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Works Cited 15
Psychological Analysis of “The Tell-Tale Heart”
Introduction
Poe was a famous American writer. He was born in Boston and his parents died within two years after his birth. Then he was taken into the home of John Allan. But he had an unhappy relationship with his foster father. Although he became an editor of Southern Literary Messenger in 1833, he lost the position due to excessive drinking and an inability to meet deadlines. When he was 27 years old, he married his 13 year-old cousin Virginia Clemm. However, this only lover died in 1847. It made Poe so sad that two years later he died in miserable circumstances. Poe was extremely good at writing horror stories. He also wrote many detective stories during his life.
"The Tell-Tale Heart" was one of Poe’s most successful horror stories. Poe described a mad man in this fiction. This mad man has been upset with one old man’s owl eye for a long time. In order to get rid of the horrible eye forever, the mad man designed a murder and he committed this crime successfully. However, to the readers’ surprise, the protagonist betrayed himself at the end of the story and confessed his crime to the policemen due to the constant noise in his ears. The absurd ending caused our thinking about the story’s meaning.
Many famous scholars wrote papers about this fiction. The domestic research on “The Tell-Tale Heart” is mainly pided into three categories. The first class focuses on language. Some people analyze how Poe chose the form of the language to reflect the theme of the short story from the perspective of the three metafunctions of systemic functional grammar. The second class concentrates on the short story’s style. From these researches, we can know that Poe not only absorbed and inherited the Gothic romance but also changed the horror focus from the terrorist external description to the human beings’ inner worlds. This creation shows Poe’s challenge towards the traditional literature. The third category is the analysis of the short story’s theme with the use of literature theories. Some critics analyze “The Tell-Tale Heart” with the theory of existentialism. Others interpret the horror and death theme from the irrational point.
Study abroad about “The Tell-Tale Heart” is mainly pided into two categories.
The first class focuses on psychological aspects with conducting some experimental study. Joris H. Janssen mainly studies the relationship between the heartbeat frequency and the degree of emotional tension in “ ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’: Perceived Emotional Intensity of Heartbeats” and he conducts four experiments to explore the relationship(65). The second kind concentrates on the theme. Wagner, E J talks about the protagonist’s crime and punishment in “THE TELL-TALE MURDER”(61).
This paper is going to analyze the short story with Freud’s Psychoanalysis Theory. The paper is pided into three parts. The first chapter focuses on the analysis of the protagonist’s psychological world. The protagonist’s crime incentive will be analyzed from the angle of subconscious desire. The protagonist’s psychology will be explained with death drive. The protagonist’s ending will be interpreted with personality psychology. The second chapter mainly describes Poe’s inner world. Poe’s experience and his unique way of releasing death instinct will be shown in this part. Moreover, Poe’s thoughts about id, ego and superego will also be analyzed. Last but not least, the third chapter mainly tells the meaning of the paper.
Chapter One The Analysis of the Short story
This part analyzes the story from the protagonist’s crime incentives, psychology and the story’ending. The unreasonable crime incentive is explained from the aspect of subconscious desire. His psychology can be explored with death instinct. The absurd ending can be made reasonable to the readers from the perspective of personality psychology.