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.

"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! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story."

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.

"It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night."

The nature of this obsessional thought will soon appear.

"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."

This strangely resembles the representation, by its opposite, of Poe's own relation to his foster-father, John Allan! But let us see the motive our narrator assigns for his deed.

"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."

This eye, filmed over, if only in part, permitting of dim or oblique vision, corresponds to an excised eye and so brings us back to the main motif in "The Black Cat." All in all, the old man must be killed for the same reason as the cats. Here, however, the murder is premeditated, as in "The Imp of the Perverse" where, again, the victim is the father; there, it was for gold but, here, to annihilate the filmed eye.

"You should have seen how wisely I proceeded—with what caution—with what foresight—with what dissimulation I went to work!"

For the father, indeed, is to be feared and needs a cautious approach!

"I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. 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. . . . I moved it slowly—very, 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. . . . 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 . . . 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 we see the son clearly outwitting the father in caution and astuteness! Even as we watch him enter the room, each morn, with friendly greeting, we seem to see the small Edgar as he visited his waking "Pa", calling him by "name" and asking had he "passed the night well?" For so children must often do, compelled as they are to be affectionate and behave, though recent punishments may inspire quite different feelings.

"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 bed, crying out—'Who's there?'."

Thus the adversaries are opposed; the eyes of the son, in the dark, being fixed on the menaced father.

"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."

The old man's increasing terror is then described and the tale continues:

"When I had waited a long time, very patiently, without hearing him lie down, I resolved to open a little—a very, very little crevice in the lantern . . . until, at length, a simple dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon 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."

We are not told whether it is with his good or clouded eye that the old man perceives the ray which shoots into the dark room, nor is it ever made clear exactly how much he sees with his "vulture eye". Whatever the case, the ray, thin as a spider's thread, striking the offending eye, is responsible for an amazing reaction:

". . . have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the senses?"

he says, almost as though a paranoiac justifying his auditory hallucinations—and, continuing;

". . . 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."

The murderer, however, restrains himself and remains motionless, his ray still fixed on that eye, while the "hellish tattoo" of the old man's heart goes on increasing. Meanwhile, his own terror rises to "uncontrollable" heights, as . . .

". . . 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 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."

The murderer then describes his "wise precautions" to conceal the body, as giving proof of his sound reason.

"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 blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all—ha! ha!"

Now, however, it is four a.m., and knocks are heard at the street door. "A shriek had been heard by a neighbour" and the police have appeared, to investigate.

The murderer, nevertheless, is wholly at ease. "The shriek," he said, was his own in a dream. "The old man . . . was absent in the country . . ." And now, worthy precursor of the murderer in "The Black Cat," (evidently written after "The Tell-Tale Heart"), he leads his visitors through the house and bids them search, and 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."

This anticipates the murderer in "The Black Cat," who raps on the cellar wall, both being reminiscent of those murderers who haunt the scene of their crime.

As might be expected, the victim, from the depths of his tomb, takes up the challenge. The statue on the Commander's tomb accepts the invitation of Don Juan and turns up at his feast. The walled-in cat shrieks out. And now the old man, whose heart beats so hellishly, also responds in his way.

'The officers were satisfied . . . They sat, and while I answered cheerily, they chatted of 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 . . . "

The ringing increases "—until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears". The auditory hallucination is thus re-established.

"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 now the poor wretch makes ever more desperate efforts to drown the increasing noise. In vain he paces heavily to and fro, or grates his chair on the boards: the sound

"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!"

Whereupon, possessed by this illusion and no longer able to bear their derision, the murderer cries:

"Villains! . . . dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks! here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!"

Such is "The Tell-Tale Heart," possibly the most shorn of trimmings of Poe's tales and thus, possibly, one that is nearest to our "Modern" taste. Among Poe's works, it stands like a faint precursor of that great parricidal epic which is Dostoievsky's² opus.

