The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe | Paige Matthey Bynum (essay date 1989)
Paige Matthey Bynum (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story': Moral Insanity and Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'," in Literature and Science as Modes of Expression, edited by Frederick Amrine, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989, pp. 141-52.
[In the following essay, Bynum asserts that Poe and his reading audience alike were familiar with the thencurrent debate about "Moral insanity" and points out that while readers of "The Tell-Tale Heart" are drawn into the mind of a deranged killer, they still identify with the terror of his victim because of their frame of reference outside the text.]
David 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...
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