Of the three short stories by American authors investigated in Part One, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) was published earliest, and it is the only one in character narration. I will start with revealing an ethically oriented covert progression in this narrative, primarily through analyzing the stylistic patterning in the tale’s structural unity. This covert progression has much to do with Poe’s ingenious use of narratorial unreliability, especially the complex interplay between the unreliable and the reliable as encoded in the same words of the narrator, which helps convey an overall dramatic irony with implicit ethical import. I anticipate immediate objection to my attempt at unraveling the hidden ethical import of this narrative since generations of critics have believed that Poe is not concerned with ethics but aesthetics (see, for instance, Buranelli 1961; Cleman 1991; Polonsky 2002). In view of this, I will first offer a discussion of Poe’s theory of prose fiction to pave the way for the analysis.
The current ethical turn in narrative studies suggests a congenial context in which to clear up a long-term misunderstanding about Poe’s view on prose fiction. Critics widely held that Poe’s aestheticism covers prose fiction as well as poetry (see below), but in effect, Poe holds a non-aesthetic view of the subject matter of prose fiction. In this genre, Poe makes an unequivocal distinction between structural design and subject matter. While putting the structural design of prose fiction completely on a par with that of poetry (both confined to the aesthetic trajectory), Poe treats the subject matter of prose fiction as different in nature from that of poetry—as often based on Truth and diametrically opposed to Beauty. Commenting on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1842), Poe observes:
We have said that the tale has a point of superiority even over the poem. In fact, while the rhythm of this latter is an essential aid in the development of the poem’s highest idea—the idea of the Beautiful—the artificialities of this rhythm are an inseparable bar to the development of all points of thought or expression which have their basis in Truth. But Truth is often, and in very great degree, the aim of the tale…. The writer of the prose tale, in short, may bring to his theme a vast variety of modes or inflections of thought and expression—(the ratiocinative, for example, the sarcastic or the humorous) which are not only antagonistical to the nature of the poem, but absolutely forbidden by one of its most peculiar and indispensable adjuncts; we allude of course, to rhythm. It may be added, here, par parenthèse, that the author who aims at the purely beautiful in a prose tale is laboring at great disadvantage. For Beauty can be better treated in the poem. (Poe 1984a: 573)
According to Poe, it is in effect the genre-specific “rhythm” that makes Beauty “the sole legitimate province of the poem” (Poe 1984b: 16), while the prose tale is open to a wide range of thematic materials that “have their basis in Truth” and are “antagonistical” to Beauty.1 Poe’s “Truth,” though, has a much wider application than “Truth” in what Poe calls “the heresy of The Didactic”—the assumption “that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth” and that “Truth” simply means the inculcation of a moral (Poe 1984c: 75). For Poe, however, “Truth” constitutes the basis for a wide range of modes of thought and expression, including but not confined to the ethical.
This non-aesthetic thematic conception has been blocked from critical view by Poe’s consistent aesthetic conception of formal design.2 For Poe all works of literary art should achieve the most important “unity of effect” (Poe 1984a: 571). In order to obtain structural unity, the writer of a prose narrative, like the writer of a poem, should preconceive a single effect and then invent and combine events for this “pre-established design.” Moreover, in order to preserve unity of effect, a prose narrative, like a poem, should be fairly short, able to “be read at one sitting” (1984a: 572).
Since behind Poe’s consistent emphasis on aesthetic formal design lies his non-aesthetic conception of the tale’s subject matter, Poe regards Hawthorne’s work as an exemplar of good prose writing, and he readily stresses Hawthorne’s ethical concerns (Poe 1984a: 574–75). One tale by Hawthorne that Poe (ibid.: 574) particularly appreciates and praises is “Wakefield,” which is marked by strong ethical concerns. The omniscient narrator welcomes the reader “to ramble with [him] through the twenty years of Wakefield’s vagary” in order to find the “moral” of Wakefield’s marital delinquency (Hawthorne 1974: 131). The narrator, from an ethical position superior to that of the protagonist, persuades his reader of the morbid vanity, selfishness, and ruthlessness that underlie Wakefield’s folly. Although Poe, out of a strong concern for dramatic effects, avoided such explicit moral teaching by an omniscient narrator, he has in some of his tales, such as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” implicitly and subtly conveyed a moral through subtle stylistic choices in a unified structural design.
Poe’s insistent emphasis on aesthetic structural unity has caused many critics to overlook his non-aesthetic and ethically related conception of the subject matter of prose fiction. This underlies the widely held view of Poe as being closely associated, in the domain of prose fiction as well as that of poetry, with “Art for Art’s sake.” Critics have argued that “Poe banished ‘the didactic’ from the proper sphere of art” and that there is “an apparent lack of interest in moral themes throughout Poe’s work” (Moldenhauer 1968: 285; Cleman 1991: 623). Vincent Buranelli more specifically asserts that “sin and crime are absent from” Poe’s fictional world, because “Poe does not touch morality” and “the terrible deeds that abound there are matters of psychology, abnormal psychology, not of ethics” (1961: 72).
John Cleman extends Poe’s “aesthetic” of poetry to prose narrative and then differentiates between the two genres only in terms of aesthetic concerns: “To some degree, this seeming indifference to moral issues can be explained by Poe’s aesthetic in which the ‘Moral Sense,’ ‘Conscience,’ and ‘Duty’ have, at best, ‘only collateral relations’ with the primary concerns: for poetry ‘The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty,’ and for prose fiction ‘the unity of effect or impression’” (Cleman 1991: 623–24).3 Such differentiation between the two genres is undesirable since, in Poe’s view, “the unity of effect or impression” is as important for poetry as for prose fiction. The real difference between the two genres lies in aim or subject matter: Beauty for poetry, and Truth for prose fiction.