It has been said³ that the composition of "The Tell-Tale Heart," to which Poe refers in a letter dated December 1842,⁴ was doubtless stimulated by his severe heart attack, towards the summer of that year, after returning from Saratoga Springs. Possibly, it was this—according to Hervey Allen, Poe's third serious heart attack since the first, in 1834-35⁵—which furnished the adventitious cause for Poe's choice of just these anguished heart-beats to express the deep and buried complexes with which we shall now deal. The same device, also, was to serve him later, when his heart condition grew still worse, to express the weariness of living, in his poem "For Annie."⁶ This explanation, however, far from exhausts all that "The Tell-Tale Heart" reveals.

Actually, we know, difficult as it may be for our conscious mental processes to grasp, that the functions of organs are not represented, in the unconscious, in a manner proportionate to the vital importance of each. The heart-beat, for instance, is so vitally important that, if it stops, death ensues. One might, therefore, imagine that the heart's activity would be extensively reflected in the psyche. This is not, however, the case; the beating of the heart no more disturbs the unconscious than do the rhythmic movements of the thorax. Both belong to those vegetative activities of organic functions which ordinarily do not concern the psychic unconscious.

Should, however, some organic disturbance suddenly disturb one or other of these important organs—or a conversion neurosis of hysterical or hypochondriac origin—we are likely to find them become a main source of anxiety. When this happens, however, it is never due to the organ as such and its function, but to the libidinal charge which invests it. Such organs then represent, apart from their proper function, that of the whole organism's libidinal function, now largely "displaced" upon them. In psychoneurotic disturbances less severe than the complete narcissistic regression that determines hypochondria, the libidinally hyper-cathected and disturbed organ may even serve to express the subjects' object relations to other beings.

So with Poe's story of "The Tell-Tale Heart." As already noted, the murdered old man resembles John Allan in several ways, even to the symptom of the thudding heart. Did not his first attack of dropsy occur in England, in 1820: which illness, worsening with age, in 1834, ended his life? . . . His fear of the pounding heart in the murdered old man's breast thus, doubtless, directly derives from the oppressed, labouring and dropsical heart of the Scotch merchant. With that heart, as a result of buried complexes we shall study—and by that identification with the father habitual with sons—Poe later, and unconsciously, identified his own neurotic, alcoholic heart.

Yet the mere fact that John Allan suffered from dropsy does not account for the whole content of this anxietyfraught tale. To understand the deeper motives which inspire man to dream or artists to create, we must grasp, in their plenitude, all the primitive, vital instincts which throng the unconscious. . . .

[T]he child's sexual instincts awake much earlier than is deemed by adults. At an unbelievably early age, the child already possesses larval instinctual mechanisms which allow it to store up impressions of adult sex acts performed in its presence. That Poe, as a child, was present at such times, when sharing the room of his actress mother, the crime of the ape is almost certain testimony. For that very same crime, shrouded in London fog, those fogs among which Frances Allan acquired her mysterious illness, the "Man of the Crowd" is described as "Type and genius of deep crime." For, to the child, at a time when coitus seems purely sadistic, the sex attack on the mother is the prototype of all crime.

Even though, when the child is small, adults do not always conceal themselves in the sex act, a time comes when they protect themselves from its eyes by what they imagine the impenetrable barrier of dark, so vividly described in "The Tell-Tale Heart" as, "pitch"-like. This darkness is indeed the preferred setting for the coitus of civilised man, as though it were something disapproved by society.

Nevertheless, alert as they are, the child's sex instincts continue to perceive and record, though in the dark. What it saw earlier may contribute to this but, even without sight, hearing would suffice. For, in effect, coitus has its own sounds, rhythmic movements and precipitate breath, combined with an accelerated heart beat. And even though these heart-beats may be imperceptible from a distance, the panting which accompanies them and characterises the sex-act, is strangely audible to infant ears, straining to every sound in the still darkness.

