway—that Poe is a better literary craftsman
than even some of his critical champions have realized.
Poe and the Tradition of Rhetoric and Oratory:

His Time and Place
We cannot say for sure with which rhetorical handbooks Poe was
familiar, but that he was familiar with some is shown by a remark he makes
in “The Rationale of Verse”: “In our ordinary grammars and in our works
on rhetoric or prosody in general, may be found occasional chapters, it is
true, which have the heading, ‘Versification,’ but these are, in all instances,
exceedingly meagre” (14: 211). To be more particular, scholars attempting
to demonstrate a nineteenth-century writer’s familiarity with the rhetorical
tradition often begin with the eighteenth-century Scottish divine and pro-
fessor of rhetoric, Hugh Blair, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
“went through 130 British and American editions between 1783 and 1911”
(Short 177n). Hussey shows no diffidence at all in insisting that Poe’s art is
grounded “in the specific injunctions of the [rhetorical] handbooks,” Blair’s
in particular. For Eureka, specifically, Poe needed appropriate personae for
his narrator and a rigidly structured pattern or mold, for which he turned
to the “classical address, again as Blair describes it, with six major sections:
the Introduction (Exordium), Proposition and Division, Narration, Rea-
soning or Arguments, the Pathetic, and the Conclusion (Peroration)” (41).
Although these divisions are centuries old and as such did not originate in
Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Hussey makes a case for Poe’s indebt-
edness to Blair by showing how the poet-cosmologist follows certain dicta
expounded in the Lectures. Although he makes no attempt to prove his case,
Donald B. Stauffer takes for granted that Poe took some of his ideas about
style from Blair (4.54).
While Blair’s rhetoric was most prevalent in Eastern colleges until
1828—in fact, “Until the middle of the nineteenth century it was one of
the most widely used textbooks of rhetoric” (Thomas 204; see also Corbett
568)—other extant works were George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric
(1776), which achieved a circulation comparable to Blair’s after 1830 (Thomas
204), Richard Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric (1823), and Professor Samuel
Frantic Forensic Oratory: Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” 145
P. Newman’s Practical System of Rhetoric (1827), which would go through

more than sixty editions (Matthiessen 203n). Another well-circulating
work was Alexander Jamieson’s Grammar of Rhetoric and Polite Literature,
first published in 1818 and “in its twenty-fourth American edition by 1844”
(Short 178n). Other works known in American colleges include Charles
Rollin’s Belles Lettres, John Stirling’s System of Rhetoric (1733), John Holmes’s
popular Art of Rhetoric Made Easy (1739), John Mason’s Essay on Elocution
and Pronunciation (1748), John Lawson’s Lectures Concerning Oratory
(1758), John Ward’s influential System of Oratory (1759), James Burgh’s Art
of Speaking (1761), Thomas Sheridan’s Lectures on Elocution (1762), Joseph
Priestley’s Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1777), John Walker’s
Elements of Elocution (1781), John Quincy Adams’s two-volume Lectures on
Rhetoric and Oratory (1810), and William Enfield’s The Speaker (1826). Less
widely circulated were contributions to the teaching of oratory and rhetoric
by American college professors, including Princeton’s John Witherspoon,
“whose lectures on rhetoric, delivered at the New Jersey college from 1758
to 1794, were posthumously collected and printed”; then there is Lectures on
Eloquence and Style, by Ebenezer Porter, holder of the Bartlett Professorship
of Sacred Rhetoric at Andover Academy from 1813 to 1831 (Thomas 205).
He also produced Analysis of the Principles of Rhetorical Delivery as Applied in
Reading and Speaking (1827). “one of the most widely used college elocutionary
texts before 1850” (Thomas 207n2).
While John Quincy Adams and Joseph Priestley do indeed appear in
Pollin’s Word Index to Poe’s Fiction, we find no reference there to any of the
above texts (Blair is mentioned in Exordium)—and none appears in Killis
Campbell’s survey, “Poe’s Reading.” Still, it seems almost inconceivable that
Poe would not have been familiar with at least some of these, especially when
we consider that, as Kenneth Cmiel puts it, “From the seventeenth to the
end of the nineteenth century, rhetoric saturated American culture” and was
“critical to the school curriculum, pulpit, political forum, and court of law.”
Poe’s career as a schoolboy and professional author fits, after all, between the
years 1820 and 1860, “the golden age of American oratory” (592). Robert
Jacobs calls oratory “the most admired form of Southern rhetorical expres-
sion in Poe’s time” (76). “It was,” says biographer Hervey Allen, “the age of
the spoken word” (176). Indeed! In a brief history of American oratory from
1788 to 1860, Aly and Tanquary tell us that “speechmaking went on in the
daily exercise of life in situations and under conditions that defy classifica-
tion. And if no situation requiring speechmaking was at hand, then one was
invented. The literary society, the ‘bee,’ the debating society, and the lyceum
were largely given over to speechmaking in one form or another” (89).
It certainly looks as if speechmaking went on at Poe’s childhood home,
for his domestic environment and education were responsible for initiating
146 Brett Zimmerman
Poe’s knowledge of rhetoric as both eloquence and persuasion. An early biog-

rapher, George Woodberry, tells us that, at the home of his foster parents,
the Allans, Poe as a young boy was encouraged to give speeches to visitors:
“his talent was to declaim”—an aptitude he had “perhaps by inheritance,”
both dead parents having been actors (15). A later biographer, James Har-
rison, confirms and elaborates by quoting a former acquaintance of Poe, Col.
Thomas H. Ellis, who paid tribute to Poe in the Richmond Standard on May
7, 1881: “Talent for declamation was one of his gifts. I well remember a
public exhibition at the close of a course of instruction in elocution which
he had attended [. . .] and my delight when, in the presence of a large and
distinguished company, he bore off the prize in competition with [. . .] the
most promising of the Richmond boys” (1: 24; see also Quinn 84).1 In fact,
it is hard to imagine a precocious Virginia boy being unaware of rhetoric,
given his environment: “Little Edgar’s childhood and youth were passed in
an atmosphere of sociability, open-air sports, oratory, and elocution. Patrick
Henry, the great orator of the Revolution, lay in the neighboring churchyard
of Old St. John’s; Chief-Justice Marshall, the greatest of the justices of the
Supreme Court, and John Randoph of Roanoke, celebrated for silver voice
and stinging sarcasm, were familiar figures in Richmond streets; retired
presidents like Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe” were also to be seen occa-
sionally (1: 13). Biographer Jeffrey Meyers goes further—probably following
Arthur Quinn (102)—speculating that Poe had met the author of “The Dec-
laration of Independence,” one of the most brilliant pieces of rhetoric ever
penned by an American: “Every Sunday Mr. Jefferson regularly invited some
of the students to dine with him at Monticello, and Poe must have met him
on several social and academic occasions” (22).
Not only did the young Poe have the example of contemporary orators
such as Jefferson (“Old Man Eloquent”) constantly in front of him but his
formal education acquainted him as well with the great rhetoricians of the
past. When a young scholar in England, Poe attended John Bransby’s school
at Stoke Newington where he learned Latin, so important for a knowledge
of ancient rhetoric. Back in America, in the English and Classical School of
Richmond, Virginia, a barely adolescent Edgar “read the ordinary classical
authors of the old preparatory curriculum” (Woodberry 19). Quinn is more
specific, quoting the schoolmaster Joseph H. Clarke, who wrote in an 1876
letter, “When I left Richmond [. . .] Edgar’s class was reading Horace and
Cicero’s Orations in Latin [. . .]” (83). At Jefferson’s newly opened University
of Virginia, Poe enrolled in the Schools of Ancient and Modern Languages,
later to excel in French and, again, Latin (Norman 72). Harrison records that
Poe impressed his associates with “his remarkable attainments as a classical
scholar” (1: 48). As another biographer, Kenneth Silverman, notes, Poe also
joined “the Jefferson Society, a debating club, [where] it was said, [he] ‘grew
noted as a debater’ ” (30). What better forum for the practice of rhetoric?
These scholarly achievements are reflected occasionally in Poe’s writ-
ings, where we certainly find some references to rhetoric and oratory. In
“Some Words with a Mummy,” Poe provides a rather comical picture of
modern oratorical gestures: “Mr. Gliddon [. . .] could not make the Egyptian
comprehend the term ‘politics,’ until he sketched upon the wall, with a bit of
charcoal, a little carbuncle-nosed gentleman, out at elbows. standing upon a
slump, with his left leg drawn back, his right arm thrown forward, with the
fist shut, the eyes rolled up toward Heaven, and the mouth open at an angle
of ninety degrees” (6: 125). Poe would have known this cartoon orator to be
partaking of the “mechanistic” concept of elocution, which was overwhelm-
ingly popular in the 1800s. In other words, here Poe shows his awareness of
the last of the traditional five parts of rhetoric: delivery. Mechanistic delivery
concentrates on “the use of pitch, intensity, rate, and quality of the voice,
as well as movements of hands, head, eyes, and other parts of the body”
(Thomas 203). Vocal and physical communication was extremely important,
and Walker’s Elements of Elocution was one of the principle books devoted to
the movement of the orator’s body; Walker based his teaching “on observa-
tions of dance, musical, and theatrical performance” (Covino and Jolliffe 43).
William Russell (see below) and Porter were both Walker adherents, but the
most monumental book devoted to mechanistic oratory was Gilbert Austin’s
Chironomia; or a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery: Comprehending Many Pre-
cepts, Both Ancient and Modern, for the Proper Regulation of the Voice, the Coun-
tenance, and Gesture (1806). Covino and Jolliffe say that Austin “grounded
his teaching in a self-proclaimed scientific study of effective delivery” (see
also Thomas 206). This book contains dozens of figures of gestures involv-
ing the hands, feet, and entire bodies (poses that would strike us as hilarious
today and would get a modern speechifier laughed off the stage). Books pub-
lished in nineteenth-century America that show Austin’s influence, and that
Poe may have known, include Increase Cooke’s The American Orator (1819),
Russell’s American Elocutionist (1844), Rufus Claggett’s Elocution Made Easy
(1845), Merritt Caldwell’s A Practical Manual of Elocution (1845), and C. P.
Bronson’s Elocution; or Mental and Vocal Philosophy (1845), in its fifth edition
by 1845 (see Robb and Thonssen xviii). In the same oratorical tradition is
Dr. James Rush’s Philosophy of the Human Voice, “the greatest single influence
upon the development of elocution in America. [. . .] The book was imme-
diately popular, and [. . .] remained the supreme authority on voice through
most of the nineteenth century” (Thomas 207). Relating oratorical anima-
tion to the histrionic tradition is Henry Siddon’s Practical Illustrations of Rhe-
torical Gesture and Action; Adapted to the English Drama (1822). It is hard to
148 Brett Zimmerman
imagine that the histrionic Poe would not have been attentive to issues of
rhetorical delivery.
Poe also displays knowledge of rhetorical “dogma,” both ancient and
modern. In “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin suggests to the narrator that
“some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor,
or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a
description” (6: 47; see also 10: 143–44). And that Poe was knowledgeable
about both ancient and modern rhetoric is shown by some remarks he makes
in his Marginalia:
We may safely grant that the effects of the oratory of Demosthenes

were vaster than those wrought by the eloquence of any modern,
and yet not controvert the idea that the modern eloquence,
itself, is superior to that of the Greek. [. . .] The suggestions, the
arguments, the incitements of the ancient rhetorician were, when
compared with those of the modern, absolutely novel; possessing
thus an immense adventitious force—a force which has been, oddly
enough, left out of sight in all estimates of the eloquence of the
two eras.
The finest Philippic of the Greek would have been hooted at in

the British House of Peers, while an impromptu of Sheridan, or of
Brougham, would have carried by storm all the hearts and all the
intellects of Athens.
(16: 62; see the nearly identical remarks in a Poe review [10: 58–59])
Elsewhere in the Marginalia we find a reference to Cicero’s speeches: “The

best specimen of his manner [Professor Charles Anthon’s] is to be found
in an analysis of the Life and Writings of Cicero, prefacing an edition of
the orator’s Select Orations. This analysis [. . .] is so peculiarly Ciceronian,
in point of fullness, and in other points, that I have sometimes thought it
an intended imitation of the Brutus, sive de Claris Oratoribus” (16: 103). In
fact, Poe reviewed Anthon’s Select Orations of Cicero for the Southern Liter-
ary Messenger in January, 1837 (9: 266–68). In “The Man of the Crowd,”
the narrator refers to “the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias” (4: 134), the
fourth-century Sicilian rhetorician and chief adversary of Socrates in Plato’s
Gorgias. The forensic oratory of Gorgias employed “highly musical forms of
antithesis, involving isocolon, homoioteleuton, parison, paramoion and—
above all—abundant paranomasia” (Cluett and Kampeas 33)—figures Poe
himself uses on occasion in his own prose. Poe shows his familiarity with
another ancient rhetor in his discussion of the mystical Ralph Waldo Emer-
son: “Quintilian mentions a pedant who taught obscurity, and who once said
to a pupil ‘this is excellent, for I do not understand it myself ’ ” (15: 260). At
any rate, Allen Tate, after acknowledging Poe’s “early classical education”
(and Christian upbringing), is certainly wrong when he goes on to say that
Poe “wrote as if the experiences of these traditions had been lost” (49).
We do not have to be denouncing bitterly the King of Macedon or car-
rying on in the British House of Peers to engage in the art of persuasion,
however, for we employ rhetoric every day of our lives, usually for the most
ordinary of needs and unconsciously; nor do we need to have all our mental
faculties in good working order to exploit rhetoric—as Poe demonstrates
through the desperate narrators in his tales of criminal homicide. In, for
instance, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Imp of the Perverse,” the mentally
disturbed murderers want to convince their auditors of the reasonableness of
their crimes—to make their audience understand that these things are com-
prehensible according to ordinary motives of human behavior and psychol-
ogy. The profound irony, of course, is that these protagonists employ the
traditional, the classical, language of reason (and primarily the Aristotelian
appeal to logos) to justify and defend the actions of unreason. Readers should
adopt the same stance of ironic detachment as Poe himself enjoys; that is, we
should be aware of the discrepancy between his narrators’ irrational actions,
motives, and their techniques of rational argument, their forensic oratory.
Like another American literary psychologist, Herman Melville, Poe recog-
nized that victims of mental diseases do not appear to be psychologically ill
all the time—that hysterical ravings and incomprehensible babblings do not
always identify the insane (also the lesson in “The System of Dr. Tarr and
Professor Fether” [especially 6: 72]). Poe would have appreciated Melville’s
psychoanalysis of John Claggart:
Though the man’s even temper and discreet bearing would seem
to intimate a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason, not the
less in heart he would seem to riot in complete exemption from
that law, having apparently little to do with reason further than to
employ it as an ambidexter implement for effecting the irrational.
That is to say: Toward the accomplishment of an aim which in
wantonness of atrocity would seem to partake of the insane, he
will direct a cool judgment sagacious and sound. These men are
madmen, and of the most dangerous sort [. . .] (Billy Budd 76)
Like Melville’s Ahab, Poe’s madman in “The Tell-Tale Heart” particularly

employs reason not only to carry out irrational acts but also to justify them.
He behaves like an orator striving to convince an audience to take up a
cause or like a defense-attorney advocating a point of view. We have to
acknowledge that Poe’s depraved rhetoricians—like Ahab, many of Shake-
150 Brett Zimmerman
speare’s evil characters, and the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost—have fairly
impressive powers of argument even while we recognize the absurdity of
their attempts to justify themselves, or recognize at least the pathos of their
attempts to explain the events in which they have played a role.
Frantic Forensic Oratory