When critics acknowledge Poe’s concern with “Truth” in prose narrative, they tend simply to drag it into the aesthetic trajectory. John S. Whit-ley, for instance, writes: “While the highest idea of a poem is the idea of the Beautiful, Poe argues that the aim of the tale is Truth…. but perhaps by ‘Truth’ he really meant the working of every part of the story—rhythm, plot, character, language, references—towards a denouement which ends the story logically, consistently and satisfactorily” (2000: xii). Thus, Poe’s separation of the structural design and subject matter of the tale is unwittingly transformed into a unified conception hinging solely on the unity of effect. Joseph J. Moldenhauer, even as he challenges the traditional view that Poe disregarded morality, is still confined to structural unity: “According to Poe, the supreme criterion for the literary performance is not truthfulness, moral or otherwise, but rather unity” (1968: 286). Like many other critics, Moldenhauer puts the genre of prose fiction completely on a par with poetry, and, in challenging the traditional view of Poe’s disregard for morality in literature, he limits his discussion to what Poe means by “Beauty,” treating the subject matter of poetry as the subject matter of literature in general (ibid.: 286–89). As a result, Moldenhauer’s effort to bring morality back to Poe’s theory of literature—through “aesthetic super-morality” (ibid.: 289)—only adds to the misunderstanding of Poe’s view on the subject matter of prose fiction.
Keeping Poe’s non-aesthetic conception of the tale’s subject matter in mind, I now proceed to an investigation of the “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
As mentioned in the Introduction, “The Tell-Tale Heart” presents a neurotic narrator’s account of his premeditated murder of an old man and finally his compelled admission of the crime because he hears his victim’s relentless heartbeat in front of the policemen.4 This plot development has attracted the attention of numerous critics, who have discussed its various aspects through diversified approaches, especially psychoanalysis since the mid-twentieth century (see below). I approach the tale from a different angle, attempting to reveal, through tracing the stylistic patterning in the narrative’s structural unity, a covert progression marked by an overall dramatic irony with significant ethical import.
In expounding his theory of the “unity of effect,” Poe stresses the importance of the dénouement of the literary work. The writer should have the dénouement constantly in view, and every plot “must be elaborated to its dénouement before any thing be attempted with the pen” (Poe 1984b: 13). In view of Poe’s emphasis on the dénouement, I start with the ending of “The Tell-Tale Heart”:
No doubt I now grew very pale; but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound [the heartbeat of the victim] 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 observations 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. 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 anything was better than this agony! Anything 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!—
“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks! here, here!—It is the beating of his hideous heart!” (Poe 1984d: 559, italics original and underlining added)5
After killing the old man, the protagonist dismembers the corpse and hides it under the floorboards. Three policemen come to search the house and the protagonist answers their questions “cheerily” and feels “singularly at ease” (559). They are now at the very spot where the corpse is buried. As regards the plot development, in this climactic title scene, attention tends to be focused on the underlined words. These words show that the protagonist is pursued by his victim’s heart as a tool or symbol of revenge (see below), a fantastic heart that dramatically starts beating again when the murderer is in a most confident, triumphant, and cheery mood. The heart, by beating louder and louder, deprives the cold-blooded and marble-hearted murderer of his after-murder ease in front of the policemen, making him increasingly irritated and horrified. The sound eventually compels the murderer to admit his crime (“again!—hark! louder! louder! louder! louder! … I admit the deed! … It is the beating of his hideous heart!”). The final sentence of the narrative—“It is the beating of his hideous heart!”—echoes its title, “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
But if we open our minds to more than one textual progression and examine carefully the stylistic choices in this passage and in the structural unity of the narrative as a whole, we may descry that what we have here is also the dénouement of a covert progression behind the plot development: The narrator-protagonist is the only dissembling person in the whole textual sequence and he keeps gloating over his own immoral dissimulation. In this final scene, he unconsciously projects his own dissemblance onto the policemen and finds the projected dissemblance increasingly unbearable, which leads to his downfall (“Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! … ‘Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more! I admit the deed!’”). In this light, the protagonist’s condemnation of the unsuspecting policemen— “Villains! … dissemble no more!”—amounts to unwitting self-condemnation. That is to say, the covert progression is marked by dramatic irony with a significant ethical dimension: implicitly telling us how one’s self-satisfying dissemblance leads to one’s downfall.
Within the crucial ending of the narrative, we can discern the stylistic patterning at the dénouement of the covert progression in three steps. At the first step, a series of verbal processes and their adjuncts interact to represent the protagonist’s increasingly intensive efforts to cover up the victim’s heart beating in order to dissemble innocence: “talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice,” “talked more quickly—more vehemently,” “argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations,” “I foamed—I raved—I swore!” This is reinforced by three action processes and their adjuncts, “I paced the floor [where the victim is buried] to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury … and grated [the chair] upon the boards.” At the second step, we have the stylistic choices describing the narrator-protagonist’s ungrounded suspicion about the policemen’s dissemblance, including his self-questioning “Was it possible they heard not?” and his exclamatory assertion in free indirect discourse: “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.” At the last step, we have the stylistic choices depicting the narrator-protagonist’s reaction to what he takes to be the policemen’s hypocrisy: “Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die!” “‘Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more! I admit the deed!’” The last shriek functions as a boomerang against the narrator-protagonist who is the only “hypocritical” “villain” in the whole narrative.
In contrast with the plot development where the underlined words in the above quotation are of most significance, in the covert progression only the stylistic choices singled out here receive emphasis, and the underlined words become much less important with the exception of “I admit the deed!” which is significant both to the covert progression and to the plot development.
