The Tell-Tale Heart

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The Tell-Tale Heart
Illustration by Harry Clarke, 1919.
AuthorEdgar Allan Poe
CountryUnited States United States
LanguageEnglish
GenreHorror short story
PublisherThe Pioneer
Publication date
January 1843
Media typePrint (periodical)

"The Tell-Tale Heart" is an 1843 short story by Edgar Allan Poe. It follows an unnamed narrator who insists on his sanity despite his murder of an old man with a vulture eye. The murder is carefully calculated and the murderer hides the body by cutting it into pieces and hiding it under the floorboards. Ultimately, the narrator's guilt manifests itself in the hallucination that the man's heart is still beating under the floorboards.

It is unclear what relationship, if any, the old man and his murderer share. It has been suggested that the old man is a father figure or, perhaps, that his vulture eye represents some sort of veiled secret. The ambiguity and lack of details about the two main characters stands in stark contrast to the specific plot details leading up to the murder.

The story was first published in James Russell Lowell's The Pioneer in January 1843. Widely considered a classic of the Gothic fiction genre and one of Poe's most famous short stories, "The Tell-Tale Heart" has been adapted or served as an inspiration for a variety of media.

Plot summary

"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a first-person narrative of a genderless narrator who is taking care of an old man with a clouded, vulture-like eye. The narrator's paranoid symptoms lead to an irrational fear of the weird clouded eye. The narrator becomes so distressed by the eye, he plots to murder the old man. For eight nights, the narrator opens the door of the old man's room, a process which takes him a full hour, watching and waiting for the perfect moment to strike. However, the old man's eyes are shut, hiding the clouded eye, and the narrator loses the urge to kill.

One night, though, the old man awakens as the narrator watches, revealing the eye. The narrator strikes, smothering the old man with his own mattress. The narrator proceeds to chop the body up, and hide the pieces under the floorboards. The narrator then cleans the place up to hide all signs of the crime. When the narrator reports that the police (whether a delusion or real is unclear) respond to a call placed by a neighbor who heard a distressful scream, the narrator invites them to look around, confident that they will not find any evidence of the murder. They sit around the old man's room, right on top of the very hiding place of the dead body, yet suspect nothing.

The narrator, however, begins to hear a faint noise. As the noise grows louder, the narrator hallucinates that it is the heartbeat of the old man coming from under the floorboards. This paranoia increases as the officers seem to pay no attention to the sound, which is loud enough for the narrator to admit to having heard. Shocked by the constant beating of the heart and a feeling that the officers must be aware of the heartbeats, the narrator loses control and confesses to killing the old man and tells them to tear up the floorboards to reveal the body.

Throughout the story the narrator insists on being sane, yet at the same time, giving the impression of serious hallucinations or paranoia, possibly caused by guilt from having murdered an elderly man.

Analysis

"The Tell-Tale Heart" starts in medias res, in the middle of an event. The opening is an in-progress conversation between the narrator and another person who is not identified in any way. It is speculated that the narrator is confessing to a prison warden, judge, newspaper reporter, doctor or psychiatrist. The first word of the story, "True!," is an admission of his guilt.[1]

One of the driving forces in this opening and throughout the story is not the narrator's insistence upon his innocence but on his sanity. His drive to convince, however, is self-destructive because he fully admits he is guilty of murder. His denial of insanity is based on his systemic actions and rational precision. This rationality, however, is undermined by his lack of motivation ("Object there was none. Passion there was none."). Despite this, however, he says the idea of murder, "haunted me day and night."[2] The story's final scene, however, is a result of the narrator's feelings of guilt. Like many characters in the Gothic tradition, his nerves dictate his true nature. Despite his best efforts at defending himself, the narrator's "over acuteness of the senses," which help him hear the heart beating in the floorboards, is what convinces the reader that he is truly mad.[3]

The relationship between the old man and the narrator is ambiguous, as is their names, their occupations, or where they live. In fact, that ambiguity adds to the tale as an ironic counter to the strict attention to detail in the plot.[4] The narrator may be a servant of the old man's or, as is more often assumed, his son. In that case, the "vulture" eye of the old man is symbolizing parental surveillance and possibly the paternal principles of right and wrong. The murder of the eye, then, is a removal of conscience.[5] The eye may also represent secrecy, again playing on the ambiguous lack of detail about the man or the narrator. Only when the eye is finally found open on the final night, penetrating the veil of secrecy, that the murder is carried out.[6]

Former poet laureate Richard Wilbur has suggested that the tale is an allegorical representation of Poe's poem "To Science." The poem shows the struggle between imagination and science. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," the old man represents the scientific rational mind while the narrator is the imaginative.[7]

Publication history

"The Tell-Tale Heart" was first published in the Boston-based magazine The Pioneer in January 1843, edited by James Russell Lowell. Poe was likely paid only $10.[8] It was slightly revised when republished in the August 23, 1845 edition of the Broadway Journal. It was reprinted multiple times during Poe's lifetime.[9]

Adaptations

Works inspired

Music

Television

  • An episode of The Simpsons ("Lisa's Rival," September 11, 1994) featured a "Tell-Tale Heart"-inspired act of revenge between Lisa and a new student. In the episode, Lisa hides the competing student's diorama of the story and replaces it with an actual animal heart. As her guilt rises, she thinks she hears the diorama's heart beating beneath the floor boards.
  • A season 1 episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, "Squeaky Boots", has Mr. Krabs burying a pair of squeaky boots underneath the floorboards, only to begin hearing the noise more and more before snapping and digging them up, saying, "I hear the squeaking of the hideous boots!"

References

  1. ^ Benfey, Christopher. "Poe and the Unreadable: 'The Black Cat' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart'," collected in New Essays on Poe's Major Tales, Kenneth Silverman, ed. Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 9780521422437 p. 30
  2. ^ Robinson, E. Arthur. "Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'" from Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe's Tales, edited by William L. Howarth. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1971. p. 94
  3. ^ Fisher, Benjamin Franklin. "Poe and the Gothic Tradition," from The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge University Press, 2002. p. 87 ISBN 0521797276
  4. ^ Benfey, Christopher. "Poe and the Unreadable: 'The Black Cat' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart'," collected in New Essays on Poe's Major Tales, Kenneth Silverman, ed. Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 9780521422437 p. 32
  5. ^ Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. p. 223 ISBN 0807123218
  6. ^ Benfey, Christopher. "Poe and the Unreadable: 'The Black Cat' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart'," collected in New Essays on Poe's Major Tales, Kenneth Silverman, ed. Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 9780521422437 p. 33
  7. ^ Benfey, Christopher. "Poe and the Unreadable: 'The Black Cat' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart'," collected in New Essays on Poe's Major Tales, Kenneth Silverman, ed. Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 9780521422437 p. 31-2
  8. ^ Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. p. 201 ISBN 0060923318
  9. ^ Index to Poe's tales at Baltimore Poe Society Online
  10. ^ "IMDb Title Search: The Tell-Tale Heart". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2007-09-01.
  11. ^ The Tell-Tale Heart (1953/I) at IMDb Edit this at Wikidata
  12. ^ The Tell-Tale Heart (1960) at IMDb Edit this at Wikidata

External links

Works related to The Tell-Tale Heart at Wikisource

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