Elsewhere (Zimmerman) I demonstrate that the killer in “The Tell-Tale
Heart” is a paranoid schizophrenic, noting that symptoms of that disease
include anxiety and argumentativeness (American Psychiatric Association
287).2 These symptoms, especially his disposition to dispute, are manifested
not only when he “arose and argued about trifles” (5: 95) but also through-
out the narration. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is in fact an extended example of
what classical Greek and Roman rhetors called antirrhesis (the rejection of
an argument or opinion because of its error, wickedness, or insignificance).
Obviously, the prisoner’s captors have named his crime for what it is, the act
of an anxiety-ridden madman; this is the argument that the narrator—illus-
trating another symptom of schizophrenia, lack of insight—rejects as erro-
neous, impertinent, absurdly false; this is the thesis to which he attempts to
provide the antithesis. Acting as his own defense-lawyer, he is not concerned
with the issue of his responsibility in the crime, with the quality of the evi-
dence against him, with the nature of the law broken, or with determining
the extent of harm done to the victim—all important issues in forensic ora-
tory (see Corbett 137–38). That is, he is not concerned with whether some-
thing happened but with the quality of what happened: his motives—the
causes of his murderous actions and his subsequent maneuverings. He wants
to demonstrate, rhetorically, that they were the actions of a sane rather than
an insane man—wants, therefore, to refute not the charge that he committed
the crime but the charge that he is mad. In doing so he bases his argument
on the topos of comparison, specifically the subtopic of difference (“I differ
from homicidal madmen in several important respects”).
As a specimen of courtroom oratory, “The Tell-Tale Heart” displays
several parts of the classical speech: it begins, as it should, with an exordium or
prooemium (introduction), which we might consider the first two paragraphs.
Part of the introductory material is the narratio, a brief, clear statement of
the case—the narrator knows that this is a principal component of forensic
oratory. Speeches, however, do not always use or need every part of the
classical division, and Poe’s narrator omits a partitio (divisio—division of
the issue into its constituent parts). He then combines the standard fourth
and fifth sections—the confirmatio (one’s strongest positive arguments) and
confutatio (refutation of contrary viewpoints—his extended antirrhesis);
these make up the bulk of the tale and are anticipated in the opening two
paragraphs. It is telling that this speech lacks the final part of a classical
oration, the peroratio—conclusion. Had the narrator been able to retain his
initial tranquility, he might have been able to produce some closing remarks
(a summary of his case and a terminal flourish), but by the end of the speech
his forensic powers have degenerated into complete and utter frenzy: he
succumbs to his schizophrenic symptoms again—specifically a violent mood
swing comprised of anger and anxiety.
At the start, he knows that his audience has already determined what
they think of him—knows that they are hostile and have labeled him a ner-
vous “madman.” He is aware, in other words, that his case is what Cicero
would have called a “difficult” one (as opposed to being “honorable,” “mean,”
“ambiguous” or “obscure”) involving as it does an audience whose sympathies
are alienated by the horrendous nature of his crime. Thus, the narrator uses
his exordium as it is meant to be used: he attempts to win the good will of his
auditors, at least to the extent that they are willing to hear him out patiently.
While the rest of the speech is an appeal to logos, reason, at the beginning
he must resort to an appeal to ethos in order to lessen the audience’s hostil-
ity and make them more receptive. He begins, therefore, with restrictio in
accepting part of their judgment: “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully
nervous I had been and am” (5: 88). He makes a concession (paromologia),
and what better way to capture the audience’s sympathies than by agreeing
with their pronouncement, in effect congratulating them on their astute-
ness, their medical acumen. It is true that he qualifies their diagnosis with
his rhetorical questions (“why will you say that I am mad?”; “How then am I
mad?”)—in this sense he is using what Richard Whately called the introduc-
tion corrective (see Corbett 284–85)—but he has already shown his good will
(eunoia) toward his listeners by agreeing with at least part of their judgment.
Corbett discusses the strategic usefulness of the concession as part of the
ethical appeal: “The audience gets the impression that the person capable of
making frank confessions and generous concessions is not only a good person
but a person so confident of the strength of his or her position that he or she
can afford to concede points to the opposition” (316).
Poe’s clever forensic rhetorician uses other devices to “soften up,” to con-
dition, his audience. The first and second paragraphs of “The Tell-Tale Heart”
also involve a device used often by Poe’s narrators: praeparatio (preparing an
audience before telling them about something done). Several Poe tales begin
with short essays on various themes, concepts, that will be illustrated by
the following narrative accounts; thus, the narrators prepare the audience to
understand the specific cases to follow by illuminating the theories first. “The
Murders in the Rue Morgue” commences with an essay on certain mental
skills before we hear about their display by the amateur detective C. Auguste
Dupin. “The Premature Burial” starts with several illustrations of untimely
interment before we hear about how the narrator himself was apparently
152 Brett Zimmerman
buried alive. “The Imp of the Perverse” begins with a short dissertation on
that destructive and irresistible human impulse before the narrator provides
three examples of it and finally his own case. I agree with Sandra Spanier
(311), who quotes Eugene Kanjo with approval: “This essay-like introduction
is not a failure of craft, as one critic contends, but a measure of Poe’s crafti-
ness” (41). This craftiness lies in Poe’s use of the rhetorical tradition—here, in
his employment of praeparatio. When used to preface a criminal confession,
this device can make what would otherwise seem to be merely cold, hard,
ugly, incriminating facts more understandable, even more acceptable—or,
at least, less unacceptable. At the same time, most significantly, the forensic
narrator combines the ethical appeal with the appeal to pathos (emotions): he
attempts to enlist the sympathies of his hostile auditors by portraying himself
as the real victim. He tries to weaken the charges against him by discoursing
of his misfortunes, his difficulties: I loved the old man, but I was persecuted,
hounded, harassed, and haunted day and night by his wretched Evil Eye
(Sharon Crowley says “a rhetor’s ethos may be a source of good will if she
[. . .] elaborates on her misfortunes or difficulties” [176]).
In his use of praeparatio, the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” differs
from the Watson-like biographer of Dupin and the protagonists of “The Imp
of the Perverse” and “The Premature Burial” in that he does not provide
any general theories or other cases of his particular illness, but he does pre-
pare us to understand it nevertheless. He wants us to recognize, first, that
he suffers from overacute senses and, second, that the vulture eye of the
old man, not hatred or greed (rather trite, uninteresting, normal motives),
is what compelled him to commit his atrocity (here is also expeditio, if we
can accept the term as meaning not just the rejection of all but one of vari-
ous reasons why something should be done but also of why something was
done). Also embedded within the larger trope, praeparatio, is aetiologia—giv-
ing a cause or reason for a result: “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; 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 forever” (5: 88). Here the narrator
employs another topos frequent in forensic oratory: the topos of relationship
and its sub-topic, cause and effect. The pathetic irony in all this, of course, is
that the narrator really believes his aetiologia to be reasonable, comprehen-
sible, easily justifiable.
Poe maintains an objective distance with us and watches the ironic aeti-
ologia. In fact, what characterizes most of the rhetorical devices in Poe’s tales
of criminal homicide is the conscious, the deliberate, irony with which he uses
these techniques of argumentation. Overlapping with the ironic aetiologia is
necessum (dicaeologia): defending one’s words or acts with reasonable excuses;
defending briefly the justice of one’s cause. As with the aetiologia, what gives
an interesting twist to the use of necessum in some of Poe’s tales is the extent
to which the narrators’ auditors and we, the readers, might find the defense,
the excuse, outrageously unconvincing and bizarre. The same is true of the
use on the part of the “Tell-Tale Heart” narrator of what Cicero called prae-
munitio—defending yourself in anticipation of an attack; strengthening your
position beforehand: “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”
(5: 92). Here the praemunitio, which is a normal component of the confirma-
tion/refutation part of a classical oration, is pathetic, ironic, because clearly
inadequate, outrageously unconvincing to anyone except the narrator—more
generally, to anyone except those outside society’s codes of moral behavior
and lacking the conscience of the superego.
The bragging narrator, however, believes that he, as a man of superior
powers (note his delusions of grandeur—another sign of schizophrenia), not
only can plan and carry out the perfect crime, and conceal the evidence, but
can also convince his prosecutors that his actions were entirely reasonable.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” is an extended exemplification of antirrhesis but it is,
as well, extended consummatio (diallage), a bringing together of several argu-
ments to establish a single point: his sanity. Argument #1: I am not mad but
suffer from overacute senses, especially of the auditory capacity (“And have I
not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the
senses?” [5: 91]). Argument #2: “Madmen know nothing. But you should
have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded—with what
caution—with what foresight—with what dissimulation I went to work” (5:
88). A lunatic, he believes, would be incapable of sagacity, caution, foresight,
and ingenuity in planning and executing a murder (“would a madman have
been so wise as this?” [5: 89]). Argument #3: “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.”3 Not only sagacity in execution but sagacity in
concealment is also a sign of sanity, he believes.
His auditors, however, likely do not share the positive slant that he puts
on his actions. After all, this shrewd forensic rhetorician seems to make use
of what is sometimes considered a rather disreputable device: paradiastole
(making the best of a bad thing; the euphemistic substitution for a negative
word with something more positive). In his introduction to Machiavelli’s
The Prince, David Wootton calls chapters 16 to 18 of that work “a virtuoso
exercise in paradiastole, the redescription of behavior in order to transform
its moral significance” (xxxiv). For example, what we call hypocrisy in a
ruler, Machiavelli would call craftiness or expediency; in other words, what
most people consider a negative trait, Machiavelli considers positive. We
see, then, how the device, a technique of argument, can involve essentially
a Nietzschean revaluation of values. As part of his forensic oratory,
154 Brett Zimmerman
the Machiavellian narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” seems to employ

paradiastole, especially in the third paragraph. Consider his use of nouns
and adverbs: “You should have seen how wisely I proceeded—with what
caution—with what foresight—with what dissimulation I went to work! [. . .]
Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in!” (5: 88–89;
my italics). What we might call perfidiously, he calls wisely; what we might
call sneakiness, he calls caution; what we might call scheming, he calls foresight;
what we might call treacherously, he calls cunningly. Even the one word in that
catalogue that has negative connotations, dissimulation, he would translate
as ingenuity. Certainly his accusers, those whom he is addressing, have
evaluated his conduct and might have expressed it thus: “We should have
seen how perfidiously you proceeded—with what sneakiness—with what
scheming—with what hypocrisy you went to work! Oh, we would have been
appalled to see how treacherously you thrust in your head!” But the narrator,
using paradiastole, has redescribed his behaviour, putting it in a positive light
according to his twisted values and assuming that his audience would be
persuaded to adopt those values also.
Let us summarize the rhetorical appeals, topoi, and devices that Poe’s
paranoid schizophrenic employs, within a classical arrangement, in order to
win the skeptical audience to his point of view. We have seen that he employs
four of the six parts of a classical oration. His exordium attempts to make the
hostile audience more receptive to his point of view through restrictio and
an initial, friendly concession (paromologia), part of his brief appeal to ethos
(simultaneously, his introduction is of an inoffensively corrective nature in
that he insists that his judges have misunderstood the nature of his illness
and, hence, his case). Next, he continues his strategy of softening the auditors
with praeparatio. His statement of the case (narratio), told in the plain style as
it should be (according to Quintilian), also features expeditio, aetiologia, and
necessum. The fourth and fifth parts of this forensic speech, the confirmatio
and confutatio, begin with the third paragraph and employ paradiastole, prae-
munitio, progressio, antirrhesis, and consummatio. Additionally, the narrator’s
forensic oratory involves the topos of comparison (with its sub-topos of dif-
ference) and the topos of relationship (with its sub-topos of cause and effect);
all these comprise a five-page appeal primarily to logos, reason—with a useful
bit of ethos and pathos thrown in at the beginning.4
What is so tragic about the narrator’s frantic forensic rhetoric, however,
is his psychopathic inability to appreciate the moral gravity of his deeds,
despite his—shall we say it?—otherwise brilliant capacity to construct a
powerful piece of persuasion, of reasoning. Paige Matthey Bynum puts it
this way: “Poe’s narrator is maintaining a causal sequence—I can reason;
therefore I am not insane—which Poe’s audience had just discovered was
false” (148). It is evident immediately to the reader, and increasingly as
the narrative progresses, that the narrator is indeed clearly ill and, as John
Cleman says, “The irony of ostensible sanity signaling insanity could not
have been lost on Poe” (632). Let us narrow the focus from the broad and
vague term insanity to the particular illness from which Poe’s forensic orator
suffers. His revaluation of values, his paradiastole, is really a manifestation of
his schizophrenia, which, remember, refers to a split between thought and
feeling: his thoughts of the grisly murder he committed are not accompanied
by the feelings of disgust that mentally healthy people would feel. His feelings
are of delight rather than disgust. That is why he is able to turn perfidiously
into wisely, sneakiness into caution, scheming into foresight, treacherously into
cunningly, and to define dissimulation as ingenuity rather than hypocrisy. We
recognize this rhetorical revaluation of values as a sign of schizophrenia; the
narrator does not.
Peroratio
Despite the glorification of oratory and rhetoric in Poe’s time and place,
in “The Tell-Tale Heart” we find Poe demonstrating that rhetoric can fail.
Did Poe therefore distrust that ancient art of persuasion? As we know, con-
tempt for and suspicion of rhetoric is a tradition at least as old as Plato, who,
in his Gorgias, has Socrates liken that art to teaching a cook how to give
poison a pleasing taste. This attitude certainly carried into the Renaissance:
in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, academics are rejected as good sto-
rytellers because “Monseigneur the Dauphin didn’t want their art brought
in, and he was afraid that rhetorical ornament would in part falsify the truth
of the account” (69). In his essay “On the Education of Children,” Mon-
taigne writes of the ideal student who “knows no rhetoric, nor how, by way
of preface, to capture the benevolence of the candid reader; nor has he any wish
to do so. In fact, all such fine tricks are easily eclipsed by the light of a simple,
artless truth. These refinements serve only to divert the vulgar” (77). Even
Machiavelli dissociates himself from the tradition in the second paragraph
of The Prince: “I have not ornamented this book with rhetorical turns of
phrase, or stuffed it with pretentious and magnificent words, or made use of
allurements and embellishments that are irrelevant to my purpose, as many
authors do” (5). And Shakespeare, most obviously, shows through the many
linguistic Machiavellians in his plays the necessity of qualifying Quintilian’s
definition of the rhetor as “a good man skilled at speaking.” Poe, like Milton
and Melville also, recognizes that bad men could speak well.
But I do not believe that Poe—the contemporary of Thomas Jeffer-
son, Chief-Justice Marshall, John Randoph, Daniel Webster—held the
rhetorical tradition in contempt. Like the Renaissance humanists cited
above who claimed to despise rhetoric, he was trained in it and put it to
good use. Yet, like them, he was wise enough to recognize how powerful
156 Brett Zimmerman
a tool it could be and to hold it in suspicion. As well, he was simply fas-

cinated by the ironic spectacle of the actions of unreason being justified
through the linguistic tradition of reason—the jarring collocation of insan-
ity employing the Aristotelian appeal to logos. Poe the Southerner may
indeed have been trained in the classical tradition—the brilliant oratory,
rhetoric, and logic of the wisest ancient Greeks and Romans—but he was
also a student of the new science of abnormal psychology. Poe, the devotee
of sweetness and light, gives in to the impulses of Dark Romanticism. A
Poe narrator may strive to convince us that his mind is a Greek temple
with its glorious friezes, fluted Doric columns, solid stylobates—but we
know what kind of ruin it is. The classical man will give way: Cicero will
succumb to the barbarian hordes of his psyche, Quintilian to the inner
demons, Aristotle to the beast within.
No t e s
1. That is worth repeating: Poe took a course in elocution. Thomas informs us
that courses devoted to the delivery of speeches were developed at American colleges
in the early 1800s. The teaching of speech came to be recognized “as a separate and
distinct subject field”:
In 1806 John Quincy Adams was appointed to the Boylston

Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. It was the first such
appointment in the United States. Previously the subject had been
taught by some tutor who also instructed in numerous other fields
and was frequently not specifically prepared for teaching speech.
But after Adams began his duties, other colleges established similar
professorships. (196–97)
2. Note that schizophrenia refers to a split between thought and feeling, not
to a split between personalities. Literary scholars seem especially prone to make this
error.
3. We might also consider the narrative an extended example of progressio,
building a point around a series of comparisons—in this case, between the narrator
and a true “madman.”
4. I have suggested in the first half of this essay that Poe was acquainted
both with contemporary and classical rhetors. Many of the ancient terms I have
been using (typically Greek)—certainly those naming the parts of an oration and
the three appeals (pisteis)—could be found in both ancient and modern books.
On the other hand, many of the names for the rhetorical figures are more likely
to be found in the ancient texts, so I propose that Poe—who was, remember,
classically trained—could have picked up such terms as paradiastole, paromologia,
and praeparatio from them. Still, that proposal begs the question of whether Poe was
even familiar with such esoteric terminology. In his review of Bulwer’s Night and
Morning, he demonstrates his awareness of the rhetorical name for personification:
“Nor does the commonplace character of anything which he wishes to personify
exclude it from the prosopopoeia” (10: 131; see also 10: 75). In “The Rationale of
Verse,” he illustrates his knowledge of another fancy Greek term: “Blending is the
plain English for synoeresis—but there should be no blending” (14: 231); Poe uses
the adjective synoeretical in Eureka (16: 187). In his review of The Dream, and Other
Poems, Poe displays his familiarity with the device solecismus: “Mrs. Norton will
now and then be betrayed into a carelessness of diction; Mrs. Hemans was rarely,
if ever, guilty of such solecisms” (10: 100). That Poe knew the esoteric name for
personification, and that he knew the little known synoeresis and solecism, shows that
he was indeed familiar with some of the classical terms for literary devices. Even
if he did not know all the names for the figures I have identified at work in “The
Tell-Tale Heart,” these figures nevertheless are there. Thus, we can conclude either
that Poe’s classical background gave him the labels for these devices (paradiastole,
paromologia, praeparatio, and so on), of which he made conscientious use for the
rhetorical maneuverings of his characters, or that he did not know all the terms but
had an intuitive understanding of the rhetorical strategies that they describe. Either
way, he shows himself to be a master rhetorician, despite the rhetorical failings that
he deliberately (and brilliantly) gives his narrators.
Wor k s Ci t e d
Allen, Hervey. Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Doran, 1927.
Aly, Bower, and Grafton P. Tanquary. “The Early National Period, 1788–1860.” A History
and Criticism of American Public Address. Ed. William Norwood Brigance. Vol. 1. 1943.
New York: Russell, 1960. 55–110.
American Psychiatric Association. “Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders.” Diag-
nostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th ed. Washington, D.C.: American
Psychiatric Association, 1994. 273–90.
Bynum, Paige Matthey. “ ‘Observe How Healthily—How Calmly I Can Tell You the Whole
Story’: Moral Insanity and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’ ” Literature and
Science as Modes of Expression. Ed. Frederick Amrine. Boston Studies in the Philosophy
of Science 115. Boston: Kluwer, 1989. 141–52.
Campbell, Killis. “Poe’s Reading.” University of Texas Studies in English 5 (1925): 166–96.
Cleman, John. “Irresistible Impulses: Edgar Allan Poe and the Insanity Defense.” American
Literature 63 (1991): 623–40.
Cluett, Robert, and Rita Kampeas. Grossly Speaking. Toronto: Discourse, 1979.
Cmiel, Kenneth. “Rhetoric.” A Companion to American Thought. Ed. Richard Wightman Fox
and James T. Kloppenberg. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995. 592–93.
Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. 1965. 3rd ed. New York:
Oxford UP, 1990.
Covino, William A., and David A. Jolliffe. Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries.
Toronto: Allyn, 1995.
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1902. Vol. 1. New York: AMS, 1965.
Hubbell, Jay B. “Edgar Allan Poe.” Eight American Authors: A Review of Research and Criti-
cism. Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1971. 3–36.
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Quarterly 26 (1975): 37–42.
Jacobs, Robert D. “Rhetoric in Southern Writing: Poe.” Georgia Review 12 (1958): 76–79.
Kanjo, Eugene R. “ ‘The Imp of the Perverse’: Poe’s Dark Comedy of Art and Death.” Poe
Newsletter 2 (1969): 41–44.
158 Brett Zimmerman
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. Trans. David Wootton. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995.
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man. 1941. New York: Oxford, 1968.
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American Humor 3 (1976): 103–17.
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cago: U of Chicago P, 1962.
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Montaigne, Michele de. Essays. Trans. J. M. Cohen. New York: Penguin, 1978.
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72–77.
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vols. New York: AMS, 1965.
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Harper Collins, 1991.
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Perverse.’ ” Studies in Short Fiction 17 (1980): 307–16.
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Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996. 448–67.
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Education.” A History and Criticism of American Public Address. Ed. William Norwood
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J ohn H . T immerman
House of Mirrors:
Edgar Allan Poe’s
“The Fall of the House of Usher”
“T he Fall of the House of Usher” is among those few stories that seem
to elicit nearly as many critical interpretations as it has readers. More recent
critical appraisals of the story have largely followed two directions: a reap-
praisal of the genre of the story as a Gothic romance1 and a close attention
to Madeline Usher as a type of Poe’s other female characters.2 But the tale
presents the reader a multiplicity of problems that set it aside from Poe’s
other stories. Madeline is as enigmatic as a new language and as difficult to
construe. While debates about Lady Ligeia have filled the pages of many
journals, it is not hard to understand why.3 Her contrarian social role,
her purely gothic resurrection, and her defiant antithesis in character to
Rowena sharpen her person from the start. But Madeline? This sylph-like
creature, so attenuated and frail, seems to slip through the story like vapor,
all the more mysterious for that and for her incredible power displayed in
the conclusion.
Similarly, while the story is certainly Gothic in nature, here, too, we
find exceptions and qualifications. In the majority of Poe’s Gothic tales the
narrative point of view is first person, and, significantly, the reader is also
placed inside the mind of this leading character-narrator who is only a step
away from insanity. In “Usher” we also have a creeping horror and the men-
tal disintegration of the principal persona, but the story is in fact narrated
From Papers on Language and Literature 39, no. 3 (Summer 2003). © 2003 by Southern
Illinois University.
159
160 John H. Timmerman
by an outside visitor (also representing the reader) who wants to find a way
out of the horror. The only problem with this narrator is that, even having
been given ample signs and warnings (as happens to Fortunato in “The Cask
of Amontillado”), he is too inept to put the clues together. Poe has designed
this deliberately, of course, for the reader is far more deductive than the
narrator but has to wait for him to reach the extreme limit of safety before
fleeing. However dull the narrator’s mental processing, it is altogether better
than being trapped in insanity.
One of the more penetrating of these studies of Gothic traits is G. R.
Thompson’s analysis of “The Fall of the House of Usher” in his Poe’s Fiction.
Thompson addresses the variations Poe creates with the Gothic tale by struc-
turing a conflict between reason and irrationality. Particularly successful is
his analysis of the decayed House mirroring Usher’s mind so that “The sink-
ing of the house into the reflecting pool dramatizes the sinking of the ratio-
nal part of the mind, which has unsuccessfully attempted to maintain some
contact with a stable structure of reality outside the self, into the nothingness
within” (90). The analysis provides a lucid discussion of the process of that
disintegration, of the dream-like qualities of Madeline as the devolution of
the subconscious, and of the narrator’s final infection by “Usher’s hysteria.”
What Thompson does not explore, however, is an accounting for the loss of
reason and what conclusion the reader may infer by the storm-struck house
crumbling into the murky tarn.
To explore such issues, one must investigate beyond the confines of
the tale proper, even beyond its generic home as a Gothic romance. The tale
yields its full meaning as we turn to areas much overlooked in the study of
this work; first, the influence of Poe’s cosmology as set forth in other works
but nonetheless pertinent, by his own telling, to his art; and, second, the
historical context of his time when the effects of Enlightenment thinking of
the prior century had not yet fully yielded (for Poe, at least) to the new spirit
of Romanticism. The latter point in particular is crucial for an historicist
appraisal of the story and of Poe, for it becomes evident that Poe did not
reject Enlightenment thinking, that he was in fact suspicious of the newer
Romanticism, and that at best he hoped for a tenuous harmony between the
two. Keeping in mind such premises, we can observe the theory for unity,
symmetry, and harmony emerging from Eureka, the aesthetic principles of
the theory in his essays, and the application of those principles in a study of
the conflict between Romanticism and Enlightenment in “The Fall of the
House of Usher.”
The casual treatment of Poe’s cosmology no doubt springs from the
conception that this is but one more entertaining hoax from the master trick-
ster, somewhat akin to the elaborate architecture of “The Raven” described in
“Philosophy of Composition.” Undeniably, however, even Poe’s most wildly
House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” 161
Gothic romances, his most mysterious tales of ratiocination, and virtually all
his poems, spring from some “idea” of order, a principle that this world can
try to twist and break but can never quite succeed. Basically, his cosmology
rests upon the philosophical principle that the very apprehension of disorder
assumes an agency of order. Those familiar with the works of Aristotle will
recognize the argument immediately. The essentials of Poe’s cosmology reside
in his essay Eureka, and there, too, he relies upon Aristotelian premises.
Since the work is less familiar to contemporary readers, I preface a dis-
cussion of it with a brief chronology. In 1843 Poe published the “Prospectus
of The Stylus,” the literary magazine he hoped to launch in July of that year.
In late 1847, he had completed the lecture “The Cosmogony of the Uni-
verse”4 that would be the introduction to Eureka, but also a lecture (nearly
two hours long) that he could use to raise funds for The Stylus. The lecture
had limited use. The only event we are certain of was an appearance on Janu-
ary 17, 1848, at Society Library where only 60 people showed up, most of
them journalists. Poe finally prevailed upon Putnam to publish the work,
asking for a print run of 50,000 copies and receiving instead a run of 500. It
appeared in early July 1848.5
There appeared to be good reason for caution. The narrative guise of
the learned scholar adopted for the lengthy third section absolutely con-
founds the casual—or even the very literate—reader.6 Elsewhere, the narra-
tor moves from humble observer to snide satirist. In addition to the shifting
narrative poses, the work itself is simply such a strange miscellany of facts
and thoughts and extrapolations that it is nearly impossible to find an orderly,
fruitful, and singular thesis emerging in it. Every issue seems to lead to an
ever-widening gyre of new questions. Admitting that, however, the work
still constitutes Poe’s fundamental cosmological view, and it does remain
central to understanding his aesthetic principles. That essential element of
Eureka, at least, may be rather clearly and conveniently summarized.
Preceding all existence is a deity functioning like Aristotle’s Prime
Mover. Humanity, and all physical nature, exists because this Prime Mover
willed it to exist. Poe states that “ ‘In the beginning’ we can admit—indeed,
we can comprehend, but one First Cause, the truly ultimate Principle, the
Volition of God” (237).7 We have then, a fairly traditional view of God’s
creation ex nihilo, that is, he willed all things into being out of nothing more
than his will. As with Aristotle (and also the Judeo-Christian tradition) God
is that being beyond which one can go no further.
But here Poe throws some of his own twists into the proposition. If
the creator being is that ultimate first cause, it must represent unity. All the
created order is individuated; necessarily, therefore, its source is not chaos but
unity. Poe speaks of this as “Irradiation from Unity”—the primary creative
act. Moreover, “This primary act itself is to be considered as continuous
volition” (237). This is to say that God’s creative impulse continues through
the creative order, including humanity, that he has willed into being.
We arrive at the old religious and philosophical conundrum. If willed
into being by God, and out of nothing, then what constitutes both our indi-
viduation yet also our unity with this God? Judaism provides the earliest
answer with the story of the Edenic fall, where because of an act of trans-
gression the unity was partially severed and, according to the Kabbalistic
myth of “God in Exile,” God withdrew into mystery. Nonetheless, as God’s
creation, humanity was still mindful of God. Plato provides the first coherent
philosophical accounting in the western world with his concept of the Ideal
Forms being transmuted by the earthly stuff of humanity. Only humanity,
however, possessed the quality of mind to apprehend the ideal.
Poe, on the other hand, insists upon an ongoing volitional act of God
apprehended by intuition. The idea led to his notorious concept in “The Poetic
Principle” that the task of the poet is “to apprehend the supernal loveliness”
(Essays 77) of God’s order and that the best way to do so is through sadness.
Poe reflects “that (how or why we know not) this certain taint of sadness is
inseparably connected with all the higher manifestations of true Beauty”
(Essays 81). This leads Poe, then, to the idea that the most sad thing, and
therefore the most beautiful, is the death of a beautiful woman. The result is
a body of work littered with female corpses.
It remains difficult, even for the most earnest reader, to take “The Poetic
Principle” altogether seriously. Yet, herein lie many of Poe’s seminal ideas and
aesthetic principles. Many of those ideas, moreover, relate directly to the cos-
mology of Eureka. One has to remember that Poe desires to startle the reader
into an awareness of the divinity within, for, he insists, we are all part and
particle of the divine.8 Necessarily so, since God willed all things into being
out of nothing. What then are we but particles of the divine itself? There-
fore in all created order there resides what Edward Wagenknecht called “the
Shadow of Beauty.”9 Poe describes it as such: “An immortal instinct, deep
within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the beautiful” (Complete
Works 14:273). Therefore, Poe concludes that, since we are willed into being
ex nihilo, since we are thereby part and particle of the divine, and since the
ongoing volition of the divine rests among its creation as a shadow of beauty,
symmetry that mirrors this unity of the universe is the paramount aesthetic
quality of the work. Poe argues that the sense of the symmetrical “is the
poetical essence of the Universal—of the Universe which, in the supreme-
ness of its symmetry, is but the most sublime of poems. Now symmetry and
consistency are convertible terms; thus poetry and truth are one” (Complete
Works 16:302).
Poe takes the issue one step further, however. If indeed all things are
willed into being ex nihilo, then not only all humanity but also all matter
is part and parcel with God. Such a view Poe expresses as his infamous
“sentience theory” in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”10 In particular
the theory exerts itself twice. When Usher reveals that he has not left the
mansion in many years, he describes the effect that the “mere form and
substance” of the mansion has had upon him: “An effect which the physique
of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked
down, had, at length, brought upon the morale of his existence” (“Usher”
403).11 Later, after Usher’s rhapsody of creative expressions, the narrator
and Usher fall into a conversation on “the sentience of all vegetable things”
(408). Remembering Usher’s description of this, the narrator describes the
preternatural interconnectedness of mansion and family, and concludes,
in Usher’s terms, that “The result was discoverable . . . in that silent, yet
importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the
destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him—what
he was” (408).12
Careful readers of Poe will quickly understand that this use of a mental
landscape is nothing new to Poe. It appears most prominently, perhaps, in
the poetry. In “Ulalume” for example, the weird and otherworldly geograph-
ical landscape is nothing more than an objectification of the narrator’s own
mind. But so too it appears repeatedly in the short stories, particularly in the
descriptions of the ornate and convoluted furnishings of a room (“Ligeia,”
“Masque of the Red Death”) that mirror the mind of the narrator. In no
other work, however, has Poe structured this sentience, or interconnected-
ness, between the physical world and the mental/psychological world more
powerfully and tellingly than in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”13
On the basis of his cosmological and aesthetic theories, Poe thereby
constructs his architecture of mirrors to prop the movement of the story.
Several studies have probed the pattern of mirror images, usually relating
them to the rationality/irrationality of Usher or the physical/psychological
tension between him and Madeline. Indeed, it falls beyond the space or pro-
vision of this essay to list them all, but in order to demonstrate the functions
of pairing and splitting that the mirror images provide, a few central patterns
may be noted.
The most evident, but eerily complex, of course, is the House of Usher
itself. Roderick himself tells the narrator that over the centuries the mansion
and the family had been so bonded as to become identified as one. Moreover,
the diminishment of the Usher family, through years of inbreeding to this
one lonely brother and sister, precisely parallels the physical collapse of the
house, standing far apart from civilization as it does in some distant, lonely
tract of country. The pairing between Roderick and the mansion is sustained
in the careful detailing of descriptions, as the narrator observes first the one,
then the other, and discerns unnerving similarities.
Although paired in matters of neglect and in physical description, both

the Ushers and the mansion are undergoing a simultaneous process of split-
ting. The house is rent by a zigzag fissure that threatens its stability. In his
letter to the narrator, Roderick admits to “mental disorder” that threatens his
stability.14 Similarly, the brother and sister are paired—not only by heritage
but also by being fraternal twins. They, too, however, are simultaneously
splitting apart, Madeline into her mysterious cataleptic trance and Roderick
into an irrationally surrealistic world of frenzied artmaking.
Many other mirror images accumulate in the story. The house is mir-
rored by its image in the tarn and collapses beneath its waters at the close.
Roderick’s painting of the underground burial vault—at which the narrator
marvels “If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher”—
preternaturally and prophetically mirrors Madeline’s escape from the vault.
The light with no apparent source in the painting may be referenced to Lady
Ligeia’s exclamation on the Conqueror Worm. “O Divine Father,” Ligeia
exclaims in a line that could be taken from Eureka, “Are we not part and
parcel in Thee? Who—who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor?
Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only
through the weakness of his feeble will” (“Ligeia” 319). Surprisingly with
her glacial, ghostly demeanor prior to her entombment, Madeline possesses
just such a will also.
“The Haunted Palace” provides another artistic mirror image. The
work precisely traces the devolution of the House of Usher from a palace
governed in orderly fashion by “Thought’s Dominion” to a den of disorder
in which demons flicker about like bats—except that these demons are in
Usher’s mind. An interesting submotif of the poem is the transition from
spirits moving “To a Lute’s well-tunèd law” to forms moving fantastically “to
a discordant melody.” With the demise of some structured order, artforms
rampage into dissonance and cacophony.
This process of devolution forms the centering thesis of Gillian Brown’s
innovative study, “The Poetics of Extinction.” Drawing upon Charles Lyell’s
Principles of Geology (1830–1833), in which he argues the diminishment and
passing of “organic beings” over vast periods of time, Brown finds a model for
the disintegration of both the House and lineage of Usher. The value of the
essay resides in Brown’s crisp demonstration of the relationship between the
devolution of environment and humanity, predicated on Lyell’s theory. As
we have seen, moreover, that close interconnectedness between the physical
and psychological, the external environment and the internal mind, is amply
supported by Eureka, as well as by Poe’s essays and art. Nonetheless one
questions to what end this devolution exists in the fiction. Is it simply that all
things pass away? Nothing could be further from Poe’s writings, with their
tenacious, almost frenzied grip upon the great mind that endures, as Eureka
has it. Beyond anything Poe sought the physical incarnation of Hippocrates’s
incantation in his Aphorisms: Ars longa, vita brevis. To complete the careful
construction of the story into an imaginative architecture that endures, how-
ever, one final set of mirror images bears scrutiny.
In order to create something of a mental theater that draws out the sus-
pense of the story, Poe constructed a conflation of such images at the ending.
To put Roderick’s mind at ease, the narrator reads to him from “Mad Trist”
by Sir Launcelot Canning.15 Every step of Ethelred to force the entrance to
the hermit’s dwelling has its mirror in Madeline’s clangorous escape from the
dungeon. Meanwhile, a storm descends upon and envelops the mansion, mir-
roring the swirling collapse of Usher’s rationality. Here, too, in the mirror of
the storm and Roderick’s mind, we find a clear use of the sentience theory.
Yet, the reader somehow feels dissatisfied if only construing the story
as a clever construction of Poe’s cosmology in his sentience theory. How-
ever carefully structured, the pairings and splittings of the mirror images
point suggestively to a larger pattern than mere aesthetic architecture. Many
directions to this larger significance have been offered.16 It may be profitable,
however, to relate the story to a larger conflict that Poe had been struggling
with for some time: how to balance Romantic passion with Enlightenment
order. By virtue of his work in the Gothic tale itself, many readers are quick
to place him without qualification in the Romantic camp. But it is a conflict
that Poe had struggled with previously that does, in fact, inhabit Eureka and
comes to bear most forcefully in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
Although literary scholars generally date the Enlightenment era from
1660 (as a departure from the Renaissance) to 1798 (with the publication
of Lyrical Ballads), all acknowledge the artificiality of such dating. All such
periods consist of attitudes, ideas, and cultural dynamics that precede and
postdate the era. Benjamin Franklin’s fervid belief in perfectibility of self 17
gave way to romantic dissolution in order to feel life more passionately.
Moreover, one could convincingly argue that the conflict between Enlight-
enment, with its heroic grandiosity of the mind, and Romanticism, with all
its disheveled passions, continue in full force. Perhaps the conflict was only
more heightened at Poe’s particular point in literary history.
The Enlightenment presupposed the primacy of human reason, the
ethical template of formal order, and the lifestyle of staid decorum. It may
be argued that Poe’s short stories eclipse reason by the supernatural, disrupt
ethical values by gothic disorder, and blast decorum by the weird and gro-
tesque. The argument would be wrong, for Poe sought nothing less than the
delicate symbiosis between the two—and the key quality of symbiosis is in
the mutual benefit one to another.
That Poe had struggled with the national literary shift from Enlight-
enment to Romantic thinking is evident long before 1839.18 And while
many of the early nineteenth-century writers embraced Romanticism pas-

sionately as the full outlet for an intuitive, imaginative, and story-driven
art, Poe was by far more reserved. In his “1836 Letter to B___” Poe refers
to the Lake Poets in quite derogatory terms: “As I am speaking of poetry,
it will not be amiss to touch slightly upon the most singular heresy in
its modern history—the heresy of what is called very foolishly, the Lake
School” (Essays 6–7). The heresy of which Poe speaks, specifically in refer-
ence to Wordsworth, is that didactic poetry is seen as the most pleasurable.
While admiring Coleridge’s great learning, despite all that learning Poe is
quick to point out his “liability to err.” As for Wordsworth, “I have no faith
in him” (Essays 8). Truly, the “Letter to B___” ends in a gnarled fist of con-
tradictions (of Coleridge, Poe says he cannot “speak but with reverence”),
and his attempt to define poetry is, in his own words, a “long rigmarole.”
But shot through the essay resides the governing belief that intellect and
passion work together in art.
Such also became the central argument of “The Philosophy of Compo-
sition,” a much better known, much clearer, but not necessarily more credible
work. Here Poe lays his famous rational grid upon the composition of a poem
of irrationality—“The Raven.” For example, he states his (predetermined)
scheme for rhythm and meter: “The former is trochaic—The latter is octom-
eter acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic repeated in the refrain
of the fifth verse, and terminating with a tetrameter catalectic” (Essays 21).
Poe’s “The Rationale of Verse,” moreover, might well be called one of the
preeminent Enlightenment documents of the Romantic era. Surely, there
were poets of Poe’s time who followed fairly rigid verse forms, yet none of
them that I am aware of would likely ever claim such an ornate, intellectual
concept prior to the poem’s composition. The fact is all the more telling in
that the elegy, “The Raven,” corresponds in many ways with “The Fall of
the House of Usher,” the singular exception being that in the former we are
placed inside the disintegrating mind of the narrator while in the latter the
narrator gives us some objective distance from the disintegration.
While “The Raven” remains one of the best known works in the western
tradition generally, a second of Poe’s elegies, “Ulalume,” is perhaps of more
critical importance to understanding the balancing act Poe was attempt-
ing between the Enlightenment and the Romantic. Upon a casual reading
the poem seems archetypally romantic. We find the narrator wandering a
strange landscape that ultimately is a mirror to his inner torment, if not his
mind itself (his companion is Psyche). Similarly the time is more of a psychic
state rather than the announced month of October with its withering and
sere leaves. Into the groaning realms, he walks with Psyche his soul. Why?
To what end? To discover the full meaning of the event for which they had
traveled here the year prior.
The heightened, fantastic elements of the poem intensify through-

out. The lonely season, the “dank tarn of Auber” (line 6), the unsettled and
threatening landscape—all the essentials of the Gothic are here. Further-
more, supernatural figures enter—the ghouls who feed on the dead but also
heavenly figures. The quarter moon rises, like twin horns hung in the sky.
With it appears the figure of Astarte, Phoenician goddess of fertility and
passion whose symbol is the twin horns of the bull. She is the consummate
romantic figure, representing the outpouring of creative passion. The narra-
tor observes that “She is warmer than Dian” (39), a reference to the Roman
goddess of chastity and order. Strangely, and in spite of Psyche’s caution to
fly, the narrator trusts Astarte to lead him to the truth. Essentially, we have
the old Appollonian-Dionysian conflict between order and impulse played
out with two female goddesses—appropriate to the elegy for Virginia. In this
case, and with the maddening desire to confront whatever lies at the end of
his journey, the narrator insists,
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,