Our perception of the covert textual progression significantly changes our interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic judgments as based on the plot development. Interpretively, we come to see more thematic relevance of the stylistic choices that depict the narrator’s gloating over his own dissimulation and his wrong perception and reporting of the policemen’s “dissemblance.” This helps us gain a fuller and better view of his unreliable narration on all the three axes: facts, values, and perception (see Phelan 2005; see also Shen “Unreliability” in The Living Handbook of Narratology). In terms of our ethical judgment, instead of seeing the narrator-protagonist only as a psychological figure, we come to discern him as a butt of implicit ethical irony, which greatly increases the narrative distance between him and us. Aesthetically, we newly perceive the artistic value of various textual details behind their trivial or digressive appearance as they gradually fall into place in the covert progression.
Now, with the crucial ending in mind, we come to explore the earlier stages of the covert progression. The character narrator begins to tell the murdering process by arguing, “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen how wisely I proceeded—with what caution— with what foresight—with what dissimulation I went to work!” (555). Previous critics have taken the last sentence only as the narrator’s assertion of his being sane (see, for instance, Robinson 1965: 369; Nesbitt 2000: 239) or as indicating the need for the protagonist to be “cautious” in his Oedipal revenge on “the father” (Bonaparte 1949: 492). But if we open our minds to a textual undercurrent, we may discover that this is the beginning of the covert progression towards the narrator-protagonist’s unconscious condemnation of his own dissemblance. In this sentence, the words “wisely,” “caution,” and “foresight” (referring partly to his well-prepared concealment of the corpse) all point to the narrator-protagonist’s belief in his own cunning. Further, the term “dissimulation,” which functions to define the preceding words, more explicitly refers to his dissemblance.
In what follows, behind the plot development focusing on the three-step murdering process—preparing for the killing, the killing act, and hiding the corpse—the covert textual progression centers on the murderer’s dissemblance and his taking delight in it throughout. After he makes up his mind to carry out the murder, the protagonist becomes “never kinder to the old man” and he keeps this mask of kindness “during the whole week” when seeking an opportunity to kill the old man. The tension between his trying to murder the old man and his being “never kinder” to his intended victim highlights his hypocrisy. He very “cunningly” spies on the sleeping old man for this whole week without being detected (555). At daybreak, he would hypocritically go into the old man’s chamber, “calling him by name in a hearty tone, and inquiring how he has passed the night” (556). On the night of killing the old man, he can “scarcely contain [his] feelings of triumph” and “fairly chuckle[s]” at heart because he is extremely proud of his “sagacity” in dissembling—“the extent of my own powers [of dissembling],” “[the old man] not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts” (556). After killing the old man, he takes “wise precautions” to hide the corpse and he does it “so cleverly, so cunningly” that he well conceals the dismembered body under the floor without leaving any trace: “no human eye—not even his—could have detected any thing 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” (557). When the police officers come to search the house after a neighbor reports hearing a shriek during the night, he dissemblingly bids the policemen “welcome” and invites them to “search—search well” (558). At the dénouement, as we have just seen, there is a strong ironic tension between the protagonist’s dissemblance in trying to cover up his crime and his intolerance of what he takes to be the policemen’s dissemblance.
Now, two questions arise: Are the policemen dissembling? Has the protagonist heard his victim’s heart beating in the first place? To answer these questions, I want to examine several passages in the textual sequence. The first passage is from the very beginning:
True!—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? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story. (555)
The second passage occurs in the middle of the tale:
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 grew louder, I say, louder every moment! … But the beating grew louder, louder! … 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. (557–58)
The final passage is from the end:
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…. It grew louder—louder— louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. (559)
Many readers regard the narrator’s claims to supernatural powers of hearing only as evidence of his madness. It is of course likely that Poe is using the structural consistency to show the continuity and coherence of the narrator-protagonist’s madness as manifested by the “over-acuteness” of his hearing.6
But there is another possibility: Poe seems to use stylistic patterning in the structural unity to suggest that the over-acute hearing is a fantastic fictional fact. The words at the beginning of the tale emphatically present the narrator’s claim that his “sense of hearing” is inhumanly or superhumanly “acute.” This is echoed by the middle of the tale, which stresses the protagonist’s “over-acuteness of the senses,” enabling him to hear the increasingly loud beating of the old man’s heart. After the protagonist has pulled the bed over the old man, the description of his behavior lends credibility to his claim of hearing the old man’s heart beating in two ways. First, his feeling satisfied without being vexed by the heart beating (“I then smiled gaily … This, however, did not vex me”) rules out the possibility that he is hearing his own heart beating out of guilt or nervousness, a point that gains continuous support in the following textual sequence. Second, although one person’s hearing another person’s heart beating with a heavy bed in between sounds impossible in reality, the description of the protagonist’s examining the corpse is perfectly in keeping with our experiences of the world: “I placed my hand upon the heart and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation” (558), which functions to make believable the preceding description of the protagonist’s hearing the old man’s heart beating. In other words, Poe makes a fantastic fictional fact credible through related realistic details. This move paves the way for the crucial dénouement, in which the protagonist’s hearing the beating of the old man’s heart is repeated virtually verbatim, and in which the fact that the old man is dead (no matter now in heaven or in hell) echoes with the narrator’s claim at the beginning of the tale: “I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.” In Poe’s fantastic fictional world, for the man whose sense of hearing is “over acute,” it seems to make no difference whether the sound is on earth or in heaven/hell.
