"The Tell-Tale Heart" and the "Evil Eye"

Author(s): B. D. Tucker
Source: The Southern Literary Journal , Spring, 1981, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring, 1981), pp.
92-98
Published by: University of North Carolina Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/20077666

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 "The Tell-Tale Heart"
and the "Evil Eye"
B. D. Tucker

Poe's tale, "The Tell-Tale Heart," is one of his most perfectly con
structed stories, and a very skillful study of madness. In such a tale it is
futile to look for logical motivation, but an author as acute as Poe
would, nevertheless, not choose a completely arbitrary point on which
the madman's rage would be focused. Yet the tale itself seems to give
no clue. The insane narrator specifically says: "Object there was none.
Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged
me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think
it was his eye!"1
What was it that caused the eye of the old man to become a fixa
tion, a monomania for the madman, just as Berenice's teeth has been
for Egaeus? Since we know hardly anything about the madman
himself, we are forced to ask why the author chose precisely this object
on which to fix the rage in the character of his creation.
Eyes obviously had a certain fascination for Poe, as we see in the

1 ' 'The Tell-Tale Heart, ' ' in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Thomas Ollive Mab
bot, Editor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), III, 792. Subsequent
volume and page references appear in the article.

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THE TELL-TALE HEART 93

long description of the eyes of Ligeia. According to John Ingram,

"Ligeia" was first suggested "by a dream in which a woman's eyes in
spired him with the intense emotions which he described in the fourth
paragraph of the tale."2 Marie Bonaparte states that "the eyes which
he saw in his dreams ... are those which, in the miniature of Eliza
beth Arnold, turn their strange wide gaze upon us and were to make
their adorer, Edgar, a fetishist of eyes."3
But there were other eyes: not those of a beautiful woman; not
those of his adored but forever lost mother, that fascinated Poe, not
with adoration but with fear and terror. In one of his earliest poems,
"Sonnet-To Science," Poe writes of the "peering eyes" of Science,
which is a vulture preying "upon the poet's heart"(I, 91). In "the
Tell-Tale Heart" the narrator tells us how he opened his lantern
slightly so that "a single dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot
from out the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye" (III, 794). He
also states that the old man "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 mind to take the
life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever" (III, 792).
Besides the vulture eye, Poe elsewhere gives us the horse's eye which
frightens young Metzengerstein, and?most fearful of all?the solitary
eye of "The Black Cat."
Superstitions about "the Evil Eye" are, as Mabbott notes (III, 789),
widespread, but it does not seem to be superstition that preys upon
the mind of the narrator. Although he does refer to it once as "his Evil
Eye, ' ' he does not seem to fear it or suppose that any evil will come to
him as a result of it. It seems to be hatred rather than fear that he feels.
The equating of "the Evil Eye" with "the evil T " of the narrator
has been noted by several critics and cannot have escaped Poe's atten
tion. Like William Wilson, the madman is killing his own dop
pelganger, and the further identification with his victim is found in
his feeling the old man's terror as if it were his own, and his fantasy
that he can actually hear the old man's heart in his own heartbeat.
Guilt is a major theme of the tale, and the attack on the objectification
of the self fits in well.

2 John H. Ingram, Edgar Allan Poe, His Life, Letters and Opinions (London: W.H.
Allen & Co., 1886), p. 126.
3 Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Inter
pretation, translated by John Rodker (London: The Hogarth Press, 1949), p. 130. (The
quotation from Ingram quoted above is also found in a note on this page.)

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 94 THE SOUTHERN LITERARYJOURNAL

It should be noted that Poe speaks only of a single eye. In

Griswold's edition there is the sentence, "One of his eyes resembled
that of a vulture," but in the original version in Lowell's Pioneer
(January, 1843), and in Poe's Broadway Journal (August 23, 1845),
this reads, "He had the eye of a vulture" (III, 792). 4 Now it is poetic
convention to speak of "the eye" when we mean "the eyes," and we
immediately recall, in this connection, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
"By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?" . . .
He holds him with his glittering eye?
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three-years' child
The Mariner hath his will.