And be sure it will lead us aright—
We surely may trust to its gleaming
That cannot but guide us aright. . . . (67–70)
Astarte, the goddess of passion, the fuel for the romantic flame, does in this
poem lead him to the burning encounter with the fact of Ulalume’s death.
In this poem, Poe appears to recognize the enormous creative potential in
romantic passion; yet, he remains wary of it, cautions that once unleashed it
has the capacity to consume someone entirely.
This tension is similar to that which Poe takes to “The Fall of the House
of Usher.” Few other authors struggled as powerfully with that tension and
with maintaining a balance between the analytic intelligence and the creative
fancy. The possible exception is Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose “Rappaccini’s
Daughter” can very profitably be read as a clash between the coldly analytic
Enlightenment man (Rappaccini) and the Romantic man (Baglioni). In “The
Fall of the House of Usher” one notices the conflict already in the first para-
graph, a masterpiece of prose poetry. The narrator possesses the initial ratio-
nal distance from the scene, reporting to the reader what he sees and feels
as he approaches the mansion. The organic form with which he reports his
findings, however, allows the reader intuitively to grasp the sense of insuf-
ferable gloom. In the initial sentence, heavy, sinking, o and u vowels droop
like sullen rain. The pacing of the sentences, with relatively brief, stumbling
phrases in very long, heavy sentences, enhance the effect.19
The carefully ordered architectural grid Poe places upon the story,
including the escalation of mirror images, is similar to the (purportedly)
careful ordering of his poems. In this story, however, the balance between
Enlightenment and Romantic itself is situated at the heart of the story.
Roderick himself is emblematic of Romantic passion, while Madeline is
emblematic of Enlightenment. Their genesis, as fraternal twins, is unified—
a perfectly mirrored complementarity—but the story unveils their splitting
to mutual destruction.
This way of viewing the relationship between brother and sister is not
customary, to be sure. The common view is that the narrator, coming from
outside the palace of horrors, represents rational order. An example of this
view appears in Jack Voller’s study of the sublime in Poe’s tale, in which he
states that “The narrator is associated with the rescuing force of reason. . . .
Although he strikes few readers as cheerful, the narrator is suited to his
task . . .” (29). Yet, it is hard to find the narrator exercising anything like
a force of reason. In the main, his role is limited to some musing observa-
tions, a rather slow study in horror, and a hopeless inefficiency to do much of
anything about the divisive destruction of the tenants of the House, which
seems to be precisely Poe’s point. When Romantic passion and Enlighten-
ment order divide, their mutual destruction is assured.
Madeline therefore becomes abstracted to little more than a men-
tal evanescence—Enlightenment at its extreme, out of touch with reality.
When the narrator first sees her passing in the distance, he is filled with
unaccountable dread, so otherworldly she appears. She is, Roderick dis-
closes, simply wasting away of some illness with no known etiology. At
the very same time, Roderick diverges in the opposite direction. While
Madeline disappears into a vaporific mist, Roderick flames into an unre-
stricted creative power, full of unrestrained, raw passion. He becomes the
fiery polar to Madeline’s cold abstraction. The narrator describes his suc-
cessive days with Usher and his artmaking thus: “An excited and highly
distempered ideality threw a sulphurous luster over all” (“Usher” 405).
Usher thereby enters a creative mania, churning out songs, paintings, and
poems against the coming dark.
That is precisely the point Poe makes in this tale. When split apart,
as they are here, Enlightenment thinking becomes all cold, analytic, and
detached; Romanticism, on the other hand, blazes into a self-consuming
passion. Aesthetically and ideally they ought to be mirrors to each other,
working in a complementary fashion to serve art. When split from each
other, they become mutually self-destructive. Preternaturally charged with
his Romantic instincts, Roderick hears, above the storm, the approaching
footsteps of Madeline. She enters, falls upon her brother, and together they
die. The splitting pairs have conjoined once again, but tragically this time.
The separation had gone to the extreme, disrupting the sentient balance,
destroying both. As the narrator flees, the house itself parallels the act of
Roderick and Madeline, first splitting apart along the zigzag fissure and
then collapsing together into the tarn.
If Eureka teaches us the design of unity, and the essays teach us Poe’s
efforts to integrate intellectual order into his aesthetics, then it may be fairly
said that “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a cautionary tale, warning of
a way Poe would not have artists go. While he did exult in the freedoms of
the Romantic imagination, he was also highly suspicious of it. He needed,
and called for, the orderliness of design inherited from the Enlightenment to
contain that imagination. Without that synchronous working, as “The Fall
of the House of Usher” demonstrates, both are doomed.
No t e s
1. Perhaps the most helpful study of this sort is Gary E. Tombleson’s “Poe’s
‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ as Archetypal Gothic: Literary and Architectural
Analogs of Cosmic Unity” (Nineteenth-Century Contexts 12.2 [1988]: 83–106).
Tombleson locates the place of the story—both its traditional and innovative ele-
ments—within the tradition dating to Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic
Story (1764). Also helpful is Stephen Dougherty’s “Dreaming the Races: Biology
and National Fantasy in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ ” (Henry Street 7.1 [Spring
1988]: 17–39). Of particular interest, and with a revealing twist on interpreting the
story, is Mark Kinkead-Weekes’ “Reflections On, and In, ‘The Fall of the House of
Usher.’ ” Kinkead-Weekes argues that the story is “not merely Gothick, but rather a
‘Gothick’ which at every turn signals a consciousness of its own operation” (17). This
pattern includes, furthermore, an awareness of the writer of the Gothic.
2. See, for example, Cynthia S. Jordan’s “Poe’s Re-Vision: The Recovery of the
Second Story” (American Literature 59.1 [Mar. 1987]: 1–19). Jordan sets forth the
ways by which Poe differs from Hawthorne and pays close attention to such stories as
“Berenice,” “Morella,” and “Ligeia,” in addition to “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
In “ ‘Sympathies of a Scarcely Intelligible Nature’: The Brother–Sister Bond in Poe’s
‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ ” (Studies in Short Fiction 30 [1993]: 387–396), Leila
S. May discusses the issue of the female persona with an interesting twist, argu-
ing that the story represents Poe’s vision of social destruction with the breakup of
family structures in mid-19th century. That the relationship between Roderick and
Madeline is aberrant goes without saying, but May provides insufficient evidence of
a social meltdown at this time or support for Poe’s holding this view.
3. It is nearly impossible to keep track of all the articles and dissenting opin-
ions that “Ligeia” has engendered. In Poe’s mind, at least, the story was his best to
date. To Philip Pendleton Cooke he wrote, “ ‘Ligeia’ may be called my best tale” (9
August 1846 Letters 2:329). Readers don’t always agree with authors on such mat-
ters. The story is, nonetheless, a fascinating document for Poe’s revision process. In
The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, volume 2, Thomas Mabbott discusses these
at some length.
4. Technically, a “cosmogony,” the term Poe uses, is concerned with the origins
and the evolution of the universe. A “cosmology,” the more fitting term here, deals
with the universe in total relativity—from the origin to the acts and consequences
of all life in the universe. As we will see, Poe’s theory clearly points in the latter
direction.
5. For helpful discussion of the relationship between the lecture and Eureka
see Burton R. Pollin’s “Contemporary Reviews of Eureka: A Checklist” (Poe as Lit-
erary Cosmologer: Studies on “Eureka”—A Symposium. Hartford, CT: Transcendental
Books, 1975. 26–30) in addition to standard biographies.
6. Frederick Conner demonstrates the plethora of contradictions and fallacies
in the third section in his “Poe’s Eureka” (Cosmic Optimism: A Study of the Interpreta-
tion of Evolution by American Poets from Emerson to Robinson. New York: Octagon,
1973. 67–91).
7. Quotations from Eureka are from volume 16 of the Harrison edition of The
Complete Works. Page numbers refer to this volume. More recently, Richard P. Ben-
ton has edited a new edition of Eureka with line numbers, a compendium essay, and
a bibliographic guide (Hartford, CT: Transcendental Books, 1973). The text is quite
difficult to find, however, while the Harrison edition is in nearly every library.
8. Poe made this point in a number of places, perhaps most forcefully in his
2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell: “But to all we attach the notion of a
constitution of particles—atomic composition. For this reason only we think spirit
different; for spirit, we say, is unparticled, and therefore is not matter. . . . The
unparticled matter, permeating and impelling all things, is God. Its activity is the
thought of God—which creates. Man, and other thinking beings, are individualiza-
tions of the unparticled matter” (Letters 1:257). Humanity is a part or extension of
God. Since it is the nature of God to create, humanity’s closest affinity to the Deity
lies in its creativity. To express its godliness humanity must create in its own unique,
but divine, method.
9. Wagenknecht puts it as such: “For though the Shadow of Beauty may float
unseen among us, we can never make much contact with it in human experience
unless it can somehow be made to impregnate the stuff of human life . . .” (151). It
is precisely the task of the poet to make that “impregnation.”
10. One should not be deterred from spotting similarities in cosmology by the
fact that Eureka was published nearly a decade (1848) later than “The Fall of the
House of Usher,” which first appeared in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, September
1839. The fundamental beliefs pulled together in Eureka were ones that Poe had
been developing in part for years and in Eureka tried to systematize as a whole.
11. All quotations from “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia” are from
volume 2 of Mabbott’s authoritative edition and will be cited as “Usher” and “Ligeia.”
12. In his “Sentience and the False Deja vu in ‘The Fall of the House of
Usher,’ ” John Lammers makes a distinction critical to understanding Poe. Sentience,
he points out, is a matter of shared awareness:
Since the word “sentience” can mean “feeling with awareness” or

“feeling without awareness,” since everyone believes that plants at
least have “feeling without awareness,” and since Usher’s theory is
unusual because only four writers in the history of the world have
agreed with him, then the meaning of “sentience” here must be the
unusual one—“feeling with awareness or consciousness.” In short,
Usher believes that all vegetation has a mind. (21)
This view comports precisely with the “volitional” act of creation appearing in
Eureka. For another discussion of sentience, see David L. Coss’s “Art and Sentience
in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ ” (Pleiades 14.1 [1991]: 93–106).
13. For a consideration of the disintegrating mind of Usher, see G. R. Thomp-

son’s Poe’s Fiction, 87–97. Thompson’s views have been contested by many. See,
for example, Patrick F. Quinn’s “A Misreading of Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of
Usher’ ” (Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Boston: G. K. Hall,
1987. 153–59). In a study of “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Ronald
Bieganowski observes that “Reflected images double the intensity of beauty” (186).
14. Earliest published forms of the story use the term “pitiable mental idiosyn-
crasy” here. See s2:398. For a lengthier discussion of the house and the “divided mind,”
see Jack G. Voller’s “The Power of Terror: Burke and Kant in the House of Usher.”
15. In an unusual twist on Poe’s notorious ending, Kinkead-Weekes views
it as an ironic, comedic scene in which the affected superiority of the narrator is
destroyed (30–31).
16. Several of these different interpretations explore the conflict between the
natural and the supernatural, such as E. Arthur Robinson’s “Order and Sentience
in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ ” (PMLA 76.1 [Mar. 1961]: 68–81) and David
Ketterer’s The Rationale of Deception in Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP,
1979). Several studies explore the subconscious or the conflict between image and
reality in the story. Representative here are Sam Girgus’s “Poe and the Transcendent
Self ” (The Law of the Heart. Austin: U of Texas P, 1979. 24–36) and Leonard W.
Engel’s “The Journey from Reason to Madness: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the
House of Usher’ ” (Essays in Arts and Sciences 14 [1985]: 23–31).
17. “It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving
at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time. . . .
As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might
not always do the one and avoid the other” (Franklin 1384).
18. For a more detailed analysis of Poe’s relation with the English Romantics
and the part they played in his aesthetics, see my article, “Edgar Allan Poe: Artist,
Aesthetician, Legend” (South Dakota Review 10.2 [Spring 1972]: 60–70).
19. For linguists with an interest in quantitative rhetoric, the first paragraph
is a treasure trove. Just dealing with the baseline figures, the first four sentences are
60, 22, 32, and 81 words in length, for an average of 49, an extraordinary average.
But the proliferation of short phrases and clauses works as interior counterpart.
Wor k s Ci t e d
Bieganowski, Ronald. “The Self-Consuming Narrator in Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and ‘Usher.’ ” American
Literature 60.2 (May 1988): 175–87.
Brown, Gillian. “The Poetics of Extinction.” The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Shawn
Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 330–44.
Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography. New York: The Library of America, 1987.
Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. “Reflections On, and In, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ ” Edgar
Allan Poe: The Design of Order. Ed. A. Robert Lee. London: Vision Press, 1987:
17–35.
Lammers, John. “Sentience and the False Deja Vu in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ ” Pub-
lications of the Arkansas Philological Association 22.1 (Spring 1996): 19–41.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott. 3 vols.
Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard U, 1969–.
———. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. James Harrison. 17 vols. New York: T.
Y. Crowell, 1902.
———. Essays and Reviews. Ed. B. R. Thompson. New York: Modern Library, 1984.
———. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe. 2 vols. Ed. John Ward Ostrom. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1948.
Thompson, G. R. Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales. Madison: U of Wisconsin
P, 1973.
Voller, Jack G. “The Power of Terror: Burke and Kant in The House of Usher.” Poe Studies
21.2 (1988): 27–35.
Wagenknecht, Edward. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend. New York: Oxford UP,
1963.
RI C H A RD KO P LEY
A Tale by Poe
T he relationship of Roger Chillingworth to Arthur Dimmesdale is

succinctly intimated in one of Hawthorne’s 17 November 1847 notebook
entries: “A story of the effects of revenge, in diabolizing him who indulges
in it” (8:278, see also 8:27). Scholars have linked the diabolized doctor to
three clusters of previous writings: those works that involve or relate to the
devil (John Milton’s Paradise Lost, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and ver-
sions of Faust); those works that concern psychological probing (accounts
of Francis Cheynell’s torment of William Chillingworth, accounts of Wil-
liam Prynne’s torment of Archbishop Laud, William Godwin’s Caleb Wil-
liams, and James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire); and those works
that involve murder (accounts of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury and
accounts of the murder of Captain Joseph White).1 The three clusters rein-
force the burden of the critical tenth chapter of The Scarlet Letter: a satanic
figure, probing the psyche of a guilty man, commits a spiritual murder.
However, none of the sources in these clusters seems to be the immediate
prompt for Chillingworth’s intrusion upon the sleeping Dimmesdale and
his discovery of Dimmesdale’s secret. That incident may find its model in a
work by Hawthorne’s one peer in the short story in 1840s America, Edgar
Allan Poe.
* * *
From The Threads of The Scarlet Letter: A Study of Hawthorne’s Transformative Art, pp.
22–35, 125–130. © 2003 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp.
173
174 Richard Kopley
Nathaniel Hawthorne highly respected the fiction of Poe. In the fall

of 1842, he acknowledged as much in his short story “The Hall of Fantasy,”
including Poe in a select company of poets and writers in the Hall of Fantasy
“for the sake of his imagination” (although threatening him with “ejectment”
for his criticism) (10:636).2 And Hawthorne wrote to Poe on 17 June 1846,
“I admire you rather as a writer of Tales, than as a critic upon them. I might
often—and often do—dissent from your opinions, in the latter capacity, but
could never fail to recognize your force and originality, in the former” (16:168).
Poe’s May 1842 Graham’s Magazine review of Twice-Told Tales—a review
acknowledging “force” and “originality,” but incorrectly accusing Hawthorne
of plagiarism (Complete Works 11:104–13)—must have particularly antagonized
Hawthorne.3 Yet Poe’s literary artistry clearly impressed him.
George Ripley’s already-quoted early review of The Scarlet Letter stimu-
lates inquiry into the possibility of a Hawthorne debt to Poe. The 1 April
1850 critique notes several parallels between the work of Hawthorne and
that of Poe: “the same terrible excitement . . . the same minuteness of fin-
ish—the same slow and fatal accumulation of details, the same exquisite cool-
ness of coloring, while everything creeps forward with irresistible certainty
to a soul-harrowing climax.” Then Ripley qualifies his observation, noting
Hawthorne’s softening of the supernatural. Although he quotes amply from
The Scarlet Letter, he does not go on to identify a specific related Poe tale.4
Nevertheless, Ripley’s general observation clearly provides encouragement
for a consideration of Hawthorne’s possible reliance on Poe.
Scholars have occasionally engaged in this consideration. Arlin Turner
rightly stated, “similarities in details and in method [in the stories of Haw-
thorne and Poe] indicate that [Hawthorne] possibly came in some measure
under Poe’s influence.” However, the relationships that Turner suggests are
not developed. Maurice Beebe nicely elaborated parallels in setting and
characters between Hawthorne’s novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
and Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), but he did not
argue for Hawthorne’s indebtedness. Millicent Bell intimated that Haw-
thorne borrowed for “The Birthmark” (1843) from Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”
(1842), and Joel Pfister concurred, but the case is still not altogether conclu-
sive.5 The initial considerations are suggestive, though, and there remains a
wide field for further inquiry. Such inquiry is rewarded: evidence suggests a
strong, but hitherto unrecognized, correspondence between The Scarlet Letter
and Poe’s classic short story “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
* * *
Hawthorne would have read “The Tell-Tale Heart” when it was first
published, in January 1843. The story appeared in the first number of James
A Tale by Poe 175
Russell Lowell’s literary magazine, The Pioneer, a monthly periodical that

