Frantic forensic oratory: Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2001 by Brett Zimmerman

I have no idea what Ezra Pound meant when he complained that Poe is "A dam'd bad rhetorician half the time" (qtd. in Hubbell 20). Perhaps he was referring to Poe's literary criticism, but what concerns me here is the rhetoric of one of Poe's murderous narrators, for John P. Hussey is certainly correct when he notes that "Poe created a series of rhetorical characters who try to persuade and guide their readers to particular ends" (37). Let us consider the protagonist of "The Tell-Tale Heart." It has been customary to see that tale as a confession, but it becomes clear that the narrator has already confessed to the murder of the old man who was his former living companion. The tale, then, is not so much a confession as a defense: "The Tell-Tale Heart" is actually a specimen of courtroom rhetoric--judicial, or forensic, oratory. This is not to say that he is necessarily arguing in a court of law; he may be speaking to his auditor(s) in a prison cell--but that he is telling his side of the story to someone (rath er than writing to himself in a journal) is clear by his use of the word "you"; and that he is speaking rather than writing is clear by his exhortation to "hearken" (listen) to what he has to say. The important point is that his spoken account is forensic insofar as that means a legal argument in self-defense. To this end, the narrator has a considerable grasp of the techniques of argument but, like a damned bad rhetorician, he fails in his rhetorical performance even while striving desperately to convince. That does not mean that Poe himself is a damned bad rhetorician, for what John McElroy says of "The Black Cat" is equally true of "The Tell-Tale Heart": the story has "two simultaneous perspectives: the narrative and the authorial" (103). The author, Poe, puts various rhetorical figures of speech and thought, as well as argumentative appeals, into his narrator's explanations of the horrible events he has initiated, and then Poe sits back with his perceptive readers to watch the narrator fall short in his a ttempts at persuasion. The result is an irony that alert readers detect and a conviction--on my part, anyway--that Poe is a better literary craftsman than even some of his critical champions have realized.

Poe and the Tradition of Rhetoric and Oratory: His Time and Place

We cannot say for sure with which rhetorical handbooks Poe was familiar, but that he was familiar with some is shown by a remark he makes in "The Rationale of Verse": "In our ordinary grammars and in our works on rhetoric or prosody in general, may be found occasional chapters, it is true, which have the heading, 'Versification,' but these are, in all instances, exceedingly meagre" (14: 211). To be more particular, scholars attempting to demonstrate a nineteenth-century writer's familiarity with the rhetorical tradition often begin with the eighteenth-century Scottish divine and professor of rhetoric, Hugh Blair, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres "went. through 130 British and American editions between 1783 and 1911" (Short 177n). Hussey shows no diffidence at all in insisting that Poe's art is grounded "in the specific injunctions of the [rhetorical] handbooks," Blair's in particular. For Eureka, specifically, Poe needed appropriate personae for his narrator and a rigidly structured pattern or m old, for which he turned to the "classical address, again as Blair describes it, with six major sections: the Introduction (Exordium), Proposition and Division, Narration, Reasoning or Arguments, the Pathetic, and the Conclusion (Peroration)" (41). Although these divisions are centuries old and as such did not originate in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Hussey makes a case for Poe's indebtedness to Blair by showing how the poet-cosmologist follows certain dicta expounded in the Lectures. Although he makes no attempt to prove his case, Donald B. Stauffer takes for granted that Poe took some of his ideas about style from Blair (454).

While Blair's rhetoric was most prevalent in Eastern colleges until 1828--in fact, "Until the middle of the nineteenth century it was one of the most widely used textbooks of rhetoric" (Thomas 204; see also Corbett 568)--other extant works were George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776), which achieved a circulation comparable to Blair's after 1830 (Thomas 204), Richard Whately's Elements of Rhetoric (1823), and Professor Samuel P. Newman's Practical System of Rhetoric (1827), which would go through more than sixty editions (Matthiessen 203n). Another well-circulating work was Alexander Jamieson's Grammar of Rhetoric and Polite Literature, first published in 1818 and "in its twenty-fourth American edition by 1844" (Short 178n). Other works known in American colleges include Charles Rollin's Belles Lettres, John Stirling's System of Rhetoric (1733), John Holmes's popular Art of Rhetoric Made Easy (1739), John Mason's Essay on Elocution and Pronunciation (1748), John Lawson's Lectures Concerning Oratory ( 1758), John Ward's influential System of Oratory (1759), James Burgh's Art of Speaking (1761), Thomas Sheridan's Lectures on Elocution (1762), Joseph Priestley's Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1777), John Walker's Elements of Elocution (1781), John Quincy Adams's two-volume Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (1810), and William Enfield's The Speaker (1826). Less widely circulated were contributions to the teaching of oratory and rhetoric by American college professors, including Princeton's John Witherspoon, "whose lectures on rhetoric, delivered at the New Jersey college from 1758 to 1794, were posthumously collected and printed"; then there is Lectures on Eloquence and Style, by Ebenezer Porter, holder of the Bartlett Professorship of Sacred Rhetoric at Andover Academy from 1813 to 1831 (Thomas 205). He also produced Analysis of the Principles of Rhetorical Delivery as Applied in Reading and Speaking (1827), "one of the most widely used college elocutionary texts before 1850" (Thomas 207n2).