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

Style, Spring, 2001 by Brett Zimmerman

Poe's clever forensic rhetorician uses other devices to "soften up," to condition, his audience. The first and second paragraphs of "The Tell-Tale Heart" also involve a device used often by Poe's narrators: praeparatio (preparing an audience before telling them about something done). Several Poe tales begin with short essays on various themes, concepts, that will be illustrated by the following narrative accounts; thus, the narrators prepare the audience to understand the specific cases to follow by illuminating the theories first. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" commences with an essay on certain mental skills before we hear about their display by the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin. "The Premature Burial" starts with several illustrations of untimely interment before we hear about how the narrator himself was apparently buried alive. "The Imp of the Perverse" begins with a short dissertation on that destructive and irresistible human impulse before the narrator provides three examples of it and finally h is own case. I agree with Sandra Spanier (311), who quotes Eugene Kanjo with approval: "This essay-like introduction is not a failure of craft, as one critic contends, but a measure of Poe's craftiness" (41). This craftiness lies in Poe's use of the rhetorical tradition--here, in his employment of praeparatio. When used to preface a criminal confession, this device can make what would otherwise seem to be merely cold, hard, ugly, incriminating facts more understandable, even more acceptable--or, at least, less unacceptable. At the same time, most significantly, the forensic narrator combines the ethical appeal with the appeal to pathos (emotions): he attempts to enlist the sympathies of his hostile auditors by portraying himself as the real victim. He tries to weaken the charges against him by discoursing of his misfortunes, his difficulties: I loved the old man, but I was persecuted, hounded, harrassed, and haunted day and night by his wretched Evil Eye (Sharon Crowley says "a rhetor's ethos may be a source of good will if she [...] elaborates on her misfortunes or difficulties" [176]).

In his use of praeparatio, the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" differs from the Watson-like biographer of Dupin and the protagonists of "The Imp of the Perverse" and "The Premature Burial" in that he does not provide any general theories or other cases of his particular illness, but he does prepare us to understand it nevertheless. He wants us to recognize, first, that he suffers from overacute senses and, second, that the vulture eye of the old man, not hatred or greed (rather trite, uninteresting, normal motives), is what compelled him to commit his atrocity (here is also expeditio, if we can accept the term as meaning not just the rejection of all but one of various reasons why something should be done but also of why something was done). Also embedded within the larger trope, praeparatio, is aetiologia--giving a cause or reason for a result: "He had the eye of a vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees--very gradually--I made up my min d to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever" (5: 88). Here the narrator employs another topos frequent in forensic oratory: the topos of relationship and its sub-topic, cause and effect. The pathetic irony in all this, of course, is that the narrator really believes his aetiologia to be reasonable, comprehensible, easily justifiable.