Hawthorne would have had reason to anticipate—Lowell had solicited a
contribution.6 And on 17 December 1842, Hawthorne sent Lowell a piece
for The Pioneer, the aforementioned “The Hall of Fantasy,” which would
appear in the second number (15:663). On 4 January 1843, Hawthorne’s
wife Sophia Hawthorne wrote admiringly about “The Hall of Fantasy” to
her sister-in-law Louisa Hawthorne, and added, “James [Russell] Lowell . . .
has sent us the first [number of The Pioneer], but that has nothing of Nathan-
iel’s” (15:667). However, that number had Lowell’s highly commendatory
review of Hawthorne’s Historical Tales for Youth. And that first issue of the
magazine featured, too, Poe’s intense tale of murder and guilt, “The Tell-Tale
Heart”—a work praised by Lowell, who referred to the author’s “powerful
imagination.” 7 Hawthorne would surely have read this issue of The Pioneer
with interest, and with particular interest Poe’s remarkable contribution.
Contemporary response to the first publication of “The Tell-Tale Heart”
was emphatic, if we judge from the second number of Lowell’s magazine,
which offered comments on Poe’s tale in three reprinted reviews of The Pio-
neer’s first number. It was probably Horace Greeley who wrote in a New
York Tribune review—with a mixture of admiration and distaste—that “The
Tell-Tale Heart” was “a strong and skilful, but to our minds overstrained
and repulsive analysis of the feelings and promptings of an insane homicide.”
A critic asserted in a Boston Bay State Democrat review that the tale was
“an article of thrilling interest.” And N. P. Willis remarked in his Brother
Jonathan review—with unmixed admiration for Poe’s tale—that “Mr. Poe’s
contribution is very wild and very readable, and that is the only thing in
the number that most people would read and remember.”8 Doubtless Haw-
thorne would have shared the views of the anonymous critic and Willis,
especially in light of his own favorable comment on Poe’s imagination in
“The Hall of Fantasy,” the lead-off piece in that second number of The Pio-
neer. Hawthorne would have been much engaged by the tale’s dark theme
and its guilt-wracked protagonist.
And he would surely have been fascinated by the tale’s indebtedness to
works familiar to him—Daniel Webster’s speech to the jury at the Joseph
White murder trial, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and his own biographical sketch,
“Thomas Green Fessenden.” Our perceiving Hawthorne’s probable recogni-
tion of some of the origins of “The Tell-Tale Heart” permits greater insight
regarding his attraction to Poe’s story.
* * *
As T. O. Mabbott has observed, in writing “The Tell-Tale Heart” Poe

relied critically on Daniel Webster’s prosecutorial speech regarding John
176 Richard Kopley
Francis Knapp, who was accused (and found guilty) of participating in a

conspiracy responsible for the murder of Captain Joseph White, a crime that
took place on 6 April 1830 in Salem, Massachusetts. Webster imagined the
very deliberate murderer, Richard Crowninshield Jr., entering the room of
the sleeping “old man,” striking his helpless victim, and later, unable to con-
tain his guilt, confessing his deed. Webster identified the story as “a new
lesson for painters and poets,” and Poe, probably reminded of the speech
by quotations from it in a Mary Rogers article in the Brother Jonathan of 21
August 1841, clearly took the lesson: “The Tell-Tale Heart” concerns just the
sequence of events described (Collected Works 3:789–91).9
Webster’s published speech, a synthesis of the summations that the
famous lawyer had made at the two trials of John Francis Knapp, appeared
in Salem in late 1830 in the Appendix to the Report of the Trial of John Fran-
cis Knapp.10 This celebrated speech would have been known to Hawthorne,
who was a resident of North Salem at the time of the murder and that of
the trials (August to December 1830). Scholars have noted that Hawthorne
might even have heard Webster speak at the trials.11 Certainly Hawthorne
would have heard much about the sensational murder and the trials—and he
wrote a letter to his cousin John S. Dike in September 1830 concerning, in
part, the convicted John Francis Knapp and his accused brother Joseph and
their family (15:206–9). He also referred to the White murder in two subse-
quent letters, one of these to his younger sister Maria Louisa and the other
to Dike (15:214, 217). Furthermore, Hawthorne recurred to that murder in
later years—in 1837, he wrote in his notebook about a cabinet in the Essex
Historical Society containing old portraits, clothes, manuscripts, and “[t]he
club that killed old Jo. White” (23:177);12 in 1847, he imagined a story based
on the Committee of Vigilance that had been created to find the murderers
of Captain White (8:279); and in 1852, he listed the birth of Joseph White,
adding, “Murdered, more than fourscore years afterwards, in Salem” (8:550).
Hawthorne’s son-in-law George Parsons Lathrop connected the Joseph
White murder with the alleged guilt of Clifford Pyncheon for the death of
his uncle, in The House of the Seven Gables; also, David S. Reynolds linked the
Knapp brothers with Roger Chillingworth. F. O. Matthiessen specifically
related the Webster speech to the murder of Judge Pyncheon, and Margaret
Moore has recently linked Webster’s dramatic speech to Reverend Dimmes-
dale’s urge to confess.13 Certainly Hawthorne would have recognized what
Mabbott termed “the chief inspiration” for “The Tell-Tale Heart” (Collected
Works 3:789).14
And Hawthorne would also very probably have recognized an impor-
tant indebtedness in “The Tell-Tale Heart” to an even more famous work
concerning the murder of an old man in his bed—Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
At the very center of Poe’s story, his narrator directs a ray of light upon
A Tale by Poe 177
the old man’s veiled eye—what he terms “the damned spot” (Collected Works
3:795). As Richard Wilbur has noted, Poe thus alludes to the guilt-ridden
Lady Macbeth, who, in the renowned sleepwalking scene, apostrophizes the
blood she perceives on her hand, “Out, damn’d spot! Out, I say!” (5.1.35).
Hawthorne had alluded to Macbeth in an 1839 letter to Sophia (“Hurley-
Burley,” 15:316 [see Macbeth 1.1.3]) and in the 1842 story “The Lily’s Quest”
(the stream stained with a murderer’s blood, 9:446 [see Macbeth 2.2.57–60]),
and he had alluded specifically to Lady Macbeth’s words in her sleepwalking
scene in his 1835 travel piece, “Sketches from Memory” (“all the perfumes of
Arabia,” 11:299 [see Macbeth 5.1.50–51].15 It is interesting to add that Haw-
thorne would read Shakespeare to his wife in 1844 (16:13), and she would
allude to Macbeth in a letter in 1845 (regarding Una’s “murthered” sleep,
16:109 [see Macbeth 2.2.33]). And he would later teach his children pas-
sages from Shakespeare, and his son Julian would readily draw on Macbeth
(regarding an older woman’s “golly locks” [see Macbeth 3.4.49–50]).16 As he
read “The Tell-Tale Heart” in January 1843, Hawthorne would surely have
been struck not only by its reliance on Daniel Webster’s speech, but also by
its allusion to Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Finally, Hawthorne would very likely have recognized another impor-
tant source for Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”—his own essay, “Thomas Green
Fessenden.” Scholars have noted Poe’s occasional reliance on Hawthorne:
Seymour Gross has suggested that Poe revised “Life in Death” (soon to be
“The Oval Portrait”) because of his reading Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”
(appearing in the third number of The Pioneer, in March 1843); Robert
Regan has maintained that in writing “The Masque of the Red Death” Poe
drew on “The Legends of the Province House” in Twice Told Tales (second
edition, 1842)—“Howe’s Masquerade,” “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle,” “Edward
Randolph’s Portrait,” and “Old Esther Dudley”; and D. M. McKeithan has
confirmed Regan with regard to “Howe’s Masquerade” and “Lady Eleanore’s
Mantle” and has linked Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” with Hawthorne’s “The
Prophetic Pictures.”17 Consistent with these views is the view that Poe’s writ-
ing of “The Tell-Tale Heart” was influenced by his reading of Hawthorne’s
1838 sketch of Fessenden. This point requires brief elaboration.
Poe lived in New York City from January 1837 through mid-1838.
Having worked as the editor of Richmond’s distinguished monthly
magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger, from August 1835 through
January 1837—and probably seeking similar employment in New York—
he announced his presence at the celebrated 30 March 1837 Booksellers’
Dinner by toasting “The Monthlies of Gotham—Their Distinguished
Editors, and their vigorous Collaborateurs.” Notably, he had, at that time, a
library including “magazines bound and unbound.”18 Of all the American
magazines then published, the American Monthly Magazine would have
178 Richard Kopley
particularly commanded his attention—he had termed it in January 1837 a

periodical “for whose opinions we still have the highest respect” (Complete
Works 9:273), and he would write in October 1846 that that magazine “[is]
one of the best journals we have ever had” (Complete Works 15:121). Edited
by Park Benjamin, the American Monthly Magazine featured in the May
1837 issue an account of the Booksellers’ Dinner; in the June 1837 issue
Poe’s tale, “Von Jung, the Mystific”; and in the July 1837 issue the unsigned
Hawthorne tale, “Incidents from the Journal of a Solitary Man.”19 Moreover,
the periodical offered in the November 1837 issue Benjamin’s review of The
Token for 1838, where the editor referred to his “admiration of the genius of
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,” alluding to his remark in a review of
The Token for 1837 that Hawthorne was a “man of genius.” The December
1837 issue included Benjamin’s announcement that “A valued friend” would
soon write a “biographical sketch” of the recently deceased editor and
poet Thomas Green Fessenden, and the January 1838 issue provided that
sketch of Fessenden, signed by that “valued friend,” that “man of genius,”
Nathaniel Hawthorne. 20 Poe would probably have been very curious about
Hawthorne at this time and perhaps somewhat competitive with him; he
surely would have seen Hawthorne’s sketch of Fessenden in the American
Monthly Magazine and read the piece with interest.21
And Poe might well have already heard significantly of Fessenden—espe-
cially during his 1827 stay in Boston. Then looking for “employment on any
of the large journals,” Poe would very likely have known of “the most widely
circulated agricultural journal in New England,” Fessenden’s New England
Farmer, the office of which was located at 52 North Market Street, opposite
Faneuil Hall.22 Pertinently, Fessenden listed his New England Farmer’s Alma-
nack, for 1828 for sale at one bookstore in Boston—Bowles and Dearborn,
located at 72 Washington Street, only a few blocks from Faneuil Hall. Poe
would have come upon this bookstore since it was between the offices of the
North American Review and United States Literary Gazette at 74 Washington
Street and the office of Calvin F. S. Thomas, the printer of his 1827 Tamerlane
and Other Poems, at 70 Washington Street.23 Probably Bowles and Dearborn
would have sold, too, the New England Farmer itself. Especially noteworthy
in that periodical, in light of the “scarabaeus” of Poe’s prize-winning 1843 tale
“The Gold-Bug,” is the 31 August and 7 September 1827 front-page article
titled “Remarks on the Scarabaeus Roseus, or Rose-Bug.” (It should be added
that Poe joined the army while he was living in Boston, and in late October
1827 his battery was sent to Sullivan’s Island, in the harbor of Charleston,
South Carolina, an island that he would later use as the setting for “The Gold-
Bug.”)24 The evidence is primarily circumstantial but quite suggestive—it does
seem reasonably likely that Poe would have heard significantly of Fessenden in
1827. If he had, then Hawthorne’s 1838 Fessenden piece would have held even
A Tale by Poe 179
greater meaning. And perhaps, too, it would have been an even more probable
work from which Poe might borrow.
Hawthorne had lived with Fessenden in 1836 and had clearly been
devoted to him; he declared towards the close of his Fessenden sketch his
affection for the senior editor.25 In this regard, we should recall, in Poe’s “The
Tell-Tale Heart,” the murderous narrator’s notoriously asserting, “I loved the
old man” (Collected Works 3:792) and his identifying the old man’s disturbing
features as his filmy eye and his beating heart. We may well be struck, then,
by Hawthorne’s feelingly stating of Fessenden, “On my part, I loved the old
man, because his heart was as transparent as a fountain” (23:106–7; emphasis
added). The great probability that Poe read this statement in the American
Monthly Magazine and the identity of the assertion of love in Hawthorne and
in Poe suggest Poe’s debt to Hawthorne. Furthermore, Poe’s ironic treatment
of that assertion in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is strengthened by an inversion of
Hawthorne’s explanation. I would propose that even as Poe, in The Narrative
of Arthur Gordon Pym, inverted the Isaiahan prophecy of the peace of Jerusa-
lem—“not one of the stakes thereof shall ever be removed, neither shall any
of the cords thereof be broken” (Isaiah 33:20)—to convey the destruction
of Jerusalem—natives pull “cords” attached to a line of “stakes,” causing a
landslide (Collected Writings 1:184–85)26 —so, too, did Poe, in “The Tell-Tale
Heart,” invert the cause for Hawthorne’s love for the old man—Fessenden’s
transparent heart—to serve as the provocation of the narrator’s hostility to
the old man—his victim’s filmy eye, his veiled eye. I would propose, too,
that Poe further inverted that transparent heart by creating a secret-bearing
heart, a tell-tale heart. According to this view, Hawthorne’s statement of
love in the Fessenden sketch was both acknowledged and subverted by Poe.
Arguably, in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the beloved editor Thomas Green Fes-
senden became Poe’s stern foster father John Allan.
In his November 1847 review of Hawthorne, Poe specifically remem-
bered the March 1838 American Monthly Magazine review of Hawthorne
(probably by Park Benjamin) (Complete Works 13:142)—it seems wholly
plausible, therefore, that when he wrote “The Tell-Tale Heart” in 1842,
Poe would have remembered the January 1838 American Monthly Magazine
sketch of Fessenden by Hawthorne. Perhaps Poe had a copy of the Janu-
ary 1838 issue of the magazine—whether “bound or unbound”—in his pos-
session or at least accessible; very likely he had Hawthorne’s unabashedly
expressive language in mind.
Reading “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Hawthorne would surely have recog-
nized its debt to the Webster speech, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and his own
Fessenden sketch. As engaged by the work as he would have been given its
authorship, its characterization, and its thematics, he would have been even
more beguiled by the work because of its genesis.
180 Richard Kopley
It is relevant to add that after Hawthorne’s story “The Birth-Mark”

was published in the third and final number of The Pioneer (March 1843),
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (also mentioned in the “Hall of Fantasy”
[10:635]) praised the work to Hawthorne in a letter of 19 March 1843, and
then admonished, “But you should have made a Romance of it, and not a
short story only. But more of that on Tuesday.” On Tuesday, 21 March 1843,
Hawthorne dined with Longfellow in Cambridge (8:368) and undoubtedly
learned more of Longfellow’s assessment. Perhaps the two writers also dis-
cussed The Pioneer’s inclusion of “The Tell-Tale Heart”—especially since that
tale opened with a stanza from Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” (Collected
Works 3:792). In any case, as Hawthorne considered the suggestion that he
write a romance, he would still have had Poe’s recently-published work, “The
Tell-Tale Heart,” fresh in his mind.27
And Hawthorne may have had occasion to encounter “The Tell-Tale
Heart” again. Although it was not reprinted in Poe’s 1845 Tales (a copy of
which Hawthorne owned [16:158]), it did appear in the 23 August 1845
issue of the Broadway Journal—the same issue in which Poe offered a para-
graph of comment on Hawthorne as a “prose poet” deserving greater finan-
cial success (Collected Writings 3:225). But regardless of whether Hawthorne
saw the Broadway Journal publication of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” he would not
likely have forgotten the work’s intensity or its familiar origins. Clearly he
could well have had Poe’s memorable tale of guilt in mind in late September
1849 as he “began work in earnest” on The Scarlet Letter. And he would soon
have had an unexpected but compelling reason to call to mind the Poe tales
he admired: on 7 October 1849, Poe died. And then followed the broad press
consideration of Poe’s life and work. 28 There is ample reason to infer that
Hawthorne would have had reason to think of “The Tell-Tale Heart” as he
wrote his first novel.
* * *
Evidence for Hawthorne’s use of Poe in that novel is a clear pattern of

parallels between “The Tell-Tale Heart” and The Scarlet Letter. In Poe’s story,
for seven nights at “about midnight” a young man “thrust[s]” his head inside
the “chamber” of a sleeping “old man” with an “Evil Eye,” and opens a lan-
tern “cautiously (for the hinges creaked)” and shines it upon this “Evil Eye”
(Collected Works 3:792–93). On the eighth night, the young man is “more
than usually cautious in opening the door” of the room of the “old man,” but
the sound of the young man’s chuckling startles his sleeping victim, who is
therefore “lying awake” (Collected Works 3: 793–94). The young man opens
his lantern “stealthily” and shines it upon the “Evil Eye,” then jumps into the
room and kills the “old man” because of his “Evil Eye” and his loudly beating
A Tale by Poe 181
heart (Collected Works 3:794–95). In Hawthorne’s novel, an “old man” (1:129,

131, 137, 139, 141, 167, 169, 172, 174, 175, 179, 194, 195, 224, 229, 252,
253, 256, 260) with an “evil eye”—the physician Roger Chillingworth—
seeks something “far worse than death” (1:196): the violation of the guilty
heart of the adulterous young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. In the critical
tenth chapter of The Scarlet Letter, “The Leech and His Patient,” Poe’s story is
approximated by Hawthorne’s presentation of a related figurative event and a
similarly related literal one. Initially, Hawthorne writes that Chillingworth,
as he probes for Dimmesdale’s secret, “groped along as stealthily, with as
cautious a tread, and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a chamber where
a man lies only half asleep,—or, it may be, broad awake” (1:130). Hawthorne
adds, “In spite of his premeditated carefulness, the floor would now and
then creak.” And just as Poe’s “old man” sensed “the unperceived shadow” of
“Death” (Collected Works 3:794), so, too, does Dimmesdale “become vaguely
aware” of “the shadow of [Chillingworth’s] presence” (1:130).29 The figura-
tive becomes literal when Chillingworth, this “old man” with an “evil eye,”
actually enters “at noonday” the room of the sleeping young man, lays “his
hand upon [the minister’s] bosom,” “thrust[s] aside the vestment,” and dis-
covers the scarlet letter on Dimmesdale’s breast—the sign of the minister’s
secret guilt (1:138). Chillingworth has trespassed, causing a spiritual expo-
sure “far worse then death.” Poe’s intruder had taken a life; Hawthorne’s
intruder thinks he has taken a soul.
In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” after the murder of the old man, Poe’s
intruder “smile[s] gaily” (Collected Works 3:795), but soon thereafter, in great
agony, confesses his deed (Collected Works 3:797). In The Scarlet Letter, after
the violation of the minister, Hawthorne’s intruder is in “ecstasy” (1:138),
and although Chillingworth does not acknowledge his guilt, Dimmesdale
earlier asked the diabolical doctor a question that recalls the confession of
the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart”: “Why should a wretched man, guilty,
we will say, of murder, prefer to keep the dead corpse buried in his own
heart, rather than fling it forth at once, and let the universe take care of
it?” (1:132). And Dimmesdale does eventually, after great agony, confess his
deed (1: 254–55).
In both Poe’s story and Hawthorne’s novel, the heart is “tell-tale.” The
imagined, perhaps projected beating of the buried heart of the murdered old
man provokes Poe’s narrator’s confession of murder (Collected Works 3:797);
and the evident stigma, the A upon Dimmesdale’s chest, emerging from the
minister’s “inmost heart” (1:258–59), indicates his sin of adultery. In both
works, a heart reveals the heart’s secret.30
Appropriately, Hawthorne relied in chapter 10 of his novel on the
Shakespearean play to which Poe alluded in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Mac-
beth. The “air-drawn lines and figures of a geometrical problem” (1:129)—to
182 Richard Kopley
which Chillingworth’s view of the elements of his investigation is com-