It is interesting that critics readily accept Poe’s fantastic fictional facts in “The Black Cat” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” as well as Franz Kafka’s fantastic transformation of the protagonist into a monstrous verminous bug in “Metamorphosis” (1915).7 Yet many critics have refused to accept that the protagonist of “The Tell-Tale Heart” hears the (alive or dead) old man’s heart beating—in Zimmerman’s words, “it would have been impossible for him to hear such a noise unless his ear were against the old man’s chest” (1992: 40). These critics take the noise as the sound of an insect in the wall (Reilly 1969: 5–7); or as the heartbeat of the protagonist himself, associated with his conscience or sense of guilt (Tucker 2001: 115; Shelden 1976: 77; Hoffman 1972: 227; Robinson 1965: 374; cf. Alber et al. 2010); or as a matter of the mad protagonist’s auditory hallucinations (Zimmerman 1992: 40–41; Phillips 1979: 128–30). But Poe’s fantastic fictional world seems to defy real-life criteria (cf. Todorov 1975: 24–27), and the structurally unified textual sequence seems to suggest that the protagonist, with his “over-acute” sense of hearing, is able to hear the dead man’s heart beating.
Significantly, in this fictional world the “over-acuteness of the sense,” which is a typical symptom of insanity in reality, is made to appear as a characteristic of sanity. As the narrator argues, based on a criterion that he apparently shares with his narratee: “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? … And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?” At the crucial dénouement, the protagonist’s process of hearing also seems to suggest his being sane in this aspect:
My head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears: but still they [the policemen] 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 definiteness—until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears.
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? (559)
The protagonist’s rational realization that he “fancied a ringing in [his] ears,” his conscious effort “to get rid of” the fantasy, and his final discovery that the noise, which “continued and gained definiteness,” was “not within [his] ears,” all point to his being “sane” in this aspect in this fictional world.
This description, which moves from the fancied ringing in the protagonist’s ears to the final discovery that the noise is external to his body, also rules out the possibility that the protagonist is hearing his own heart beating. Indeed, one does not need an over-acute sense of hearing to hear one’s own heart beating—one feels rather than hears the beating of one’s own heart. If Poe’s purpose were to suggest that what the protagonist hears is his own heart beating, the above-quoted interaction among the beginning, middle, and end of the textual movement concerned with the protagonist’s over-acute hearing would be not only unnecessary but also out of place. Besides, Poe’s description of the narrator-protagonist does not suggest any trace of his conscience/guilt:
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….
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…. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs….
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! (558)
The self-satisfying “smiled gaily,” “did not vex me,” and “ha! ha!” betray the narrator-protagonist’s cold-bloodedness and go against the interpretation that the narrative represents “the voice of a guilty conscience” (Ward 1924: 35) or “[g]uilt is a major theme of the tale” (Tucker 2001: 115). This narrator-protagonist is a man who is simply beyond the sense of guilt.8 Moreover, this man, who at the beginning of the tale claims to have been “dreadfully nervous,” is “singularly at ease” in front of the policemen:9
… they [the policemen] had been deputed to search the premises.
I smiled,—for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome. 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 officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was singularly at ease. They sat, and while I answered cheerily, they chatted of familiar things. (558–59, italics original and underlining added)
The words underlined point at once to the narrator-protagonist’s dissemblance and his gloating over it. The contrast between the protagonist’s being “dreadfully nervous” as a rule and his being “singularly at ease” in front of the policemen ironically and dramatically underscores the point that he is absolutely beyond the sense of guilt.
As we know, usually after hiding the corpse, a murderer, in fear of discovery, would try hard to prevent other people—especially policemen—from getting to the spot. But for the sake of creating dramatic irony, Poe depicts the murderer as stupidly inviting the policemen to sit in the very room where he hid the corpse, and, moreover, as most stupidly sitting himself “upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim,” out of his enthusiastic confidence and “perfect triumph.” The stupidity arises from the protagonist’s immoral behavior since it is essentially a matter of his gloating over his dissemblance. But he falls victim to his own dissemblance: His sitting upon the heart of the victim makes it very natural for him to be chased by the victim’s revengeful heart in this fantastic fictional world.
Now, a significant point to note is that even if the sound is a matter of the protagonist’s hearing his own heart beating associated with his conscience/guilt, or even if it is a matter of his insane auditory hallucinations, a crucial fact will remain unchanged: The policemen with normal hearing cannot hear the heart beating and are therefore not dissembling. That is to say, by making the textual movement continuously convey, from the beginning through the middle to the end, the “overt-acute” hearing of the protagonist, Poe frees the policemen of the charge of dissemblance and invites us to see the unreliability of the narration.
The narrator concludes that the policemen’s inability to hear the heart beating really cloaks a pretense that mocks his own horror. This unreliable interpretation and reporting arise from his own immoral behavior, and what he suspects the policemen to be doing to him is precisely what he has done to others:
To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little, and he [the old man] not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea….
Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror…. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart. (556, italics added)
Later, when the policemen come to search the house, the narrator reports: “I smiled,—for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome” (558). The stylistic choices “chuckled at the idea,” “chuckled at heart,” and “I smiled,” which appear to be unimportant in the plot development, become thematically significant in the covert progression, since they lend themselves to the implicit overall dramatic irony. Compare the narrator’s final pleadings:
They heard!—they suspected!—they knew!—they were making a mockery of my horror!—this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! (559)
In retrospective character narration, usually the narrating self is better-informed, more knowledgeable and ethically improved as compared with the experiencing self. That is why Rimmon-Kenan compares the retrospective Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations to traditional omniscient narrators for being “a higher narratorial authority in relation to the story which he narrates” (2002: 96). But in the covert progression of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe invites us to see that this retrospective narrator shares the same limitation in knowledge and the same immorality with the experiencing self. By making the narrator utter “this I thought, and this I think,” Poe shows that the narrating self shares the experiencing self’s wrong interpretive judgment on the policemen, just as the two selves share the same unethical delight in his own dissemblance. Through the subtle echoing among words (the repeated “chuckled at” with “making a mockery of”; “I [hypocritically] smiled” with “those hypocritical smiles”), Poe guides us to see that precisely because the murderer mocks at the old man’s horror and treats the policemen with hypocritical smiles, he suspects that the policemen are mocking at his horror and treating him with hypocritical smiles as well.