Thus, it need not surprise us to find, in "The Tell-Tale Heart," reference to an almost supernatural acuteness of hearing. Doubtless, we have here the unconscious memory of nocturnal eavesdroppings when, in the night, "hellish" things were heard by the child:⁷ in other words, the father's sex attack on the mother. Similar unconscious memories are found at the root of many auditory hallucinations of paranoia.

The old man's heart-beat, that "hellish tattoo" which grew "quicker and quicker, and louder and louder", would thus be the heart's fanfare for the sex act: its assault on the woman and supremest pleasure. Whence, doubtless, in the tale, the furious crescendo of the heart-beats, twice repeated, which culminate first in the old man's death and, next, in the murderer's seizure and eventual death also. Thus, the talion law is satisfied twice; first by punishment of the mother's murderer and, then, by punishment of the slayer of that murderer.

In the last analysis, therefore, it is the Man of the Crowd—in this tale lying in the old man's bed—who thus receives just punishment. In the same way that, in neurotic symptoms, the repressed material finally emerges from the repressing process itself so, here, the sign of the crime, the clamouring heart in the sex act, reappears in this retributive punishment of the heart that thuds with the anguish of death.

Also, it is under the bed, in which his crime—the sex attack—was enacted, that the old man is stifled to death. Thus, the instrument of his crime, becomes that of his destruction.

The darkness again, black as pitch, where the old man—or the beating heart—sleeps, into which the hero spies and which is pierced by his lantern beam must, evidently, be interpreted as an echo of the intensity with which the child once wished to see through the dark. I knew a young man, whose memories of spying on his parent's sex acts reappeared, in analysis, in the shape of a dream where he saw himself, as a child, observing them through the diaphragm of his camera lens instead of eyes. Photography was very young in Poe's time and here, in "The Tell-Tale Heart," the lantern, instead, symbolises viewing. We know, in primitive concepts of vision, that it is not the illuminated object which sends rays to the eye, but the eye which projects its rays on the object. This primitive concept reappears here, implicit in this way of viewing through darkness by half-opening a lantern shutter as though an eyelid. Juxtaposing this element in the tale with its main motif, the heart-beat, we get some idea how much yearning, both visual and aural, must have remained in the child Poe, all through his life with the Allans, to go on responding to the sex-scene as he once knew it with his mother.

Nevertheless, our tale gives quite another reason why this father-figure must be destroyed by the son-figure. The narrator declares that he "loves the old man", who never had "wronged" him or "given him insult" while, as for his "gold", for that he had no desire: all which, in fact, represent the opposites, as we showed, of Edgar's relation to his "Pa", John Allan.⁸ There is a certain hyprocrisy here and this tale, in which we might expect the son's ambivalence to the father to appear is, primarily, a tale of hate. The reason alleged, however, for this hate, is remarkable: the old man is hated for his eye.

"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."

We shall not presume to affirm that, in this mention of the vulture, there is an incontestable allusion to the mother, though the vulture was a classic mother symbol of the Ancient Egyptians and though we find it, later, in the vulture phantasy of the child Leonardo da Vinci.⁹ But, what cannot be denied, is that the old man's eye establishes a direct connection with the eyes of the mother totem cats in "The Black Cat." True, a film over the eye does not invariably imply a total loss of vision but, in general it does or, at least, suggests it. In other words, like Wotan in Germanic mythology, the father in "The Tell-Tale Heart" is represented as blind in one eye, which is equivalent to being castrated.¹⁰

Clearly also, castrated for his crimes! For, as regards the mother, the father was indeed the prototype of all crime, as to the son. Was it not he who kept the son from the mother by wielding the threat of castration? Here, however, lies the rub! For, if it is the mother who, by her body, manifests to the son that the dread possibility of deprivation of the penis exists, in the last analysis it is the father—by whom or in whose interests the Œdipal prohibitions were instituted—who, from remotest time and the depths of the unconscious, threatens to castrate the son for his guilty desires. It is because the father has committed this crime against the son, that the latter repays him by castration in retribution of the crime for which the son would have been castrated; that of possessing the mother. Thus Zeus, when grown, castrated his father Kronos who, himself, had castrated Uranos, his father.