pared—recall Lady Macbeth’s speaking to Macbeth of “the air-drawn dag-
ger which you said / Led you to Duncan” (3.4.61–62). Clearly Shakespeare’s
“charm” was “firm and good,” and Poe and Hawthorne honored it in their
allusive creations.
George Ripley’s general comment may be applied specifically: Poe’s
“The Tell-Tale Heart” and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter do both possess a
“terrible excitement,” a “minuteness of finish,” a “slow and fatal accumulation
of details,” a “coolness of coloring,” and a “soul-harrowing climax.” But they
share more than that. Poe’s tale and chapter 10 of Hawthorne’s novel share
language—“old man,” “awake,” “chamber,” “creak,” “shadow,” “cautious,”
“stealthily,” and “thrust”—and the “old man” in both tale and novel possesses
the “evil eye.” Furthermore, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and the tenth chapter of
The Scarlet Letter share a dramatic situation (anticipated figuratively, then
rendered literally in that tenth chapter): at twelve o’clock, one man enters the
room of another man, asleep or awakened, and assaults him, causing death
or a violation thought worse than death. Also, tale and novel share the cru-
cial theme of man’s sinfulness, guilt, and need for confession. Significantly,
chapter 10 of The Scarlet Letter specifically mentions a tormented murderer’s
need to confess his crime. Furthermore, in both the short story and the novel,
a seemingly supernatural heart lays open man’s sin. And both works feature a
covert reference to the murder of the sleeping Duncan in Macbeth.31
As Hawthorne borrowed, he also transformed. Ripley notes that Haw-
thorne softened the supernatural of Poe; we may note other modifications
here. Even as Poe had inverted elements of “Thomas Green Fessenden” for
“The Tell-Tale Heart” and Hawthorne inverted elements of Macbeth and
the Webster speech (notably, the relative ages of murderer and victim) for
The Scarlet Letter, so, too, did Hawthorne invert elements of “The Tell-Tale
Heart” for his novel. Hawthorne switched the young man and the old man—
the former became the sleeper and the latter the intruder. And he switched
the time, as well—midnight became noon. Furthermore, he modified the
motive of the intruder—the narrator’s desire to alleviate his nameless ter-
ror became Chillingworth’s desire to determine definitively his wife’s lover.
And he modified the nature of the helpless victim—the terrified old man in
“The Tell-Tale Heart” became the remorseful minister in The Scarlet Letter.
Hawthorne also refashioned the heart in Poe’s story—the provocative heart
of the old man in “The Tell-Tale Heart” became the object of the scrutiny
of the old man in The Scarlet Letter. And Hawthorne adapted the murder in
Poe’s work to his own purpose, spiritualizing that murder, turning it into
the violation of “the sanctity of a human heart” (1:195)—a violation that he
considered, in his short story “Ethan Brand,” the “Unpardonable Sin” (11:90,
94, 98–99; see also 8:251). Unlike the sin of murder in Poe’s story, this sin
A Tale by Poe 183
in Hawthorne’s novel is never confessed—though Dimmesdale does confess

his adultery and duplicity.
Finally, and, crucially, Hawthorne transformed the damnation of Poe’s
work to the salvation of his own. Poe’s narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart”
had “heard many things in hell” (Collected Works 3:792) and had presumably
developed his horror of the old man’s “Evil Eye” because of its knowledge of
his damnation—he later states of his burial of the old man, “no human eye—
not even his—could have detected anything wrong” (Collected Works 3:796).
Trying to destroy the condemning eye—that “damned spot”—through mur-
der, the narrator only increased his own damnation. His painful confession
suggests momentary escape, but there is no evidence of redemption or salva-
tion. The narrator is as damned at the tale’s close as he had been at its begin-
ning—indeed, if possible, even more so. In contrast, the investigation of
Dimmesdale in chapter 10 of The Scarlet Letter has a salvific purpose, which
Hawthorne acknowledges immediately before and after that chapter. Before
chapter 10, Hawthorne writes that “[t]his diabolical agent [Chillingworth]
had the Divine permission, for a season, to burrow into the clergyman’s inti-
macy, and plot against his soul” (1:128); after that chapter, Hawthorne writes
that “Providence” was “using the avenger and his victim for its own purposes,
and, perchance, pardoning, where it seemed most to punish” (1:139–40).
And Dimmesdale does eventually confess, thankful to his “afflictions,” his
“agonies” (1:256–57)—including Chillingworth’s burrowing into his own
suffering—for permitting his “victory” (1:255). Dimmesdale defeats Chill-
ingworth’s “evil eye,” acknowledging instead “God’s eye” (1:255).
When Poe alluded in his December 1844 “Marginalia” to his (erro-
neous) May 1842 claim in his review of Twice-Told Tales that Hawthorne
had used “William Wilson” for “Howe’s Masquerade,” he stated that he was
“honored in the loan” and added that “[Hawthorne’s] handling is always
thoroughly original” (Complete Works 16:43). One imagines that in light of
his response to an imagined borrowing, an actual borrowing (suggested by
parallels between “The Tell-Tale Heart” and The Scarlet Letter in language,
plot, setting, theme, and literary touchstone) would have led Poe again to be
“honored in the loan.” And the noted transformations of the former work in
the latter would have confirmed him in his opinion that Hawthorne’s “han-
dling” was “always thoroughly original.”
In view of the telling parallels identified, including parallels in lan-
guage, we may consider “The Tell-Tale Heart” to be an important source for
Hawthorne’s writing of Chillingworth’s discovery of Dimmesdale’s secret—a
significant addition to the cluster of works about murder (Macbeth, the Over-
bury accounts, the Webster speech) on which Hawthorne relied for chapter
10 of his novel. We may infer that by recalling these works, as well as those
in the clusters concerning the devil and psychological probing, Hawthorne
184 Richard Kopley
was well prepared to write of Chillingworth’s assault upon Dimmesdale. We

may extrapolate from this instance and, returning to the figure of our title,
infer that as Hawthorne fashioned The Scarlet Letter, he bore in mind threads
from other literary and historical narratives—threads relevant to his planned
character development, theme, and plot—so as to strengthen his imaginative
effort. Still, to preserve the desired hue of his fabric, he toned down indi-
vidual threads. As Hawthorne stitched these threads, more or less evidently,
into his narrative, he deepened the work and challenged his readers.
Arlin Turner wrote that Hawthorne “had one prevailing method of
expanding each idea—a method involving what we may call the catalogue
or procession.” In the case of The Scarlet Letter, Turner added, that catalog
consists of scenes involving Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. Turner
noted, too, that Hawthorne relied on his life experiences and his reading.32
We may advance this point by returning to the term “catalog.” Ironically,
even as Hawthorne dramatized the idea of secret guilt in The Scarlet Letter
in a catalog of scenes, he elaborated each scene with the help of a catalog
of secret sources—or clusters of secret sources. Yet Hawthorne was—as he
advised his readers to be—“true” (1:260)—he offered detail (primarily lan-
guage) through which the sources “may be inferred.” And not adultery, but
artistry, is revealed. Although one scholar has asserted that “[Hawthorne’s]
sources are not readily traceable, because they appear in his ideas and effects
but hardly ever in his phrasing,” this statement is not accurate.33 In fact,
some of Hawthorne’s sources may be traceable especially because of his
phrasing—or at least his wording—as his allusions to “The Tell-Tale Heart”
in The Scarlet Letter make apparent.
We may return to our primary figure—as Hawthorne stitched, he
borrowed others’ threads that would inspire him and enhance his handi-
work. He allowed these threads to fade, but not so much as to preclude
identification. Hawthorne could sew with subtlety and dexterity; he could
reveal faintly. Indeed, Hester’s “delicate and imaginative skill” (1:81) was
also his own.
* * *
It seems fitting to close this chapter by noting that even after he wrote
The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne continued to rely on Poe. Hawthorne’s phras-
ing in The House of the Seven Gables reveals his debt. And it wasn’t only “The
Fall of the House of Usher” that he employed in that novel.
In chapter 20, “The Flower of Eden,” Holgrave shows to Phoebe, in
the reception room of the Pyncheon house, a miniature of the dead Judge
Pyncheon—the corpse itself is seated in the next room. Holgrave does not
say how Judge Pyncheon died, although the repeated descriptions of the
A Tale by Poe 185
suspicious “Grimalkin” (2:247, 281, 298; emphasis added) near the death
scene suggest that kin of Maule may have been responsible. (Perhaps the
name’s earlier use for the witch’s familiar—“Graymalkin”—in Macbeth
[1.1.9] encourages conjecture regarding murder.)34 In any case, Holgrave
tells Phoebe (truthfully or not) that he had heard that Judge Pyncheon was
missed, and “A feeling which I cannot describe—an indefinite sense of some catas-
trophe, or consummation—impelled me to make my way into this part of the
house, where I discovered what you see [the dead Judge]” (2:303; emphasis
added). Hawthorne’s language with regard to this House of the Dead cor-
responds closely with Poe’s language in his tale of a Ship of the Dead, the
Death Ship, the Flying Dutchman, a vessel whose men had been punished
for some terrible crime: the award-winning tale, “MS. Found in a Bottle.”
Although Hawthorne may have read the story in the 1850 Griswold edition
of Poe, it is also possible that he read the work in The Gift for 1836—after all,
both Hawthorne’s “Howe’s Masquerade” and Poe’s “William Wilson” may
well have been drawn from Washington Irving’s “An Unwritten Drama of
Lord Byron,” which appeared in The Gift for 1836. And it was in that gift-
book that “MS. Found in a Bottle” was first reprinted. 35
Holgrave’s “A feeling which I cannot describe—an indefinite sense of some
catastrophe” may be linked backward to the language of Poe’s narrator as
he sees the dead crew and captain on the Death Ship: “An indefinite sense
of awe, which at first sight of the navigators of the ship has taken hold
of my mind, was perhaps the principle of my concealment”; “A feeling for
which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul” (Collected Works
2:140–41; emphasis added). The correspondences in phrasing are unob-
trusive yet unmistakable. By alluding to Poe’s tale about the Death Ship,
Hawthorne underscored the presence of the dead in the Pyncheon house,
increased the sense of mystery and possible discovery, and again paid trib-
ute to Edgar Allan Poe. As he relied on “The Tell-Tale Heart” in The Scarlet
Letter, so, too, did he rely on “MS. Found in a Bottle” for The House of the
Seven Gables. “For the sake of [Poe’s] imagination”—especially with regard
to crime and guilt—Hawthorne employed Poe’s fictions in his own, sewed
Poe’s threads into his own fabric.
No t e s
I am pleased to note that an earlier version of this chapter appeared in the
Autumn 1995 issue of Studies in American Fiction.
1. For sources for Chillingworth in the three identified clusters, consider
the following scholarly works. Regarding Milton’s Paradise Lost, see Stewart,
Introduction, lii–liii; Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 305–8; and Abel, “Devil
in Boston.” Regarding Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, see Matthiessen, 273, and
David E. Smith, John Bunyan, 62–66. Regarding versions of Faust, see Stein,
Hawthorne’s Faust. For Cheynell’s torment of Chillingworth, see Maes-Jelinek,
186 Richard Kopley
“Roger Chillingworth,” and for Prynne’s torment of Laud, see Isani, “Hawthorne
and the Branding.” For comment on Godwin’s Caleb Williams, consult Scheuerman,
“Outside the Human Circle”; for discussion of Rymer’s Varney the Vampire, see
Autrey, “Source.” Reid considers the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury (Yellow Ruff ),
and David S. Reynolds treats the murder of Captain Joseph White (Beneath the
American Renaissance, 250–51). A possible literary source for Chillingworth that
does not fall into any one of the three clusters is Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie
Queen, characters from which may have suggested the doctor’s appearance (Stewart,
Introduction, lii–liii; “Hawthorne and The Faerie Queen,” 200–201). A possible
historical source is one of Hawthorne’s Salem enemies, Richard Saltonstall Rogers
(Julian Smith, “Hawthorne and a Salem Enemy”).
2. Scholars have tried to date the composition of “The Hall of Fantasy” by
attending to Hawthorne’s comments on his contemporaries in the first version
of that story. Harold P Miller, considering when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
returned to the United States from England, suggested the time of composition as
November 1842 (“Hawthorne Surveys,” 228). Buford Jones, focusing on the time of
Bronson Alcott’s return from Europe, viewed the story as written “between 1 Sep-
tember and 20 October” (“Hall of Fantasy,” 1430). The editors of the first volume
of Hawthorne’s letters, also noting Longfellow’s return, asserted that “The Hall of
Fantasy” was “probably written in October or early November” of 1842 (Centenary
Edition, 15:662n). John J. McDonald, attending to Hawthorne’s knowledge of
Longfellow’s return, posits the time of composition as “16 November to 17 Decem-
ber 1842” (“Old Manse Period Canon,” 23).
Poe quoted Hawthorne’s comment about him from “The Hall of Fantasy” in
the Saturday Museum biography, published on 25 February 1843 and 4 March 1843;
see Pollin, “Poe’s Authorship,” 165.
3. Quotations from Edgar Allan Poe’s work are cited in the text with short
titles.
4. Ripley, Review of The Scarlet Letter, 158–59. For the quoted excerpts in
the novel, see Cameron, “Literary News.” For a portion of the review, see Ripley,
“[Gothic, the Supernatural, the Imagination].” For Ripley’s mixed evaluation of Poe,
see his Review of The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe.
5. Turner, “Hawthorne’s Literary Borrowings,” 558; Beebe, “Fall of the House
of Pyncheon”; Millicent Bell, Hawthorne’s View, 81, 182; Pfister, Production of
Personal Life, 43–44. Alfred H. Marks contended that Hawthorne satirized Poe
in “Egotism; or, the Bosom Serpent” (“Two Rodericks and Two Worms”). Arlin
Turner suggested that Hawthorne satirized Poe in “P’s Correspondence” (Nathaniel
Hawthorne, 159), though Poe’s notice of the work does not indicate that he saw
himself in it (Collected Writings 3:88–89).
6. Lowell’s fiancée Maria White wrote to Caroline King on 4 October 1842,
“James has gone to Portland today to engage John Neill [Neal] as a contributor [to
The Pioneer] and will go this week to Concord to see Hawthorne and obtain his ser-
vices.” See Maria White Lowell to King. (Published by permission of the Schlesinger
Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.) For a description of the manuscript
of this letter, see Loewentheil and Edsall, Poe Catalogue, 56. Caroline King was later
the author of When I Lived in Salem. Perhaps Lowell visited the Hawthornes by him-
self at this time; certainly he did visit them with Maria on 2 November. (See Maria
White Lowell to Sarah Shaw.) Further consideration of Lowell’s time at the Haw-
thornes and the Lowell-Hawthorne relationship is offered in chapter 2.
A Tale by Poe 187
7. Writing in his review of Thomas Middleton’s plays of the feeling of “bodily