While the narrator-protagonist gloats over his own dissemblance and enjoys his mockery and hypocritical smiles at others, he finds the same behavior from others to be most intolerable (“I felt that I must scream or die!”). But, as mentioned above, what he finds most intolerable, in effect, is only his own immoral behavior unwittingly projected onto the policemen. His shriek “Villains! dissemble no more! I admit the deed!” intends to call to a stop the policemen’s “dissemblance” but only ironically and unconsciously calls to a stop his own dissemblance. His unwitting self-condemnation, which is foregrounded as the only direct speech in the tale and which is given more prominence by paragraph division and the textual end-focus position, culminates the structurally unified dramatic irony in the covert progression.10
The covert progression has so far eluded critical attention. Apart from the traditional focus on one textual progression—that of the plot development, there may be other reasons underlying the critical neglect. As discussed in the previous section, many critics take Poe’s aestheticism as covering both poetry and prose fiction, and so they have overlooked the ethical dimension of the tale. Besides, many critics are led by the narrator’s words to believe that he is giving his account of his cunning and dissimulation only to prove that he is not mad. In this vein, if critics find the narration problematic or unreliable, they only take it as an indication of the narrator’s madness (see, for instance, Silverman 1991: 208–9; Wilson and Lazzari 1998: 345–47; Zimmerman 2001).
Interestingly, one critic, William Freeman, while paying attention to the protagonist’s over-acuteness of hearing, perceives it as a matter of getting an excess of unwanted knowledge. He says, “To see, to feel, to sense too much is to suffer the punishment of destructive knowledge…. The closing of the old man’s eye and the silencing of the seemingly jeering detectives is the plotted equivalent of Poe’s less lethal efforts to dim our own perception and weaken our assumptions about meaning and intent” (2002: 102). Freeman’s words, especially the expression “the silencing of the seemingly jeering detectives,” point to the fact that missing the covert progression may lead to a misinterpretation of the plot development. Another critic, Paul Witherington tries to show how “the narrator seduces the listener by getting him to participate vicariously in the crime, an accomplice after the fact” (1985: 472). As for the ending, Witherington argues that here the reader is prompted to identify with the police officers and indeed to become one of the “Villains!” To Witherington, the reader is “a villain for wanting to listen to the recreation of a tale of horror, and he’s a naïve hypocrite for imagining that he can do so with impunity” (ibid.: 474). From this point of view, the narrator-protagonist is justifiably leveling a moral condemnation against the policemen and the reader. But in fact, in the covert progression behind the overt plot, Poe has implicitly turned the butt of the moral condemnation from the policemen to the narrator-protagonist himself, who is the only hypocritical “villain” in the narrative. Witherington’s interpretation illustrates especially well this point made by Booth: Narratorial unreliability, which conveys the implied author’s stance in an indirect way, may involve costs, such as the failure of “transcending the limits of the immediate scene,” especially the limits of the unreliable narrator (1961: 174–75). But if we can transcend the limits and descry the narratorial unreliability in the covert progression, we may gain, in Booth’s words, a sense of pleasure “compounded of pride in [our] own knowledge, ridicule of the ignorant narrator, and a sense of collusion with the silent author” (ibid.: 304–5).
It is significant that, in investigating character narration, we may need to pay attention not only to what is unreliable but also to the conflict between the reliable and the unreliable as encoded by the implied author in the same words of the narratorial discourse. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator asserts, “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!” (555). Previous critics have focused on the gap between the narrator’s unreliable claim of his being sane and the textual elements displaying his insanity to a certain extent (see below). They have overlooked the narrator’s assertion of his dissemblance partly because it is in keeping with his deeds. But the assertion is at once factually reliable and ethically unreliable (taking immoral delight in his dissemblance). This reliable reporting and unreliable evaluation, as noted above, marks the beginning of the covert progression towards ironic self-condemnation. At the ending, the narrator-protagonist’s accusation of the policemen’s “dissemblance” as being immoral sounds reliable in terms of ethical evaluation and is therefore either overlooked or endorsed in existing criticism. But the accusation, in effect, is not only factually unreliable but also ethically problematic—the narrator-protagonist takes delight in his own dissemblance throughout and the double standard renders his ethical judgment questionable.
It should be stressed that the covert progression in “The Tell-Tale Heart” does not rest with the main line of action—it is not a deeper level of meaning of the plot development. Let’s take a look at two representative plot summaries. The first was given at the beginning of the twentieth century:
The Tell-Tale Heart is one of the most effective parables ever conceived. Shorn of its fantastic details regarding the murdered man’s vulture-like eye, and the long-drawn-out detail concerning the murderer’s slow entrance into his victim’s room, the story stands as an unforgettable record of the voice of a guilty conscience. Beneath the floor lies the victim’s body; the police-officers sit chatting pleasantly with the murderer, who has met them with perfect outward calm and apparently satisfied them that the old man whom he had killed is absent in the country. Then, above the cheery talk of familiar things, he begins to hear “a low, dull, quick sound—much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton”—the sound of the ceaseless beating of the tell-tale heart. By its insistent pulsation he is driven into a state of increasing terror and frenzy, until he tears up the flooring-boards and reveals his crime (Ward 1924: 35–36).