These are the two great, eternally human themes which underlie Poe's tale and confer such sovereign power on it. The two prime complexes, through which all humanity and every child must pass, are its marrow and substance. Here, the son's Œdipus wish for his father's death becomes effective; the father is struck down for the crime of possessing the mother and for inventing the curse of castration, first as a threat to the son, but more for effecting it. For it is the father whom the son generally considers responsible for the woman's castration, when he discovers she lacks the penis. Secure in memories of the parents' coitus, the child imagines that though the mother did not succumb to the father's sadistic attacks, nevertheless it cost her a wound which, like Amfortas's hurt, would go on eternally bleeding. The menstruation, of which the child, sooner or later, becomes aware, is the proof. Thus, for the great crime of bringing castration into the world when, without it, all created beings would be whole and entire, each of the parents, in his or her way, is responsible; the mother for having undergone the castration and the father for having inflicted it. That is why both must be punished. The cats are hanged or immured and the old man is stifled under his mattress. Both flaunt the emblem of their common crime: the cats have a gouged-out eye and the old man's eye has a film over it.

Here it seems pertinent to ask whether the old man in "The Tell-Tale Heart" is, in fact, blind in that eye? Poe does not say: he even seems to imply that, in spite of its covering film, it still retains sight for, as he says at the start of the tale: "Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold". Later, after the murder, when the dismembered body is buried under the floor, he once more tells us: "no human eye—not even his—could have detected any thing wrong". Thus, extreme acuity of vision is now attributed to that eye. There is some contradiction here for, if in Poe's unconscious the eye, though filmed, retained its vision, nevertheless it continued a blind eye, as in the Norse myth of Father Wotan.

We know, however, that contradictions in the manifest content of dreams or myths represent other, perfectly coherent thoughts, in the latent content. This contradiction then, as regards the eye, an eye that can see so well in spite of its blindness, must derive from the fact that, in this story, the father receives punishment for two distinct crimes; first, that of coitus with the mother and second, for its result, which led to castration, as the mother reveals. Yet, to effect castration, a weapon was needed and this was the penis, so that, to enact his deed, the father must still possess the penis, though he will later be punished by castration for it. The old man's eye that sees and is sightless would, thus, in this apparent contradiction, condense two successive aspects of the criminal father; first, when with his weapon the crime is committed and, then, when as punishment that weapon is cut off.¹¹

There is a somewhat earlier tale by Poe where the father-castration motif appears far purer and death is not concomitant with castration. In "The Man that was Used Up,"¹² Brigadier John A. B. C. Smith, in full possession of his strength and faculties, while engaged in a more than epic campaign against the savage Kickapoos and Bugaboos, is captured and submitted to almost every kind of mutilation. The narrator, meeting the general at a social gathering, is at first dazzled by his fine presence, beautiful voice and assured manner. The general, in particular, passes for a very lion with women. Nevertheless, it is whispered that some mystery surrounds him, the nature of which the narrator cannot discover. At his wits' ends, he seeks the truth at its source and, one fine morning, calls on our hero. Though the general is at his toilet, the visitor is shown in. As he enters, he stumbles over a nondescript bundle which emits the ghost of a voice. It is the general, in the state to which he is reduced when without the artificial limbs, organs and muscles, prodigies of modern invention, which remedy his many mutilations. The cardinal mutilation, however, is not mentioned, but we may well imagine it included, for the Kickapoos and Bugaboos who so generously relieved him of leg, arm, shoulders, pectoral muscles, scalp, teeth, eye, palate and seven-eights tongue, would surely not have left him the penis! The castration of prisoners, moreover, holds high place among tribes quite as savage as were the Kickapoos and Bugaboos!