Yet, while there is no suggestion that the ancient mariner had only
one eye, the reader is left with the impression that Poe's old man may
indeed have been a one-eyed specter.
When we search for one-eyed prototypes, the Cyclops comes at once
to mind, and the extinction of his one eye through the fearful deed of
Odysseus is, of course, a kind of parallel. But the resemblance between
the frail old man and the Homeric giant is too remote to make this
parallel very suggestive. One-eyed Odin is seen as a possible forerun
ner of the old-man by Marie Bonaparte and Daniel Hoffman,5 but
again there is little to make the connection between the two. For the
narrator, who says that he loved the old man, the vulture eye seems to
have an existence of its own apart from the old man.
There is another image of a single eye with which Poe must have
been familiar. It is on the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United
States, and is most frequently seen by Americans today on the one
dollar bill in current use. To many people it may seem to have a
strange, disturbing, surrealistic appearance.
William Barton of Philadelphia is given credit for this design which
was adopted in 1782. The face of the seal shows the familiar American
eagle displayed, in a rather fierce pose, facing left, so that only one eye

4 On page 791, Mabbott mistakenly gives the date in Broadway Journal as 1855, in
stead of 1845; presumably a misprint.
5 Bonaparte, op. cit., pp. 500-01; and Daniel Hoffman. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe
(New York: Anchor Press, 1973), p. 224.

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THE TELL-TALE HEART 95

is visible. (It does not look very much like a vulture.) It is rather the
reverse side which holds the attention with its mysterious design. A
truncated pyramid, consisting of thirteen courses of stone, represent
ing the thirteen original states, is surmounted by an eye, enclosed in a
triangle, surrounded by a glory proper. Above the design are the
words, " Annuit Coeptis" (He/She has approved our undertaking),
and below it "Novus Ordo Seclorum" (A new order of the ages).
The eye represents, of course, the watchful Eye of Providence, and
the triangle is a traditional symbol of the Triune God. What gives this
a rather disturbing appearance is that the eye is not merely a sym
bolical representation of heraldry, but an exceedingly realistic por
trayal of a real eye which seems to be looking out with a penetrating
and searching stare. One could imagine that for a mentally or emo
tionally unbalanced person this specter might be frightening, and
even terrifying, suggesting a vindictive and avenging judge or father,
from whom there is no escape.
The idea of an all-seeing eye, peering at one, even during one's
most secret moments, is indeed disturbing. Like the narrator of this
tale, Poe wished to be the seer, not the seen. If there were exhibitionist
tendencies, they were usually suppressed or disguised, although "the
Imp of the Perverse," which caused many of his characters to betray
themselves, as in this tale, may itself be thought of as a form of exhibi
tionism. There is something like the voyeur in Dupin, who boasted,
"with a low chuckling laugh, that most men, in respect to himself,
wore windows in their bosoms"(II, 521-74).
Certainly the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" shows himself a
voyeur and a secret listener, and his lantern with its lid and single ray it
itself a symbolic eye. But this voyeur-narrator did not wish to be seen
or heard in the dark, and he goes to insane lengths to conceal himself
from the old man, whose vulture eye, nevertheless, poses a threat. The
power of this orb is suggested in the extraordinary statement that ' ' no
human eye?not even his?could have detected any wrong." Granted
this is a negative statement, it still implies that the old man's eye had
exceptional penetration to discover secret sin; and note that this asser
tion is made after his corpse has been dismembered and all traces of
the crime removed.
Though no human eye could see the traces of the crime, there was
an eye which could. It was the Eye of God, depicted in strange and
disembodied aspect on the Great Seal, from whose all-judging
surveillance there is no escape. This thought would have been par

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96 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

ticularly distressing to the narrator and his secret ways. And if the im
age of the triangle enclosing the all-seeing eye had also come to his
mind, it also would have seemed to have had a mysterious and
threatening significance.
The number three had already been associated with a powerful eye
in the first verse of ' 'The Ancient Mariner, ' ' a poem which Poe echoed
repeatedly in "MS Found in a Bottle," and Arthur Gordon Pym, and
in the seemingly old man who tells the tale of " A Descent into the
Maelstrom." Three also plays an important part in "The Tell-Tale
Heart." It is about midnight when the narrator goes to the old man's
room. After the cry goes up,?"Who's there?"?he tells us, "for a
whole hour I did not move a muscle. ' ' At length ' 'The old man's hour
had come! With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into
the room. He shrieked once, once only ... .1 then smiled gaily, to
find the deed so far done." After the victim is dead and his heart has
ceased to beat, the narrator can finally say with relief, "His eye would
trouble me no more." Three planks are removed to conceal the dis
membered corpse, and all this must have taken about three hours, for
it was four o'clock when the three men knock and are admitted into
the house.
There is another story of three men who come to a place where an
old man dwells, in this case, Abraham?a story with which Poe must
have been familiar from his childhood. It is in Genesis 18.