As far as the murdering process is concerned, we lose sight of the murderer’s dissemblance and his gloating over it, since what is relevant to the main line of action is only “the murderer’s slow entrance into his victim’s room.” When it comes to the ending, we likewise lose sight of the murderer’s projecting his own dissemblance onto the policemen and his finding the projected dissemblance most unbearable, since what is relevant to the main line of action is the “insistent pulsation” of “the tell-tale heart” itself. Unless we open our minds to another textual movement paralleling the main line of action, the covert progression will not come into view no matter what efforts we make in trying to uncover a deeper level of meaning of the plot development.
Nearly one century later, in her summary of the tale’s plot in Short Story Criticism, Anna Sheets Nesbitt (2000: 239) writes:
After again declaring his sanity, the narrator proceeds to recount the details of the crime. Every night for seven nights, he says, he had stolen into the old man’s room at midnight holding a closed lantern. Each night he would very slowly unlatch the lantern slightly and shine a single ray of light onto the man’s closed eye. As he enters the room on the eighth night, however, the old man stirs, then calls out, thinking he has heard a sound. The narrator shines the light on the old man’s eye as usual, but this time finds it wide open. He begins to hear the beating of a heart and, fearing the sound might be heard by a neighbor, kills the old man by dragging him to the floor and pulling the heavy bed over him. He dismembers the corpse and hides it beneath the floorboards of the old man’s room.
At four o’clock in the morning, the narrator continues, three policemen come asking to search the premises … He soon begins to hear a heart beating, much as he had just before he killed the old man. It grows louder and louder until he becomes convinced the policemen hear it too. They know of his crime, he thinks, and mock him. Unable to bear their derision and the sound of the beating heart, he springs up and, screaming, confesses his crime.
In this plot summary, we also fail to see the murderer’s dissimulation and his taking unethical delight in it during the eight-night murdering process. As for the ending, although Nesbitt pays attention both to the policemen’s “derision” and the old man’s beating heart, we still lose sight of the murderer’s projecting his own dissemblance onto the unsuspecting policemen and his finding the projected dissemblance most unbearable. The dramatic irony of the murderer’s unwitting self-condemnation will not become visible unless we consciously search for a hidden textual progression throughout the text, one that parallels the plot development.
For over one-and-a-half centuries, “The Tell-Tale Heart” has attracted the attention of numerous critics who have focused on the plot development, though approaching it from various angles and often reaching a deeper level of meaning. Not surprisingly, in existing interpretations of the themes of the tale there is no mention of the implicit moral as conveyed by the covert progression—how one’s self-satisfying dissemblance leads to one’s downfall:
critics agree that there are two primary motifs in the story: the identification of the narrator with the man he kills and the psychological handling of time. The narrator says he understands his victim’s terror just as he is about to murder him, and the beating heart he mistakes for the old man’s may well be his own. Throughout the story the narrator is obsessed with time: the central image of the heart is associated with the ticking of a watch, the nightly visits take place precisely at midnight, and time seems to slow and almost stop as the murderer enters the old man’s chamber. Another major theme is that of the eye, which some critics consider to have a double meaning, as the external “eye” of the old man is seen in contrast to the internal “I” of the narrator. Several commentators have pointed out that the symbolism in the work is highly structured and intertwined, so that the various themes—of death, time, nature, inner versus outer reality, the dream, the heart, and the eye— work together for accumulated effect. (Nesbitt 2000: 240)
The psychoanalytic approach dominated the scene in the latter half of the twentieth century. As summarized by Witherington (1985: 474), this approach characteristically takes the police to be “the murderer’s super-ego,” the narrator’s admitting his crime a matter of “the narrator’s compulsion to unmask and destroy himself” and the entire inner story (corresponding to the instabilities in the plot) “a psychodrama of compulsions and counter compulsions” (see also Bonaparte 1964; Davidson 1966: 189–90; Canario 1970; Davis 1983; Kennedy 1987: 132–34; Zimmerman 2001). No matter what approaches critics adopt, when attention is focused on the plot development, the covert progression as such will remain unseen, since it is a textual undercurrent paralleling the plot development. The various stylistic details that are important to the covert progression as shown above tend to appear to be trivial and digressive when measured with the gauge of the plot development and therefore tend to be overlooked.
If we explore the ethically oriented dramatic irony of “The Tell-Tale Heart” further, we may find that it extends to the narrator’s “sanity defense,” which is closely related to the cultural context of the narrative.
