Edgar Allan Poe's ''The Tell-Tale Heart'' and Other Stories (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

221 Pages·2009·1 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Edgar Allan Poe’s
“The Tell-Tale Heart”
and Other Stories
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations:
“The Tell-Tale Heart” and Other Stories—New Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The tell-tale heart” and other stories / edited and with an
introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-388-2 (acid-free paper) 1. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849—
Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. Series.
PS2638.E39 2009
818’.309—dc22
2008054307
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Contributing editor: Pamela Loos
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Printed in the United States of America
IBT EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Grotesques and Arabesques 9
Daniel Hoffman
The Ironic Double in Poe’s
“The Cask of Amontillado” 31
Walter Stepp
A Feminist Rereading of
Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” 39
Gita Rajan
A Note on the Public and the Private
in Literature: The Literature of “Acting Out” 55
Henry Sussman
“Observe how healthily—how calmly
I can tell you the whole story”: Moral Insanity
and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” 69
Paige Matthey Bynum
Detective Fiction, Psychoanalysis,
and the Analytic Sublime 81
Shawn Rosenheim
vi Contents
Death and Its Moments:
The End of the Reader in History 105
Johann Pillai
Frantic Forensic Oratory:
Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” 143
Brett Zimmerman
House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe’s
“The Fall of the House of Usher” 159
John H. Timmerman
A Tale by Poe
Richard Kopley 173
Chronology 191
Contributors 195
Bibliography 197
Acknowledgments 201
Index 203
Editor’s Note
My notorious introduction brought upon me the wrath of the Poe Society,
but I admit that Poe is inescapable though a vicious stylist in all his work.
Critics however mostly delight in Poe, as do common readers, so I am
merely a voice in the wilderness. Daniel Hoffman generously admires all
the famous tales, while Walter Stepp studies the double in “The Cask of
Amontillado.”
A feminist reading of “The Tell-Tale Heart” is ventured by Gita Rajan,
after which Henry Sussman boldly gives us postmodernist Poe.
We return to the “moral insanity” of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Paige
Matthey Bynum, while Shawn Rosenheim shrewdly examines Poe as detec-
tive fiction.
Death and the reader are concerns for Johann Pillai, after which we
once more march onto “The Tell-Tale Heart” with Brett Zimmerman.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” is observed by John H. Timmerman,
while Richard Kopley then concludes this volume by interestingly tracing
“The Tell-Tale Heart”’s influence on Hawthorne.
vviiii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
I
Valéry, in a letter to Gide, asserted that “Poe is the only impeccable writer.
He was never mistaken.” If this judgment startles an American reader, it
is less remarkable than Baudelaire’s habit of making his morning prayers
to God and to Edgar Poe. If we add the devotion of Mallarmé to what he
called his master Poe’s “severe ideas,” then we have some sense of the scan-
dal of what might be called “French Poe,” perhaps as much a Gallic mystifi-
cation as “French Freud.” French Poe is less bizarre than French Freud, but
more puzzling, because its literary authority ought to be overwhelming, and
yet vanishes utterly when confronted by what Poe actually wrote. Here is
the second stanza of the impeccable writer’s celebrated lyric, “For Annie”:
Sadly, I know
I am shorn of my strength,
And no muscle I move
As I lie at full length—
But no matter!—I feel
I am better at length.
Though of a badness not to be believed, this is by no means unrepre-
sentative of Poe’s verse. Aldous Huxley charitably supposed that Baudelaire,
Mallarmé, and Valéry simply had no ear for English, and so just could not
hear Poe’s palpable vulgarity. Nothing even in Poe’s verse is so wickedly
1