The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe - Marie Bonaparte (essay date 1949)
Marie Bonaparte (essay date 1949)
SOURCE: "The Tell-Tale Heart," in The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, Imago Publishing Company, 1949, pp. 491-504.
[In the following excerpt, Bonaparte offers a Freudian reading of "The Tell-Tale Heart, " asserting that the old man in the story resembles Poe 's stepfather, on whom the author sought to enact his Oedipal revenge.]
"True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?" begins the hero of "The Tell-Tale Heart"1 who, like his fellows in "The Black Cat" and "The Imp of the Perverse," writes from behind prison bars, where his crime has consigned him.
"The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. 1 heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken!...
[The entire page is 6428 words long]
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