In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the character narrator uses his narration in the service of self-defense:
True!–nervous–very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? … Hearken! and observe how healthily— how calmly I can tell you the whole story. (555)
In the narrative, we see the conflict between the narrator’s protestations about his sanity and various symptoms of his insanity: his “dreadful” nervousness, the lack of a rational motive for killing (“[The old man] had never wronged me. He had never given me insult” [555]), his irrational fear of the old man’s eye (which he regards as an “Evil Eye”), and his obsession with a queer idea (“It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night” [555]).11 As the tale ends with the protagonist’s admitting his guilt to the policemen, critics tend to agree that this defense is made by the narrator in the process of legal justice. The narration, however, is less an effort to defend his innocence from a murder charge than an effort to prove that he is sane. In order to account for the deviant direction of the defense, which goes against conventional expectations, and to account for the contradiction between claimed sanity and actual symptoms of insanity, it is necessary to look into the cultural context of Poe’s tale.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” was produced in the context of the increasing controversy in the mid nineteenth century over the “insanity defense” (see Cleman 1991; Maeder 1985). Before the end of the eighteenth century, the most common test of exculpatory insanity was the loss of reason and the “knowledge of good and evil” (Cleman 1991: 628; Maeder 1985: 7–12). As John Cleman writes, with “the equation between reason and the moral sense, any sign of rationality—such as appearing calm and reasonable in court, premeditating or planning the crime, or seeking to hide or avoid punishment—demonstrated the presence of an indivisible conscience and concomitant moral responsibility” (Cleman 1991: 628; see also Maeder 1985: 9–12). To qualify for legal exemption, the defendant had to be, in the words of Judge Tracy in 1774, “a man that is totally deprived of his understanding and memory, and doth not know what he is doing, no more than an infant, than a brute, or a wild beast.”12
At the turn of the century, however, Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry, distinguished the moral faculties from the intellectual faculties (represented by different areas in the brain) and developed a new theory of insanity—“moral derangement”—in which insanity was considered a disease affecting the moral faculties alone without disordering the intellect (see Rush 1972; Ray 1962; Bynum 1989: 141). In the 1830s, James Cowles Prichard further developed and popularized the discussion, making what he called “moral insanity” the “focus of psychological studies and polemical arguments until replaced by the category of psychopathic personality at the end of the century” (Carlson 1972: xi; Bynum 1989: 142–44). The courts in the nineteenth century began to accept arguments for an exculpatory “moral insanity,” or partial insanity, and with the increasing use of the insanity defense for defendants who did not fit the commonsense image of insanity, the defense became an object of ridicule and led to the suspicion that the defense was undermining civil order (see Maeder 1985; Cleman 1991: 625–27). Some judges believed “that moral insanity was, in Baron Rolfe’s words, ‘an extreme moral depravity not only perfectly consistent with legal responsibility, but such as legal responsibility is expressly invented to restrain’” (Bynum 1989: 144).13 The claim of moral insanity also met serious opposition within the profession of psychiatry, and “by the late 1840s even some distinguished asylum superintendents began denying the existence of a ‘moral’ insanity” (ibid.). The public at that time “tended to suspect deception in defense pleas of insanity, and newspapers often fanned these feelings” (ibid.).
The asylum reforms of the period also “contributed to the public view that to be acquitted on the grounds of insanity was to avoid punishment” (Cleman 1991: 625). Before the end of the eighteenth century, the insane were treated very much like criminals, subjected to similar confinement and corporal punishments (see Foucault 1988: 38–64). As Cleman writes, “with the reforms, the insane were housed apart from criminals and, to some degree, treated with … compassion and care” (1991: 625). Poe explicitly satirizes these reforms in his tale “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” (1844), in which he depicts in a highly dramatic manner the adoption of the “soothing system” at the Maison de Santé, a system that frees the insane from all punishments and, in most cases, from confinement. But the lunatics in the Maison de Santé take over, imprison the keepers in underground cells, and treat them inhumanly until the lunatics are subdued again.
In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator-protagonist displays typical symptoms of partial insanity or “moral insanity.” On the one hand, he retains his rationality in “calmly” telling the story, premeditating the crime, cunningly carrying it out and trying to hide it; but on the other hand, as just mentioned, he displays “dreadful” nervousness, the lack of a rational motive for killing, his irrational fear of the old man’s eye, and his obsession with a queer idea. It is significant that, although the narrator-protagonist is morally insane according to the social standards at that time, Poe implicitly denies the existence of “moral insanity” in this fictional world by using the loss of rationality as the sole criterion for determining insanity—a criterion established through the narrator’s own words (e.g. “Madmen know nothing”). Interestingly, even according to the narrator’s own criterion of sanity (a criterion that obtains in this textual world), his sanity defense is still somewhat unreliable since he is marked by various symptoms of irrationality. Yet he is rational enough to be convicted of murder according to the criterion in this textual world.
As for the thematic relation between the “The Tell-Tale Heart” and the cultural context, it is arguable that Poe is purposefully making use of the social controversy to extend the ethically oriented dramatic irony in the textual undercurrent. Closely linked with the ironic covert progression as such, we have an implicit textual movement towards the narrator’s unwitting yet firm self-conviction:
True!–nervous–very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? … Hearken! and observe how healthily— how calmly I can tell you the whole story. (555, at the very beginning of his narration)
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! (555, at the start of narrating the murdering process)
It took me an hour [every night] 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? (555, when describing in detail his seven-night spying on the old man at midnight)
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. (558, italics added)
Many critics see these claims only in terms of the narrator’s madness itself. Alfred C. Ward says: “From the very first sentence his madness is apparent through his desperate insistence upon his sanity; and the preliminaries of his crime go to prove that madness” (1924: 36). Similarly, Marie Bonaparte observes, “Thus the narrator—whom Poe evidently wishes to show as mad, or, at least, the victim of the Imp of the Perverse—begins by denying his madness like the ‘logical’ lunatic he is” (1949: 491). E. Arthur Robinson also writes, “Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ consists of a monologue in which an accused murderer protests his sanity rather than his innocence. The point of view is the criminal’s but the tone is ironic in that his protestation of sanity produces an opposite effect upon the reader” (1965: 369). Robinson concludes that “since such processes of reasoning tend to convict the speaker of madness, it does not seem out of keeping that he is driven to confession by ‘hearing’ reverberations of the still-beating heart in the corpse he has dismembered, nor that he appears unaware of the irrationalities in his defense of rationality” (ibid.). Quoting the narrator’s “How, then, am I mad? Hearken! And observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story,” Daniel Hoffman comments: “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 portray 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” (1972: 222). In the same vein, Elizabeth Phillips (1979: 128–30) offers a detailed discussion of how the narrator-protagonist resembles the homicidal maniacs.
