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This essay locates Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" within gothic fiction's larger exploration of deviant sexuality. Trauma theory, clinical psychological research, and legal and medical history all help illuminate how the tale symbolically struggles to bear witness to a type of sexual trauma that still strongly resists articulation-male-on-male incest, and, more specifically, father-son incest.
Gothic horror's association with the unspeakable is nowhere more apparent than in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." The story's narrator himself cannot satisfactorily articulate his motivation for stalking and murdering an apparently kind old man. Because the "mad" narrator's explanation of his motive-"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"-begs to be analyzed in terms of its repressed and displaced meanings, the tale has been, over the course of more than 70 years, the subject of psychological readings that try to uncover motives for murder that the narrator cannot reveal (792). In this essay, I argue that these readings, while at times astute and even profound, ultimately fail to hear vital information that the narrator is trying to provide, information vital to understanding not only his motives, but also to Poe's challenges to the limits of the gothic genre's ability to represent sexual deviance and its effects. Recognizing how "The Tell-Tale Heart," through its sexual subtext, develops the gothic tradition also compels us to recognize this story as a quintessential example of Poe's use of layered allegory, which, as Brett Zimmerman has argued, he buries deeply in stories to camouflage perverse meanings that society cannot accept ("Allegoria" 11).
Among the many critical attempts to understand the murder in "The Tell-Tale Heart," a number of landmark essays argue that Poe offers an extreme dramatization of what are actually quite normative conflicts: whether sexual developmental conflict as theorized by Freud, as Marie Bonaparte argued in 1934; or social conflict as theorized by Lacan, as Robert Con Davis argued in 1984; or gender conflict, as Gita Rajan argued in 1988. By contrast, this essay argues that "The Tell-Tale Heart" dramatizes an attempt to bear witness to a traumatic event so difficult for narrator and readers to re-embody in language that it remains, to this day, excluded...