Why Will You Say That He Is Mad?

Why Will You Say That He Is Mad?: Re-examining "The Tell-Tale Heart"

Susan Amper, Bronx Community College, CUNY (Abstract)

From 1838 to 1844 Poe lived and worked in Philadelphia. "The Tell-Tale Heart" was written in Philadelphia at a time when the public was all abuzz about the issue of insanity as a defense against a charge of murder. Prior to 1835, insanity pleas had been entered only in the defense of idiots or raving maniacs. The situation changed beginning in 1835 with the publication of a book by James Cowles Prichard that popularized the notion of "moral insanity," a condition in which a person, while retaining his intellectual faculties, is nevertheless considered incapable of conducting himself with decency or propriety. The concept quickly became the focus of extensive political, social and theological debate, which filled thousands of pages of publications both serious and otherwise.

Nowhere was the controversy hotter than in the legal arena, where defenses on the grounds of "moral insanity" began leading to acquittals of violent criminals who seemed in perfect possession of their senses. Public suspicion of deception in such insanity pleas became widespread, and by 1840 trials featuring such defenses were major events, their proceedings splashed in detail across the front pages of the nation's daily newspapers. In the highly publicized trial of Singleton Mercer in Philadelphia in March, 1843, two months after Poe's story, "The Tell Tale Heart," appeared, the defense attorney himself acknowledged in his opening statement that the insanity defense had become "an object of ridicule," for having been used where no insanity existed. Poe's own knowledge and interest in the topic is beyond question: he actually reported on the case of James Wood (found not guilty of the murder of his daughter by reason of insanity) in Alexander's Weekly Messenger in April, 1840.

Philadelphia, then, and the happenings in the legal arena surely affected Poe's writing of "The Tell-Tale Heart." The story begins with a question: "Why will you say that I am mad?" Yet this question and the denial it implies have given modern readers little pause. Critical opinion is unanimous, and usually unhesitating, in pronouncing the narrator of the tale mad. On the contrary, there is much room for doubt, and I will argue that the narrator merely feigned madness to escape punishment. Such a reading finds strong support in the text, and the historical context corroborates such a reading.