remorse” after one commits murder, James Russell Lowell states in a footnote, “This
bodily feeling is painted with a terrible truth and distinctness of coloring in Hood’s
‘Dream of Eugene Aram,’ and with no less strength by the powerful imagination
of Mr. Poe, in his story of the ‘Tell-tale heart,’ on page 29 of the present number”
(“Plays of Thomas Middleton,” 37 n). (Poe later acknowledged this praise—see Let-
ters, 1:221.) Poe mentions Thomas Hood’s “The Dream of Eugene Aram” in August
1845 (Collected Writings 3:202); he also mentioned Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene
Aram in December 1835 (Complete Works 8:95) and April 1841 (Complete Works
10:132). Hawthorne reviewed Hood’s Poems in May 1846, though without treat-
ing “The Dream of Eugene Aram” (“Simms’s Views and Reviews; Hood’s Poems,”
23:239–41). Although Hood’s poem has an affinity with “The Tell-Tale Heart” and
The Scarlet Letter, parallels are not strong enough to suggest its having served as a
source.
8. James Russell Lowell, ed., Pioneer, inner wrappers of second issue.
9. In writing “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe also relied on Charles Dickens’s
“The Clock-Case: A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the
Second” for the placement of the chair over the buried body and the murderer’s dif-
ficulty in looking in the eye of his victim (Krappe, “Possible Source”; Collected Works
3:790). And he referred to a variety of biblical verses with several of the phrases in
the story (including Psalms 113:6 and Philippians 2:10 with “I heard all things in
the heaven and in the earth” [Collected Works 3:792]; Exodus 20:21, Deuteronomy
4:11, and 5:22 with “thick darkness” [Collected Works 3:793]; and John 13:1 with “The
old man’s hour had come!” [Collected Works 3:795]). All citations to the Bible here
and hereafter are to the King James Version.
10. See Appendix, 31–62. Webster’s speech was reprinted in his Speeches and
Forensic Arguments, 450–89.
11. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 291; Moore, Salem World, 165–66.
12. Reference to the weapon that killed Joseph White was not made in the
first appearance of the notebook entry in the Hawthorne edition (8:155) because
the copy-text was Sophia Hawthorne’s version of the notebook, and she must have
deleted the phrase (8:155; see also 8:701). She apparently shared a sensitivity regard-
ing the White murder with Caroline King, who destroyed her own writing on the
subject because it was “indiscreet” (When I Lived in Salem, 9). The full notebook
entry was first published in Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s Lost Notebook, 42.
One wonders if Hawthorne knew that the ship Mary and Eliza, which his
father Nathaniel Hathorne had commanded in 1804, had been owned by Joseph
White. (See Hoeltje, “Captain Nathaniel Hathorne,” 346.)
13. George Parsons Lathrop, Complete Works, 3:9; David S. Reynolds, Beneath
the American Renaissance, 251; Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 214–15; Moore,
Salem World, 164.
14. Interesting Hawthorne–Webster links might be added. Hawthorne
referred to the Whig view of Webster as “a disreputable character” in 1838 (15:230)
and termed him “a majestic brute” in 1845 (8:258). Still, Hawthorne served as
recording secretary of the Salem Lyceum when Webster spoke about the United
States Constitution in 1848 (16:244–45), and historian and Whig leader William
H. Prescott appealed for Webster’s assistance regarding Hawthorne’s imminent loss
of his position at the Salem Custom House in 1849. Forwarding Prescott’s letter,
Webster wrote to William M. Meredith, secretary of the treasury, “I suppose it will
188 Richard Kopley
be for the best to leave Mr. Hawthorne where he is, for the present” (See Cameron,
“New Light,” 4, and Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 296). But according to J. C.
Derby, Webster wrote to Prescott, “How can you, a Whig, . . . do such a thing, as
to recommend the continuance in office, of a man of the politics of Hawthorne?”
(Derby, Fifty Years, 327). For a comparison of Hawthorne’s negative view of Web-
ster (allegedly revealed in “The Great Stone Face”) with his wife’s positive view, see
Julian Hawthorne’s Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, 1:476–81. For a listing of
several letters by Sophia Hawthorne touching on Daniel Webster, see McDonald,
“Guide,” 282–83. For a treatment of the possible relationship of The Scarlet Letter
to the Fugitive Slave Law, notoriously supported by Daniel Webster, see Korobkin,
“Scarlet Letter of the Law.”
15. Arlin Turner’s doctoral dissertation, “Study of Hawthorne’s Origins,” pro-
vided the second and third of these Hawthorne links to Macbeth, 68–69. Turner also
notes a passage in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun that is suggestive of the sleepwalk-
ing scene. A connection between “Young Goodman Brown” and Macbeth is sug-
gested by Frank Davidson, “Young Goodman Brown,” 69. An excellent discussion
of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Macbeth is offered by Wilbur, “Poe,” 6–8.
16. Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne Reading, 122.
17. Gross, “Poe’s Revision,” 18–20; Regan, “Hawthorne’s ‘Plagiary,’ ” 284–92;
McKeithan, “Poe and the Second Edition,” 257, 262–68.
18. For Poe’s toast, see Thomas and Jackson, Poe Log, 243. For Poe’s library,
see Stoddard, “Put a Resolute Hart to a Steep Hill,” 26.
19. Park Benjamin had been editor of the New England Magazine and publisher
there of fifteen Hawthorne stories; however, Hawthorne may have been irritated
because Benjamin had broken up his collection “The Story-Teller” (see “Fragment,
to Elizabeth P. Peabody,” 18:89; see also Adkins, “Early Projected Works,” 132–33).
For further background on Benjamin, see Hoover, Park Benjamin; for additional
considerations of Hawthorne and Benjamin, see Turner, “Park Benjamin,” and Gil-
kes, “Hawthorne.” During different portions of Poe’s stay in New York City in 1837
and 1838, Benjamin was assisted by Charles Fenno Hoffman, Robert Montgomery
Bird, and Robert M. Walsh (Chielens, American Literary Magazines, 19).
20. Benjamin, Review of The Token (1838), 487; Review of The Token (1837),
407. For the review of the 1837 Token, see Idol and Jones, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Contemporary Reviews, 15. For the anticipation of Hawthorne’s essay on Fessenden,
see Benjamin, “Thomas Green Fessenden.” Lowell may have had Benjamin’s origi-
nal comment in mind when he referred to Hawthorne as “a man of acknowledged
genius,” Review of Historical Tales for Youth, 42. Benjamin’s expression of admiration
for Hawthorne in 1837 seems to anticipate Herman Melville’s famous dedication
to Moby-Dick (1851): “in token of my admiration for his genius, This Book is
Inscribed To NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE” (Writings, 6:vii).
21. Other items in the American Monthly Magazine of this period also merit
mention. For example, the April 1837 issue included Park Benjamin’s review of
Thomas Green Fessenden’s satirical poem Terrible Tractoration (previously reviewed
by Hawthorne in the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge
[23:230–34]), and the December 1837 issue featured William Austin’s short story,
“Martha Gardner; or, Moral Re-action” (considered by Brook Thomas to have an
affinity with The House of the Seven Gables [Cross-examinations of Law and Literature,
51–52]).
A Tale by Poe 189
22. Regarding Poe’s employment goal, see Thomas and Jackson, Poe Log, 79.
For the description of the New-England Farmer, see McCorison, “Thomas Green
Fessenden,” 14.
23. See [Advertisement for Bowles & Dearborn]; [Boston Map]; and the
Boston directory for 1827. The Bowles & Dearborn bookshop is discussed by
Mary E. Phillips (Edgar Allan Poe, 1:295–99), but with erroneous information
regarding Poe’s supposed trip to London before his stay in Boston. Bowles &
Dearborn published the United States Literary Gazette and the Christian Exam-
iner, as well as various books. The printer of Fessenden’s New England Farmer’s
Almanack, for 1828 was John B. Russell, later the printer of the first edition of
Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales.
24. Thomas and Jackson, Poe Log, 83.
25. It is interesting to note that Hawthorne’s future sister-in-law, Elizabeth
Palmer Peabody, had stayed with the Fessendens in 1822—his future wife Sophia
Peabody had written, “I am very glad to hear you are at Mr. Fessenden’s where you
are so pleasantly situated.” See Sophia Hawthorne to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody,
2 November 1822. (Published by permission of the Berg Collection of English
and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations.)
26. See Kopley, “Very Profound Under-current,” 148–49; and Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, xxv, 239 n.
27. For Longfellow’s advice in his 19 March 1843 letter to Hawthorne, see
Longfellow, Letters, 2:519. Poe’s other contributions to The Pioneer were “Lenore”
(February 1843) and “Notes upon English Verse” (March 1843), where he offered
scansion of Longfellow verses. Hawthorne’s positive attitude toward Poe in early
1843 may be suggested by his responsiveness to Poe’s invitation to contribute a story
and a portrait to the Stylus. On 17 April 1843, both Lowell and Sophia Hawthorne
reported Hawthorne’s acceptance of the invitation (Poe, Complete Works 17:142;
Sophia Hawthorne to Maria Louisa Hawthorne, 17 April 1843). See also her letter
to her mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, 20 April 1843.
28. The dating of Hawthorne’s beginning work “in earnest” on The Scarlet
Letter is offered by Larry J. Reynolds in “The Scarlet Letter and Revolutions Abroad,”
57. A discussion and listing of the obituaries of Poe and memorial pieces about
Poe appearing in the year after his death are provided by Pollin, “Posthumous
Assessment.”
29. The variorum edition of Poe, edited by T. O. Mabbott, (Collected Works)
offers the 1850 Works text of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” with variants from the Pioneer
and Broadway Journal texts of the story identified at the base of the page. None of
the material quoted here varies from the Pioneer text except for the word “Death,”
which was, in The Pioneer, “death.” (See James Russell Lowell, Pioneer, 30.) Mabbott
does not list the lower-case variant.
30. Another Poe work that might have reinforced for Hawthorne the idea of
the revelatory heart is the “Marginalia” installment in the January 1848 issue of
Graham’s Magazine, which gave the title of the unwritable true autobiography as
“My Heart Laid Bare” (Collected Writings 2:322–23). Poe writes that “The paper [of
this autobiography] would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen” (Collected
Writings 2:323); Hawthorne writes in “The Interior of a Heart” that Dimmesdale,
confessing obliquely from the pulpit, had thought that “the only wonder was, that
190 Richard Kopley
they [his congregants] did not see his wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes,
by the burning wrath of the Almighty!” (1:143–44).
31. For a formal link between “The Tell-Tale Heart” and The Scarlet Letter,
see chapter 4.
It is interesting to recall Edward Stone’s observation (“More on Hawthorne
and Melville,” 66) that Herman Melville wrote in Moby-Dick, “For all men tragi-
cally great are made so through a certain morbidness” (Melville, Writings, 6:74; Stone’s
emphasis) even as Hawthorne had written in chapter 10 of The Scarlet Letter, “Yet
Mr. Dimmesdale would perhaps have seen this individual’s character more perfectly,
if a certain morbidness, to which sick hearts are liable, had not rendered him suspi-
cious of all mankind” (1:130; Stone’s emphasis). It is certainly possible that Melville
was influenced by this Poe-permeated chapter of Hawthorne’s novel. Furthermore,
Starbuck’s looking at the sleeping Ahab, that “Terrible old man!” whose closed eyes
looked toward the “tell-tale” (6:235), may recall to us Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
And the association of Moby-Dick with Poe’s tale becomes even stronger when we
note that the monomaniacal Ahab—linked (by “half-slouched hat” [6:161] and
swinging cabin light [6:235]) with the evil-eyed, guilty Jonah (6:43–45)—speaks of
dismemberment (6:168).
Another debt to Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” seems present in chapter 11 of
Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Douglass writes
of an angry Master Hugh Auld, “He raved, and swore” (73), recalling Poe’s writing,
as the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “I raved—I swore!” (Collected Works 3:797).
Furthermore, Douglass writes that by “working steadily,” he was able to allay suspi-
cion of his imminent flight north—indeed, his master “thought I was never better
satisfied with my condition than at the very time during which I was planning my
escape (74). Similarly, Poe’s narrator asserts, “I was never kinder to the old man
than during the whole week before I killed him” (Collected Works 3:792). Douglass
was living in Lynn, Massachusetts, when Poe’s tale appeared in The Pioneer in Janu-
ary 1843. He was, of course, involved in Boston’s abolitionist movement, as was
the editor of The Pioneer, James Russell Lowell. Douglass probably read Poe’s work
and later alluded to it as he wrote his own story. This is not so surprising for, as J.
Gerald Kennedy has pointed out, Poe and Douglass shared a defiant attitude toward
paternalistic authority. (See “Trust No Man,” 228.)
32. For the comment on Hawthorne’s “prevailing method of expanding each
idea,” see Turner, “Hawthorne’s Methods,” 305; for elaboration of this view regard-
ing The Scarlet Letter, see 307, 309–12.
33. Abel, “Immortality vs. Mortality,” 570.
34. That Matthew Maule’s descendant Holgrave was the murderer of Judge
Pyncheon has been argued in Cox, “ ‘ Who Killed Judge Pyncheon?’ ”
35. Thornton, “Hawthorne, Poe, and a Literary Ghost,” 151–52.
Chronology
1809 Born in Boston on January 19 to itinerant actors Elizabeth

Arnold Hopkins Poe and David Poe Jr. Father abandons the
family while Edgar is an infant.
1811 Elizabeth Poe dies on December 8 in Richmond, Virginia.
John Allan, a Richmond importer, and his wife, Frances, take
in Edgar, while his brother and sister each end up in different
locations.
1815–1820 Travels with the Allans to England and Scotland, where John
Allan hoped to expand his business. Attends boarding school in
London, 1818 to 1820. Family returns to Richmond in 1820.
1824 Writes earliest extant verse.
1825 Meets and becomes romantically involved with Sarah Elmira
Royster. John Allan inherits considerable wealth and property
from his uncle, William Galt.
1826 Attends University of Virginia but does not return after the
winter break.
1827 Goes to Boston, where he enlists in the army. Publishes first
book of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems.
1829 While stationed in Virginia, Poe hires a substitute and is dis-
charged from the army. Frances Allan dies. Publishes Al Aaraaf,
Tamerlane, and Minor Poems.
191
192 Chronology
1830 With Allan’s help, attains an appointment to West Point and

enrolls in May. Allan remarries and ends his relationship with
Poe.
1831 Court-martialed and expelled from West Point for neglect-
ing classes and drills. Publishes Poems: Second Edition. Moves
to Baltimore, where he lives in poverty with his grandmother;
his aunt, Maria Clemm; his cousin, Virginia; and Poe’s brother,
William Henry Leonard Poe, who dies August 1.
1832 The Saturday Courier, a Philadelphia magazine, publishes five
stories Poe submitted as entries in a contest. John Allan writes
Poe out of his will.
1834 John Allan dies.
1835 Grandmother dies. Poe begins writing for T. W. White’s fledg-
ling Southern Literary Messenger, then moves back to Richmond
with his aunt and cousin to edit the magazine. Contributes sto-
ries and often-scathing book reviews to the publication.
1836 Marries his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, in May.
1837 Moves the family to New York City, after he is either fired by
White or resigns.
1838 Moves to Philadelphia. Publishes The Narrative of Arthur Gor-
don Pym.
1839 Becomes coeditor of William E. Burton’s Gentleman’s Maga-
zine. First 25 stories are published as Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque.
1840 Leaves Gentleman’s Magazine.
1841 Hired as an editor of Graham’s Magazine.
1842 Virginia contracts tuberculosis. Resigns from Graham’s.
1843 Travels to Washington, D.C., to win a government job and
raise subscriptions for his planned magazine.
1844 Moves to New York City. Works as an editorial assistant at the
New York Evening Mirror.
1845 Becomes coeditor of the Broadway Journal and later its propri-
etor. Publishes Tales and The Raven and Other Poems.
1846 Broadway Journal folds. Moves with family to Fordham, New
York. Suffers severe illness when Virginia’s health declines.
Chronology 193
1847 Virginia dies in January. Poe is depressed and ill for most of the
year and writes little.
1848 Eureka is published. Engaged to Sarah Helen Whitman; she
breaks the engagement. Probably attempts suicide by overdose
of laudanum.
1849 Negotiates with E.H.N. Patterson to establish the Stylus. Pro-
poses to Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton. Falls into a coma. Dies
on October 7 and is buried in Baltimore.
Contributors
HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale Uni-

versity. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking, The
Visionary Company, Blake’s Apocalypse, Yeats, A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah
and Criticism, Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism, The American Religion,
The Western Canon, and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams,
and Resurrection. The Anxiety of Influence sets forth Professor Bloom’s pro-
vocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and
their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention
of the Human, a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why,
Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, Hamlet: Poem
Unlimited, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names
Divine. In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Acad-
emy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the
International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and
the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark.
Daniel Hoffman is part of the emeritus faculty in the English

department at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published many vol-
umes of poetry, and his critical studies include Faulkner’s Country Matters
and Form and Fable in American Fiction.
WALTER STEPP has been a professor of English at Nassau Community

College, Garden City, New York. In addition to critical assessments of Poe,
he has also written on Henry James.
195
196 Contributors
Gita Rajan is an associate professor of English at Fairfield University.

She coauthored New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the U.S. and coedited
Postcolonial Discourse and Changing Cultural Contexts, among other works.
Henry Sussman is a professor of comparative literature at the State

University of New York at Buffalo. Among his studies in literary criticism
and critical theory are The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual
Work in Modernity and Psyche and Text: The Sublime and the Grandiose in Lit-
erature, Psychopathology, and Culture.
Paige Matthey Bynum has taught at the University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill and is coauthor of Lawrence Durrell: Comprehending
the Whole. He has been a speaker at the annual meeting of the Poe Studies
Association.
SHAWN ROSENHEIM has taught at Williams College. He is the author

of The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Allan Poe to the
Internet.
Johann Pillai is chair of the general education department and an

associate professor at Eastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus.
Brett Zimmerman is an assistant professor at York University in

Toronto. He has authored Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style and Herman
Melville: Stargazer and also has published book reviews, opinion pieces, and
magazine and journal articles.
JOHN H. TIMMERMAN teaches American literature at Calvin College.

He has authored or edited numerous essays and books, such as A Nation’s
Voice: An Anthology of American Short Fiction and Other Worlds: The Fantasy
Game.
Richard Kopley is a professor of English at Penn State University’s

DuBois campus. He is the editor of Poe’s Pym: Critical Explorations, wrote
the introduction and annotations for the Penguin edition of Poe’s novel The
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and has worked on other publications as
well. He is a past president of the Poe Studies Association.
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201
202 Acknowledgments
Shawn Rosenheim, “Detective Fiction, Psychoanalysis, and the Analytic Sub-

lime,” pp. 153–176. From The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, Shawn Rosen-
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From Style 35, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 34–49. © 2001 by Style. Reprinted with
permission.
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House of Usher.’” From Papers on Language and Literature 39, no. 3 (Summer
2003). © 2003 by Southern Illinois University. Reprinted with permission.
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From The Threads of The Scarlet Letter: A Study of Hawthorne’s Transformative Art.
© 2003 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp.
Every effort has been made to contact the owners of copyrighted mate-
rial and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume gen-
erally appear much as they did in their original publication with few or no
editorial changes. In some cases, foreign language text has been removed
from the original essay. Those interested in locating the original source will
find the information cited above.
Index
“1836 Letter to B___,” 166 Auden, W.H., 15

Austin, Gilbert
Abraham, Nicholas, 84 Chironomia, 147
Adams, John Quincy
Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Barthes, Roland, 44
145 Bauldelaire, Charles, 1–2, 56,
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor 61
Poems, 11 Beebe, Maurice, 174
Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, 11 Belles Lettres (Rollin), 145
Allan, John, 179 Bell, Millicent, 174
Allen, Hervey, 145 Benjamin, Park, 178–179
American “Berenice”
nightmares, 7 imaginary places in, 12
poetry, 3 narrator, 9
reader, 1 premature burial in, 19
writers, 2–3, 5, 145 “Birthmark, The,” (Hawthorne),
American Elocutionist (Russell), 147 174, 177, 180
American Monthly Magazine, 177–179 “Black Cat, The”
American Orator, The (Cooke), 147 narrator of, 71, 125–128, 144
Analysis of the Principles of Rhetorical perverseness in, 128
Delivery as Applied in Reading and premature burial in, 19
Speaking (Porter), 145 Blair, Hugh
androgyny, 39 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles
“Angel of the Odd, The,” 12, 15 Lettres, 144
Anthon, Charles, 148 Blake, William, 5
Aristotle, 149, 156, 161 Bloom, Harold
Art of Rhetoric Made Easy (Holmes), introduction, 1–7
145 Bonaparte, Marie, 5, 94–95,
Art of Speaking (Burgh), 145 98
“Assignation, The” Life of Poe, 45
suicide in, 18 Bransby, John, 146
203
204 Index
Brigham, Amariah, 72 Castle (Kafka), 5

Bronson, C.P. C. Augustus Dupin (“The Murders
Elocution; or Mental and Vocal in the Rue Morgue”), 9
Philosophy, 147 analytical powers, 17, 81–82, 85,
Brooks, Peter, 90, 95 92–93, 98–101, 151
Brown, Gillian, 164 explanation of murder, 87–90,
Bunyan, John 94–97
Pilgrim’s Progress, 173 touch, 92
Burgh, James voice and manner, 86, 91
Art of Speaking, 145 Certeau, Michel de, 105
Burnet, James Chironomia (Austin), 147
The Origin and Progress of “City in the Sea, The” (poem),
Language, 87 2–3
Bynum, Paige Matthew, 154 Cixous, Hélène
on the moral insanity of ‘The Tell- La Jeune Née, 44
Tale Heart,” 69–79 theories of narrativity, 39–40,
Byron, Lord, 2 43–44, 51–53
“Darkness,” 3 Claggett, Rufus
tone and style of, 16 Elocution Made Easy, 147
Clark, Joseph H., 146
Caldwell, Merritt Cleman, John, 155
A Practical Manual of Elocution, 147 Cmiel, Kenneth, 145
Caleb Williams (Godwin), 173 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 166
Calvinism, 18 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
Campbell, George 22
Philosophy of Rhetoric, 144 “Colloquy of Monos and Una,
Campbell, Killis, 145 The,” 10
Camus, Albert, 56, 62 Conchologist’s First Book, The
The Stranger, 61 (Wyatt), 89
Carlson, E.T., 70 Conrad, Joseph
“Cask of Amontillado, The,” 5, 160 Lord Jim, 64
allegory, 32 “Conversation of Charmion and
carnival season in, 22, 33 Eiros, The,” 10
catacombs in, 22, 31, 34 Cooke, Philip Pendelton, 82,
crypt imagery in, 24 101
double in, 23–24, 31–37 The American Orator, 147
grotesque in, 13 Cooper, James Fenimore, 3
irony in, 31–34, 37 Course of Lectures on Oratory and
motive for murder in, 7 Criticism (Priestley), 145
narrative, 22–24, 31 Crime and Punishment
plot, 31 (Dostoevsky), 57
premature burial in, 19 Crowninshield, Richard, Jr., 176
revenge in, 22–23 cryptography, 85, 88, 99
wine in, 22, 33 Cuvier, Georges, 88–89
Index 205
“Darkness” (Byron), 3 “Facts Concerning A Recent