And the LORD [Yahweh] appeared unto him

[Abraham] in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent
door in the heat of the day; And he lift up his eyes and
looked, and lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw
them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed
himself toward the ground, and said, My Lord, if now I
have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee,
from thy servant: Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched,
and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree: and
I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts;
after that ye shall pass on: for therefore are ye come to your
servant. And they said, So do, as thou hast said. (Genesis
18:1-5)
Now it is noteworthy that although three men appear suddenly
before Abraham, he addresses them in the singular ?"My Lord, if
now I have found favor in thy sight..." ?in one sentence, and then
in the plural in the next. Ancient scholars had several explanations for
this. The Masoretes, or Jewish scribes who compiled notes on the

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THE TELL-TALE HEART 97

sacred texts, generally concluded that the Lord appeared with two
angel guards. But at times all three speak at once, and if only one were
the Lord, the presumption of the other two would be as strange as the
idea of the Lord appearing in all three at once. It is true that in verse
22, "the men turned their faces from thence, and went toward
Sodom: but Abraham stood yet before the LORD," but it may be too
simple just to say that two men departed to reappear at Sodom as
"two angels" in 19:1, while Yahweh remained to argue with
Abraham about the impending destruction of "the cities of the
plain" (Genesis 18:23-33).
A few early Christians seized upon this text as a reference to the Ho
ly Trinity, but almost no biblical scholars would accept this today. In
stead it is most likely that there is here a conflation of two or more
sources, but the various strands are so closely woven that it is difficult
to separate them with certainty. In one version probably Yahweh ap
peared to Abraham alone, and in another it was three messengers (or
angels) from God, thus avoiding the anthropomorphism of which this
story is one of the most notable examples.6
It is highly doubtful, however, that Poe would have been aware of
all these possible interpretations, and it is more likely that he would
have remembered only the mysterious ambivalence of the one and the
three. Somehow Abraham recognized these three men as God and ad
dressed them as "My Lord." He then hastened into the tent to tell
Sarah, his wife, to make some cakes, and told his herdsmen to prepare
a calf for the feast.
AH these preparations must have taken considerable time for what
Abraham had called "a morsel of bread," but in the biblical narrative
the elapsed space seems but a moment. While the deity deigns to par
take of this mortal fare, Abraham stands respectfully to the side to
wait on them.
The men then ask, "Where is Sarah thy wife?" The reader suspects
that they knew very well where she was and everything else about her.
There then follows the prediction of Isaac's birth. The narrator tells us
parenthetically that Abraham and Sarah were "well stricken in age,"
and comments delicately that it had "ceased to be with Sarah after the
manner of women." Sarah had been listening within the tent and

6 See Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, translated by John H. Marks

(Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1961), pp. 198-210.

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98 THE SOUTHERN LITERARYJOURNAL

laughed within herself, thinking, "After I waxed old shall I have

pleasure, my lord being old also?"
And now Yahweh asks reprovingly why Sarah had laughed: "Is
anything too hard for the Lord?" Sarah, hiding in the darkness of the
tent, is dismayed at being found out and comes forth in confusion and
terror to try to deny the charge. But God is not deceived. He sees even
our secret thoughts, and sternly rebukes her.
All this may sound very remote from Poe's tale, but in dreams and
in the minds of mentally unbalanced persons very strange associations
are sometimes made. There are several similarities in Poe's tale to be
noted here: the three men who come and search out the secret fault;
the narrator's smiles and chuckles at his own cleverness; his certainty
that ' 'They heard! ? they suspected! ? they knew\ ' ' Despite his hav
ing, as he thought, destroyed the "Evil Eye" and having concealed all
the evidence of the crime, he cannot rid himself of the fear that these
three men know his secret deed, that their ears have heard the throb
bing heart, and that their eye has penetrated through the darkness of
the night to find him out.
When the narrator shines his single ray "precisely upon the damned
spot,"7 he "could see nothing else of the old man's face or person." Is
this not exactly the case of the mysterious eye within the triangle? And
is this not the eye which could not only peer within the darkness of
Abraham's tent and detect the hidden thought and derisive laugh of
Sarah, but could also see the secret sins of the night, synonymous with
the very names of Sodom and Gomorrah, upon which the fierce
destruction was soon to fall in fearful judgment?
The narrator at first imagined that the old man did not even
"dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea."
But in the end, in his madness, he imagines that the three men know,
hear, and see all, even the deepest secrets of his heart. And he almost
shrieks to himself: "Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God!
?no, no!" For it is his own heart, his tell-tale heart, his conscience,
which cannot hide from the all-seeing eye of God, which betrays him.

7 Poe could hardly have written these words without being conscious of Macbeth, V, 1,
38, where Lady Macbeth, in her mad sleep-walk, says, "Out, damned spot! out, I say!"
There are many parallels with Macbeth: Lady Macbeth's early confidence ("A little
water clears us of this deed. How easy it is then!" II, iii, 67-68); Macbeth's guilt in con
trast (II, iii, 60-64); the knocking at the door after the crime; the innocence of the vic
tim; the three witches; and the sleep-walk with a light and eyes open.

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