Though the murderer in "The Tell-Tale Heart" also mutilated his victim by removing head, arms and legs before depositing him under the floor, what he "castrated" was but a corpse whereas the treatment to which General Smith is subjected is castration, in its pure symbolic form, and does not include death. For, though the castration motif (deprivation of the penis), is related to that of death (deprivation of existence), the two are not identical as this tale of "The Man That Was Used Up" shows.

Moreover, in this tale, we find echoes of Poe's army life and a time when his military superiors stood, for him, in the place of the Father he had left, in fleeing from John Allan.

Before we close this study of "The Tell-Tale Heart," let us seek to discern those features of the murdered old man, which would relate him to the child Edgar's successive fathers.

Poe's unconscious memories, as we saw, of the parents' coitus, dated from the time when, as an infant, he shared his mother's room on her tours with Mr. Placide. At that time his father was David Poe whom, doubtless, a lover was soon to replace, . . . Probably it was this lover from whom, primarily, derived the motif of the increasingly violent heartbeats. And the fact that, at last, when the man with the lantern bursts into the old man's room, he reveals himself by yelling and opening his lantern—slips which imply the wish to be revealed—may well re-echo another frequent occurrence; namely when the childish, jealous eavesdropper, with his cries or need to urinate, sought to interrupt the parents' intercourse because of the excitement communicated, or for other reasons.

All these impressions however, so precociously stored up, after Edgar's adoption were transferred en bloc to John Allan, a far more imposing father whose harshness laid an indelible mark on the growing child. It was certainly in this respectable, middle-class household, that the repression of his precociously early sexuality was forced upon Poe. This was the time when he was scourged by the castration-complex, whence our morality derives. Thus, the old man's film-clouded, vulture-like eye belongs, in fact, to John Allan. It was on him that the full force of the child's (Edipal rage and resentment must have been concentrated, given the fact that, dour and forbidding, he stood in the father's position to Poe, in addition to owning and, martyrising, his new mother. To us, the old man's heart-beats appear, at least, triply determined. If, firstly they represent the panting of coitus, overheard in the dark of fortuitous lodgings during his mother's life, its cardiac transposition must be determined by memories of the heart attacks experienced by his dropsical father John Allan which again, in reality, were echoed by the neurotic, alcoholic, heart of the son Edgar. Yet, these hearts ail because they are guilty of one and the same sin; that of desiring the mother. Their disease, like their precipitate heartbeats, to Poe's unconscious, expresses both the crime and the punishment.

The compulsion of the man with the lantern to open the old man's door, night after night, that he may watch him asleep and alone, in bed, surely also re-echoes some precise reminiscence of Poe's, as a child. And indeed, it is unlikely that John Allan, who disliked his wife's love of the orphan, would have permitted him to sleep in their room, even if ill, to please her. Besides, the Allans had a large comfortable house and slaves. It was to one of these, his black "Mammy", that Edgar would be entrusted and, with her, he would have slept.¹³

Perhaps through this negress, in "pitch"-black nights, nights as dark as her skin, the listening child may have reexperienced its responses to the parents' coitus,—which he could only hear in the dark—as the man with the lantern listens to the old man's heart. Nevertheless, the libido of this child, as Poe's life and tales both testify—for in neither do negresses play any part—was by then fixated on his foster mother, as white and pretty as his own, in accordance with the classic mechanism of the compulsion to repetition. It was on her room that, falling asleep, his childish desires must have converged at night, because he so loved and desired her, and because of his jealousy, too; all his yearning, in fact, to see what another was doing there.

That "other" was John Allan, whom the child would certainly suspect as guilty of similar attacks to those he remembered made on his mother. When the man with the lantern, night after night, feels urged to go and spy on the old man's bedroom, he doubtless only enacts what the child, kept by his nurse in his crib was, in his helplessness, prevented from doing. Though the image of the mother is here suppressed, as in "The Man of the Crowd," it is nevertheless for her, that the father has one eye blinded and then is killed.

