Be Still My Tell-Tale Heart
I don’t quite know where my love for the goth aesthetic came from but my love for Edgar Allan Poe was probably the gloomy and riveting writing he did. The gothiness was a bonus. I think the Poe anthology I have was knicked from my high school library when I was 15. I used a quote from “A Dream Within a Dream” as my senior quote in the yearbook. My sister got me a Poe air freshner for my car (it creeped people out). My mom bought me a Poe-ka dot tote bag for Christmas one year. I’d love a Raven as a pet (probably for a day or two, though). Most people only know Poe’s “The Raven” and haven’t read any of his short stories. For a true-crime lover like me, short murder stories are where it's at and my darling Poe delivers.
Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short, sweet, and murdery story. A man is creeped out by his roommate’s cloudy eye, which he claims is like that of a vulture. He eventually decides to kill the roommate, (who, for the record, never did anything to the narrator) because of the eye. He loved the man but that eye had to go. Creeping around every night for a week and popping his head into the man’s room resulted in nothing — yet. He would only kill the man if he could see his eye, kind of like how serial killer Richard Chase wouldn’t enter a house if it was locked.
Night eight was the night. He slowly opened the door and heard his roommate stir, afraid of what was there. He heard what he claimed was the sound of the man’s heart beating, “such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton” (Poe). He heard the hearbeat louder and louder and become worried the neighbors would be able to hear it. His roommate shrieked as he leapt toward him. After smothering him with his own bed, he dismembered the corpse and hid him under the floor boards. No blood left over (yeah, okay) and all was clean.
The cops came not long after he finished and said a neighbor heard a shriek and suspected foul play. He let the cops in and so confident was he about his handiwork that he even let them into the murder room. But then he hears a “low, dull quick sound — much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton” and it gets louder and louder (Poe). Eventually it gets too loud and he is overwhelmed by the sound of what he believes to be the dead man’s heart. He confesses.
I loved this story. This guy is irrationaly creeped out by his roommate’s cloudy eye and just decides to kill him. He “spoke courageously to [the roommate]” and had “enthusiasm of [his] confidence” when speaking to police (Poe). He was sure he was going to get away with it, even before it happened. What I inferred from the story was that the killer was only ever hearing his own heartbeat. Obviously we can’t hear someone’s heart beating in their chest, at least not from another house so those fears were unfounded. A person’s heart stops beating once they’re dead and that roommate was “stone dead” and dismembered. He was hearing his own anxious heartbeat in his ears both before and after the murder. We have pulses near or in our ears and we can hear it going nutty when our heart starts racing or we’re relaxed and alone in silence. We can hear it loud and clear but no one else can.
He claimed he wasn’t a madman but one doesn’t kill because of a creepy cloudy eye. You have to be a madman to kill someone over something so petty and out of their control. You have to be a madman to assume your heartbeat is someone else’s. You have to be a madman to hear a man’s heartbeat after you killed him. Sorry, guy. You’re a madman.
Works Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Edgar Allan Poe Museum, 2019, www.poemuseum.org/the-tell-tale-heart.