Some recent critics have paid attention to the cultural context of Poe’s tale, and they regard the narrator-protagonist as morally insane. One is Paige Matthey Bynum, who tries to show that “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” (1989: 141). Similarly, John Cleman observes, “Even the narrator’s insistent denial of the charge of insanity fits the pattern of symptoms of the homicidal maniac, so that the act of the tale’s telling and its self-defensive posture constitute evidence in a determination of partial insanity” (1991: 632). Another critic Brett Zimmerman, taking into account both the historical context of Poe’s time and the sociocultural context of contemporary time, argues that the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” not only is morally insane but also “corresponds with current psychoanalytic profiles of the ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ personality” (1992: 39). Zimmerman finds the narrator’s “vehement insistence” of his sanity, like his “brag[ging] and boast[ing]” of his “brilliant circumspection” and “finesse” in the murdering process, a most important source of irony in the tale. But he only sees it as the narrator’s “inflated opinion of himself,” which is “in keeping with the current view that a ‘common delusion among paranoid schizophrenics involves exaggerated grandiosity and self-importance’” (1992: 41). Along this line of thinking, Zimmerman argues that “Poe’s madman” confesses his crime “because he suffers from delusions of persecution,” a typical symptom of paranoid schizophrenia (1992: 44).
But in effect, Poe has subtly precluded the issue of moral insanity from this fictional world through the narrator’s insistent claim, directly or indirectly, that the loss of reason is the only criterion for determining sanity, a criterion the narrator shares with his narratee (“You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing…. would a madman have been so wise as this? … If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when …”). If we not only consider the historical context but also carefully examine the stylistic details, and, more importantly, open our minds to a textual undercurrent behind the plot development, we will discern that, while Poe subtly uses a structurally unified covert progression to turn the protagonist’s condemnation of the policemen into the protagonist’s unconscious self-condemnation, he likewise resorts to contextual relations to turn the narrator’s progressive “sanity defense” in the process of legal justice into the narrator’s unconscious yet firm self-conviction. Poe seems to make the protagonist’s unconscious self-condemnation and unconscious self-conviction reinforce each other in order to convey the implicit moral in a highly dramatic and ironic manner.
If Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” forms an explicit satire on the asylum reforms of the period, “The Tell-Tale Heart” functions as an implicit social satire, ridiculing the “insanity defense” through the unexpected, opposite, and ironic “sanity defense.” While greatly increasing the dramatic effects by depicting a murderer who appears to be partially insane, Poe, faced with the social controversy, uses the ironic “sanity defense” in order to convey the ethical lesson in question and to prevent readers from absolving the murderer of his guilt and treating him with compassion and pity.
It should have become clear that Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is marked by strong ethical concerns. A substantial part of the tale’s ethical import is aesthetically conveyed through a veiled double-layer movement towards the narrator-protagonist’s unconscious self-condemnation coupled with his unwitting self-conviction. This double-layer undercurrent rests with the narrator-protagonist’s multiple unreliability. Indeed, Poe’s ingenious use of unreliability may function to enrich our understanding of this narrative technique. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” we see multiple interplays between the unreliable and the reliable. First, the narrator is factually reliable in telling the narratee about his dissemblance and cunning, but is ethically unreliable in taking delight in his immoral behavior, a delight as conveyed by the same words. Second, the narrator-protagonist is interpretively and factually unreliable in interpreting and reporting the policemen to be dissembling, but is ethically reliable in deeming the “dissemblance” to be a villainous act, a reliability that is, however, undermined by the narrator-protagonist’s taking pride in his own dissemblance. These two kinds of unreliability join hands in contributing to the overall dramatic irony culminating in the narrator-protagonist’s self-condemnation. Third, the narrator is factually somewhat unreliable in claiming that he is sane since he displays notable features of insanity, and meanwhile he is factually somewhat reliable in making this claim since he retains enough rationality in calculatingly executing the murder, and his partially reliable claim ironically amounts to unwitting self-conviction, which justifies the legal arrest at the crucial dénouement. Poe makes the two aspects of the overall dramatic irony interact with and reinforce each other in order to convey, in a highly aesthetic way, ethical effects to readers.
Subtle and indirect as Poe’s techniques are, if we consciously search for a possible undercurrent behind the plot development and combine a careful structural-style analysis with extratextual (e.g. the historical insanity debate) and intertextual (e.g. “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”) considerations, we will be able to descry the ethically oriented overall dramatic irony based on the complex use of narratorial unreliability. In existing theoretical discussions of unreliability, attention has not yet been paid to the multiple interplay between the unreliable and the reliable, nor to the interaction between the unreliable and the reliable along the same axis, nor to the chaining interaction among three kinds of unreliability (e.g. misreporting arising from the misinterpretation of other people’s behavior, which in turn is associated with the misevaluation of one’s own behavior). The investigation of the covert progression in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” that is to say, may help broaden our perspective on the ingenuity and complexity of a literary writer’s use of narratorial unreliability.
Primarily because of the critical tradition to pay attention only to one textual movement in prose fiction, the ethical-aesthetic covert progression in “The Tell-Tale Heart” has eluded generations of critics. No matter how well we understand other significance or implications of the text, missing the double-layer covert progression will necessarily result in the loss of the most subtle part of the tale’s ethical import and the most ingenious aspect of the tale’s artistry. Like Hopkins’s underthought, Poe’s covert progression presents a great challenge to interpretation. But precisely because of the challenge, the process of uncovering it is marked by a particularly keen intellectual delight, an unexpected gain in ethical understanding, and an un-hoped-for increase in aesthetic appreciation. As we shall see in later chapters, the same holds for other covert progressions no matter in what unique way each moves aesthetically forward and no matter whether the undercurrent supplements or subverts the overt plot development in ethical significance.