“Observe How Healthily — How Calmly I Can Tell You the Whole Story”: Moral Insanity and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’

Abstract

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 the story by the narrator with no sense of reality other than what the narrator has to say”. This narrative technique forces the reader to identify with the narrator and to take the narrator’s values as his own (pp. 142–43n). What Saliba fails to realize is that no one can read a text without an external sense of reality; all audiences bring to a work of literature some frame of reference that exists outside the text. And for Poe’s audience in the 1840s, that frame of reference would have included a knowledge of a controversial new disease called ‘moral insanity’ and of the legal and philosophical dilemmas that surrounded its discovery. 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. Thus if we are to recover the meaning of the tale for Poe’s audience, an audience that applauded ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ at the same time that it shunned tales like ‘Ligeia’, ‘William Wilson’, and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ — indeed, if we are to assess the tale’s significance for today’s audience — we need to establish the medical history from which Poe drew.