It is the old man's death that is at stake in this Œdipal battle, where the mother is the prize. But the mother is eliminated from the story, and the old man appears alone in bed, as the small Edgar would doubtless have wished John Allan always to be. Apparently, the old man's solitary sleep re-echoes one of the phantasy-wishes of the small Edgar.

Yet, though the old man sleeps alone, his heart beats in Crescendos. Thus, he condenses in one being both the negation and affirmation of the father's coital activity, in the same way that his eye suggests both the presence and absence of the penis. Such modes of representation are natural to the unconscious, in which opposites exist side by side. Though conscious logic disapprove they, none the less, continue buried in our depths, as the dreams of the normal and the neurotic testify, as well as the myths to which humanity has given birth.

Notes

¹ "The Tell-Tale Heart": The Pioneer, January, 1843; Broadway Journal, II, 7.

² FREUD: Dostoevsky and Parricide. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1945, 1-8: Dostojewski und die Vatertötung, 1928. Ges. Werke, Band XIV.

³ Hervey Allen, Israfel (New York, 1927), p. 567.

⁴ Lowell to Poe, Boston, December 17, 1842. (Virginia Edition, Vol. 17, p. 125.)

⁵Israfel, p. 540.

⁶ The moaning and groaning, The sighing and sobbing, Are quieted now, With that horrible throbbing At heart:—ah that horrible, Horrible throbbing! (Cf. pages 180-3.)

⁷ Cf. Henri Barbusse, l'Enfer, (Paris, Librairie Mondiale, 1908) where sexuality in general is equated with "hell".

⁸ Similarly, in "Thou Art the Man," ( Godey's Lady's Book, November, 1844), the poor hack-writer, so appropriately named Mr. Pennifeather, is as innocent as the new-born babe of the murder of his rich uncle, Mr. Shuttleworthy, whose heir he is. Only a double of the latter, a rogue ironically called Old Charley Good-fellow, who likewise belongs to the series of "Fathers", or hypocritical John Allans, could have been capable of so heinous a deed! Goodfellow succeeds in having the innocent nephew arrested and condemned to the gallows but, by a device typically Poe's, (the corpse of the victim rises to denounce his murderer from a case of wine), he is exposed and brought to justice. The murderer falls dead, while Pennifeather, released from prison, in all innocence enjoys the murdered man's fortune.

⁹ FREUD: Leonardo da Vinci: A Psycho-Sexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence. Op. cit. page 382, note 4.

¹⁰ The Encyclopœdia Britannica, article Odin, tells us that, among ancient peoples, prisoners taken in war were often sacrificed to the "one-eyed old man". "The commonest method of sacrifice was by hanging the victim on a tree; and in the poem, "Hávamál," the god himself is represented as sacrificed in this way." There must be something more than coincidence in the fact that Wotan, the castrated father, should be hanged or, in other words, have his penis mockingly restored, in the same way as the Black Cat, a one-eyed monster like Wotan.

¹¹ Yet another contradiction may be noted. The sound of the old man's heartbeats is likened to the ticking of a watch: a watch "enveloped in cotton", even. Now watches or the ticking of a watch (in contrast, as we shall see, with the imposing swing of a clock pendulum) are classic symbols, in the unconscious, for the female organ and the throbbings, in sexual excitement, of the tiny clitoris it conceals. Before the old man's heart-beats have swollen to the "hellish tattoo" of truly virile character, they thus begin to beat twice, muted as it were, and in feminine fashion. We therefore may have here another instance of a dualism similar to that of the film-covered eye which both sees and does not see or, in other words, which is at the same time ultra-virile and castrated.

¹² "The Man that was Used Up. A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign": Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, August 1839; 1840; 1843; Broadway Journal, II, 5.

¹³ Cf. Israfel, p. 61, for a reference to this "Mammy".