Darwin, Charles, 98 Carnival of Crime in
Davis, Robert Con Connecticut, The” (Twain), 18
theories of narrativity, 42–43, 46 “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,
Defoe, Daniel, 19 The”
Derrida, Jacques, 83–84 horror in, 83
Desire and Language (Kristeva), 44 “Fall of the House of Usher, The,” 5,
detective fiction 69, 174, 184
and Poe, 81–103 concealment of terror in, 159–160
Dickinson, Emily, 3 conflict between reason and
Dike, John S., 176 irrationality in, 160, 167
“Dong with the Luminous Nose, destruction of the House, 160,
The” (Lear), 2 163–164, 168–169
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 4, 56 diction, 4
doubleness themes enlightenment in, 160, 166–168
in Poe’s tales, 13 film version, 6
Doyle, Arthur Conan imaginary places in, 12
“Musgrave Ritual,” 90 incest in, 6
Dracula (Stoker), 5 mirror images in, 164–165, 167
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), narrative, 159, 161
18 nightmares in, 7
Duval, Henri, 86 premature burial in, 19
self-consuming narrator in, 160,
Elements of Elocution (Walker), 145, 163, 165, 167–168
147 vampire lore in, 6–7
Elements of Rhetoric (Whately), 144 feminist criticism
“Eleonora” theorists, 39–54
grotesque in, 13 Fessenden, Thomas Green, 175,
Ellis, Thomas H. 177–179, 182
Richmond Standard, 146 “Few Words on Secret Writing, A,”
Elocution Made Easy (Claggett), 147 88
Elocution; or Mental and Vocal Flaubert, Gustave, 61
Philosophy (Bronson), 147 “For Annie” (poem), 1
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 148 Fortunato (“The Cask of
transcendental vision, 3 Amontillado”)
Enfield, William blindness, 31, 34, 160
The Speaker, 145 disrespect of Montresor, 22, 24, 31
Essay on Elocution and Pronunciation drunkard, 33
(Mason), 145 ego, 32–33, 35–36
“Ethan Brand” (Hawthorne), 182 murder of, 19, 22–24, 32, 34–35,
“Eureka” (Poe), 144 37
cosmology of, 160–162, 164–165, weakness, 33
169 Franklin, Benjamin, 165
criticism of, 3 Freeman, William, 72
206 Index
French “Howe’s Masquerade,” 177, 183,

theorists, 39–40 185
Freud, Sigmund, 1, 5 “Incidents from the Journal of a
psychoanalytic theories, 41–42, Solitary Man,” 178
45–46, 84–85, 95–101 influences on, 173–190
theories of narrativity, 40, 50–51, “The Prophetic Pictures,” 177
60 The Scarlet Letter, 173, 180–185
theory of dreams, 41 sketch on Thomas Green
Fessenden, 175, 178–179, 182
Garcia, Alfonzo, 86 Twice-Told Tales, 174, 177, 183
Gargano, James W., 37 “Unpardonable Sin,” 182
Gide, André, 1 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
Godwin, William 57, 60
Caleb Williams, 173 Henry, Patrick, 146
“Gold Bug, The,” 10, 178 Heptameron (Navarre), 155
gothic tales Historical Tales for Youth
British, 4 (Hawthorne), 175
German, 4 Hoffman, Daniel
narrative, 81 on Poe’s tales, 9–29
realism, 11 Hoffman, E.T.A., 4
romance, 94, 159–161, 165 Holmes, John
tradition, 18, 84–85, 89, 91–93 Art of Rhetoric Made Easy, 145
Grammar of Rhetoric and Polite House of Seven Gables, The
Literature (Jamieson), 145 (Hawthorne)
Greek tragedies, 56, 150, 156 influence on, 174, 176, 184–185
Greeley, Horace, 175 “Howe’s Masquerade” (Hawthorne),
Gross, Seymour, 177 177, 183, 185
Humphrey, David
“Hall of Fantasy, The” (Hawthorne), “The Monkey,” 98
174–175, 180 Hussey, John P., 143–144
Harrison, James, 146 Huxley, Aldous, 1
Hartman, Geoffrey, 82 vulgarity, 2–3
Haslam, John
Observations on Madness and “Imp of the Perverse, The”
Melancholy, 71 madness in, 14, 93
“Haunted Palace, The” (Poe) narrator in, 24, 125–127, 149, 152
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 167 perverseness in, 12, 15, 29
“The Birthmark,” 174, 177, 180 victim of, 13–14
“Ethan Brand,” 182 “Incidents from the Journal of a
“The Hall of Fantasy,” 174–175, Solitary Man,” 178
180 “In the Penal Colony” (Kafka), 63
Historical Tales for Youth, 175 Irigaray, Luce, 39
The House of Seven Gables, 174, Irving, Washington, 16, 185
176, 184–185 “Israfel” (poem), 3, 11
Index 207
Jacobs, Robert, 145 Lear, Edward

Jakobson, Roman “The Dong with the Luminous
structural linguistics, 40–41 Nose,” 2
Jamieson, Alexander “The Jumblies,” 2
Grammar of Rhetoric and Polite Lectures Concerning Oratory
Literature, 145 (Lawson), 145
Jefferson, Thomas, 146, 155 Lectures on Elocution (Sheridan), 145
Jeune Née, La (Cixous), 44 Lectures on Eloquence and Style
Johnson, Barbara, 83 (Porter), 145
Joyce, James, 62 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
Ulysses, 56 (Blair), 144
“Judgment, The” (Kafka), 63, 65 Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory
“Jumblies, The” (Lear), 2 (Adams), 145
“Letter to His Father” (Kafka), 66
Kafka, Franz, 56 Levin, Harry, 6
The Castle, 5 Lewis, C.S., 4–5
“In the Penal Colony,” 63 Life of Poe (Bonaparte), 45
“The Judgment,” 63–64 “Ligeia,” 69
“The Knock at the Manor Gate,” eyes and vision in, 26
63 grotesque in, 13
“Letter to His Father,” 66 imaginary places in, 12
“The Metamorphosis,” 57, 62–66 Ligeia in, 9, 159, 164
The Trial, 63 narrator, 163
Kanjo, Eugene, 152 premature burial in, 19
Kierkegaard, Søren, 61 Lilith (MacDonald), 5
“King Pest” “Lily’s Quest, The” (Hawthorne),
grotesque in, 13 177
Knapp, John Francis, 175–176 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 3
“Knock at the Manor Gate, The” “A Psalm of Life,” 180
(Kafka), 63 Lord Jim (Conrad), 64
Kopley, Richard “Loss of Breath”
“The Tell-Tale Heart” influence on grotesque in, 13
Hawthorne, 173–190 Lowell, James Russell, 174
Kristeva, Julia, 39 Lyell, Charles
Desire and Language, 44 Principles of Geology, 164
Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth), 165
Lacan, Jacques
theories of narrativity, 39–44, Mabbott, T.O., 17, 74, 175
46–51, 83, 93–94, 100 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 175–177, 179,
LaCapra, Dominick, 105 181–182, 185
Lanier, Sidney, 3 MacDonald, George, 4
Lathrop, George Parsons, 176 Lilith, 5
Lawson, John Machiavelli
Lectures Concerning Oratory, 145 The Prince, 153, 155
208 Index
Madeline Usher (“The Fall of the failed family, 31, 35

House of Usher”) motivation, 32
entombment of, 164 murder of Fortunato, 19, 22–24,
escape, 164–165, 168–169 31–38
fate of, 21 narration, 22
social role, 159 sexual nature of, 24
tension, 163 troubled conscience, 34
undead, 6, 159 wine, 22
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 2 Moore, Margaret, 176
“Man of the Crowd, The” “MS Found in a Bottle,” 185
Dupin in, 22 narrator, 9
narrator of, 148 “Murders in the Rue Morgue, The”
stranger in, 22 C. Augustus Dupin in, 82, 85–
“Man That Was Used Up, The,” 12 101, 151
“Marginalia,” 148, 183 covert crimes against women in, 91
masculine crime story in, 81–82, 91, 93,
theorists, 39–40, 48, 50 95–96, 100, 151
Mason, John head-body dichotomy in, 91, 93,
Essay on Elocution and 95
Pronunciation, 145 identification in, 86
“Masque of the Red Death, The,” 177 language, 84, 86–88, 93–94
grotesque in, 13 Madame L’Espanaye in, 90–92,
narrator, 163 95, 99–100
Mademoiselle L’Espanaye in, 83,
Matthiessen, F.O., 176
91–92, 95, 98–100
McElroy, John, 144
lesson of, 85
McKeithan, D.M., 177
metaphors in, 91
“Mellonta Tauta” narrative, 81–82, 85, 87–94, 97–99,
government and philosophy in, 12 101
Melville, Herman, 3, 61, 149, 155 orangutan in, 81–82, 86–90, 94,
Menninger, Karl, 20–21 97–98, 100
“Mesmeric Revelation,” 12 prefect of Police in, 99
deathlike states in, 19 process of detection in, 87–88
“Metamorphosis, The” (Kafka), 57 rational analysis in, 89–90, 92–93,
Gregor Samsa in, 62–66 96–97
Milton, John, 155 sailor in, 86, 90, 96–97
Paradise Lost, 2, 150, 173 setting of, 83
“Monieur Valdemar” social relations in, 84
deathlike states in, 19 Muset, Isidore, 86
“Monkey, The” (Humphrey), 98 “Musgrave Ritual” (Doyle), 90
Montresor (“The Cask of “Mystery of Marie Rogêt, The”
Amontillado”) C. Augustus Dupin in, 82
armor, 37 covert crimes against women in, 84
confession, 23 crime story in, 82
costume, 23 setting of, 83
Index 209
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The, Porter, Ebenezer, 147

179 Analysis of the Principles of
Navarre, Marguerite de Rhetorical Delivery as Applied
Heptameron, 155 in Reading and Speaking, 145
Newman, Samuel P. Lectures on Eloquence and Style,
Practical System of Rhetoric, 145 145
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 57, 153 Pound, Ezra, 143
Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical
Observations on Madness and Gesture and Action (Siddon), 147
Melancholy (Haslam), 71 Practical Manual of Elocution, A
Origin and Progress of Language, The (Caldwell), 147
(Burnet), 87 Practical System of Rhetoric
“Oval Portrait, The,” 174, 177 (Newman), 145
“Predicament, A”
Paradise Lost (Milton), 2, 150, 173 parody, 12
Pfister, Joel, 174 “Premature Burial, The”
“Philosophy of Composition, The” autobiographical, 19
(Poe), 160, 166 death in, 23, 60, 152
Philosophy of the Human Voice (Rush), grotesque in, 13
147 irony, 152
Philosophy of Rhetoric (Campbell), narrator, 20–21, 151–152
144 Price, Vincent, 3
Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 173 Prichard, James Cowles
Pillai, Johann Treatise on Insanity and Other
on death and the reader, 105–142 Disorders Affecting the Mind,
Pinel, Philippe, 70 70–71, 73, 76
Pioneer, The (magazine), 175, 177, Priestley, Joseph
180 Course of Lectures on Oratory and
“Pit and the Pendulum, The” (Poe), Criticism, 145
5, 60 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 153, 155
myths of victimage in, 7 Principles of Geology (Lyell), 164
parody of, 12 “Prophetic Pictures, The”
Plato, 155 (Hawthorne), 177
Poe, Edgar Allan “Psalm of Life, A” (Longfellow),
childhood, 145–146, 149 180
death, 3 “Purloined Letter, The”
early ambitions, 3 C. Augustus Dupin in, 83
imagination, 10 diction, 4
influence of, 5 grotesque in, 13
styles, 3 narrator in, 148
synonyms, 6, 22 rational analysis in, 83
“Poetic Principle, The” (Poe), 162 semiotic purity of, 83
Pollin, Burton R.
Word Index to Poe’s Fiction, 145 Quinn, A.H., 10, 16, 146
210 Index
Rajan, Gita confession and guilt in, 181,

on “The Tell-Tale Heart,” 39–54 183–184
Randolph, John, 146, 155 Hester Prynne in, 184
“Rational of Verse, The,” 144, 166 influence on, 173, 180–185
“Raven, The” language of, 182–183
irrationality in, 166 Roger Chillingworth in, 173,
narrator, 9 181–184
structure of, 160 Schlegel, Friedrich, 61
Ray, Isaac, 72 Scott, Walter, 10–11
Reynolds, David S., 176 Sedgwick, Eve, 91–92
Richardson, Samuel, 19 Seward, William H., 72
Richmond Standard (Ellis), 146 Shakespeare, William, 155
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Macbeth, 175–177, 179, 181–182,
(Coleridge), 22 185
Ripley, George, 174, 182 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 2, 5
Robinson, Arthur, 74 “To a Skylark,” 3
Roderick Usher (“The Fall of the Sheridan, Thomas
House of Usher”), 4 Lectures on Elocution, 145
destruction of, 160, 163, 168–169 Shulman, Robert, 74
family, 163, 168 Siddon, Henry
madness, 165 Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical
mysticism, 6, 84 Gesture and Action, 147
Rogers, Mary, 176 Silverman, Kenneth, 146
Rolfe, Baron, 72 “Sketches from Memory”
Rollison, Charles (Hawthorne), 177
Belles Lettres, 145 “Some Words with a Mummy”
romanticism, 2 deathlike states in, 19
mythopoeic power in, 5 government and philosophy in, 12
Rosenheim, Shawn oratorical gestures in, 147
on Poe’s detective fiction, 81–103 Southern Literary Messenger, 177
Rush, Benjamin, 70–71, 74 Spanier, Sandra, 152
Rush, James Speaker, The (Enfield), 145
Philosophy of the Human Voice, 147 “Spectacles, The”
Russell, William, 147 grotesque in, 13
American Elocutionist, 147 Stauffer, Donald Barlow, 144
Rymer, James Malcolm Steep, Walter
Varney the Vampire, 173 on the double in “The Cask of
Amontillado,” 31–37
Saliba, David R., 69 Stevenson, Robert Louis
satire Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 18
in Poe’s work, 13 Stirling, John
Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne) System of Rhetoric, 145
Arthur Dimmesdale in, 173, 181, Stoker, Bram
183–184 Dracula, 5
Index 211
Stranger, The (Camus), 61 victim’s heartbeat in, 46–47,

Sussman, Henry 51–52, 57, 107–110, 112, 114,
on a postmodernist Poe, 55–67 117–119, 122, 124–125, 129
Swift, Jonathan, 19 writing of, 72
“System of Doctor Tarr and Thompson, G.R., 160
Professor Fether, The” (Poe), 149 Thoreau, Henry David, 3
System of Oratory (Ward), 145 “Thou Art the Man”
System of Rhetoric (Stirling), 145 detective story, 84
narrator of, 12, 84
“Tale of the Ragged Mountains, A,” Timmerman, John H.
10 on “The Fall of the House of
family in, 9 Usher,” 159–172
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque Torok, Maria, 84
realism in, 10, 12 “To a Skylark” (Shelley), 3
Tate, Allen, 3, 148 Treatise on Insanity and Other
“Tell-Tale-Heart, The” (Poe), 5, 177 Disorders Affecting the Mind
confession compulsions in, 45, 47, (Prichard), 70–71, 73, 76
49, 51–52, 75, 123–127, 143, Trial, The (Kafka), 63
181, 183 Turner, Arlin, 174, 184
evil eye in, 25–29, 45–46, 48, 51, Twain, Mark, 3, 5
57, 60, 74, 76, 109–113, 117, “The Facts Concerning A
119–121, 124, 129–130, 152, Recent Carnival of Crime in
180–183 Connecticut,” 18
feminist reading of, 39–54 Twice-Told Tales (Hawthorne)
guilt in, 175–176 reviews of, 174, 177, 183
horror in, 57–59, 115, 183–184
insanity defense in, 73, 108, 110, “Ulalume” (poem), 2, 163
120, 123, 125, 143, 150–151, narrator, 166–167
153 Ulysses (Joyce), 56
ironic structure of, 52, 60–61, 66, “Unpardonable Sin” (Hawthorne),
69, 155
182
language of, 25, 48, 129, 182–183
moral insanity of, 24–25, 69–79,
108, 153 Valéry, Paul, 1
motive in, 109 Van Buren, John, 72
murder in, 7, 45, 57, 61, 75–76, Varney the Vampire (Rymer), 173
175, 180–181 Very, Jones, 3
narrator in, 16, 25, 27, 40, 42–43, “Von Kempelen and His
45–53, 57–65, 69, 73–76, 106– Discovery,” 178
131, 143–144, 149–155, 179, Gold Rush in, 12
183, 185
obsession and madness in, 24–25, Wagenknecht, Edward, 162
46, 60–61, 76 Walker, John
reverberations in, 111 Elements of Elocution, 145,
suffocation in, 28 147
212 Index
Ward, John poetic justice in, 36

System of Oratory, 145 rumor of a relationship in, 33, 36
Webster, Daniel, 155, 175–177, 179, Willis, N.P., 175
182 Witherspoon, John, 145
Whately, Richard, 151 Woodberry, George, 146
Elements of Rhetoric, 144 Wood, James, 72–73
White, Joseph, 175–176 Woodward, Samuel B., 72, 74
Whitman, Walt, 3 Wootton, David, 153
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 3
Word Index to Poe’s Fiction (Pollin),
Wilbur, Richard, 86, 177
145
“William Wilson,” 22, 177, 183, 185
Wordsworth, William, 166
allegory, 32
confession, 15 Lyrical Ballads, 165
diction, 4 Wyatt, Thomas
divided self in, 18 The Conchologist’s First Book, 89
double conscience in, 32–36
madness in, 16–18 Zimmerman, Brett
narrator of, 15, 69 on “The Tell-Tale Heart,” 143–158

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations

The Adventures of The Grapes of Wrath One Hundred Years

Edgar Allan Poe’s

Edited and with an introduction by

Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom

Bloom’s Literary Criticism

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Contributing editor: Pamela Loos

Printed in the United States of America

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Editor’s Note vii

Grotesques and Arabesques 9

The Ironic Double in Poe’s

A Note on the Public and the Private

“Observe how healthily—how calmly

Detective Fiction, Psychoanalysis,

Death and Its Moments:

Frantic Forensic Oratory:

House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe’s

My notorious introduction brought upon me the wrath of the Poe Society,

Though of a badness not to be believed, this is by no means unrepre-

funny as Huxley’s parody in which a grand Miltonic touchstone is trans-

Not that fair field

Next, Huxley’s Poe:

It was noon in the fair field of Enna,

Here once, through an alley Titanic,

is a touch too close to Byron’s “Darkness,” while “Israfel” weakly revises

to quote him at his strongest as a storyteller. Here is the opening paragraph

This rhetoric, including the rhetorical questions, is British Gothic

The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at times

Lewis replies that he is not thinking of anyone’s words, but of a par-

when I first heard the story of Kafka’s Castle related in conversation

I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment—

That “pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible,

Grotesques and Arabesques

‘O f my country and of my family I have little to say,’ says the narrator of

Plotinos, the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed

Birthplace, parentage, ancestry—these are the attributes of body. To

essay, ‘On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,’ Fortnightly Review

more skillfully, and in a more cosmopolitan vehicle in ‘The Purloined Letter.’

Thus speaks Hoaxiepoe in his earnest guise as truthsayer. It is evident, if

Some of this obsessive material becomes clear, because handled with

What say of it? what say Conscience grim,

Wilson 2 exposes William Wilson, forcing his immediate departure

It was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could

enables one to murder the other in a dramatization of the suicide-wish; (b)

there came suddenly to my nostrils the strong peculiar odor of

dog—nailed up in some coffin—and thrust, deep, deep, and for

were inconceivably hideous; but out of Evil proceeded Good; for

One recalls the extraordinary career of Harry Houdini (Ehrich

straightjackets, all manner of manacles, chains, handcuffs, prison

Was there ever so close a reenactment of Poe’s most horror-struck fantasies?

His most dramatic escapes were from coffins buried underground

Coupled with this, unconsciously, is the fact that he had an

We have no right then to dismiss the significance of a particular

guilt and there is a well-known (concomitant) conception of the

Alas the poor psychotic imagination, to which everything that counts

‘The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but

How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how