Tell-Tale Heart: Madness And Passion, A Journey Within

Madness and Passion, a Journey Within Madness is an idea that has been widely explored and theorized throughout the ages, particularly within Shakespearean literature and other works along those lines. It is nearly impossible to establish a working definition for madness itself, because there are so many different forms of madness shown through out time, as well as different contexts. It breaks down to subjectivity, along with time and place, and situational circumstances. In Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” a perhaps unusual form of madness rears it’s head, the madness of passion, and how too much exertion on a single passion may in fact lead to madness. “Tell-Tale Heart” explores the idea of passion operating as a gateway for madness,
which is then followed by a state of delirium, yet the short story also conveys the idea that both passion and delirium must work, together in order for madness to develop within the individual.
Passion plays a fundamental role in the in the dark intoxication of madness.
Michel Foucault, author of Madness and Civilization, devotes an entire chapter to discussing this theory, he asserts that: “The distractions of our mind is the result of our blind surrender to our desires, our incapacity to control or to moderate our passions.” (85) He means that if individuals lose the ability to balance between their passionate desires, and regular activities, their mind will be overcome with desire and passion, thus leading them into madness. This theory is quite evident in “Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator seems to have an obsession with the old man’s eye, they describe it as a “vulture eye,” and the narrator even exclaims how they need to “kill the old man and close that eye forever!” (65) It is interesting that the narrator chose the eye as the primary reason as to why they found so much disdain and disgust for the old man; it is almost as if the passion became an obsession and the obsession consumed the narrator of the story. Passion acts as almost a bridge for madness to overcome the ability to reason, rather than passion in itself being the sole cause for madness. As stated by Foucault: “the determinism of the passions was nothing but a chance for madness to penetrate the world of reason; and that if unquestioned union of body and soul manifested man’s finitude in passion, it laid this same man open, at the same time, to the infinite movement that destroyed him.” (89)
Foucault is suggesting that the narrator’s passion for getting rid of the old man’s eye alone was not the sole reason for his or hers idea of killing him, but rather the manifested idea of obsessing and focusing on the only the old man’s eye, and subsequently letting it bother the narrator so much, served as an open gateway across the bridge of sanity, to the side of complete madness. Once the passion turns into pure obsession, it becomes nearly impossible for the individual to be deterred from their respective task, which in this case, was the narrators “task” to kill the old man, and his eye. Passion finds numerous ways to present itself within “Tell-Tale Heart.” The narrator find themself putting immense care and calculation into the murder of the old man, displaying a very morally twisted form of passion. In the story, the narrator describes how they “carefully hide the body,” and how they pay very close attention to small details in order to make it seem as though the body of the old man was never there to begin with. This is important because Foucault evaluates this behavior as a form of passion that continues after the madness has taken over the “body and spirit of the individual.” It is almost as if the narrator of “Tell-Tale Heart” was unaware that they became immersed within absolute chaos, chaos that rears its ugly head in the form of a passion so strong enough to the point where the brain completely ignores the morality of the situation. This scenario has been seen before in the William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” Macbeth is a man whose one true passion is the desire for power, so after being fueled with ambition from his wife and a prophecy bestowed upon him by three witches, he goes on a violent killing spree, murdering the king of Scotland to take the throne for himself, also murdering anyone who may stand in his way. The significance of this comparison lays in the mere fact that Macbeth, similar to the narrator of “Tell-Tale Heart,” confirms the Foucaultian ideology of Passion opening the door for madness if the passion is not balanced with other ideas that occupy the human mind, or if the passion presents itself in a morally wrong idea. Both Macbeth, and the narrator of “Tell-Tale Heart” find themselves being driven completely mad over the single focused idea of passion. Once the idea of passion opens the door of madness, delirium invites itself into the mind and tends to get comfortable, this principle is quite clear in “Tell-Tale Heart.” According to Foucault, delirium is described as a rather serious disturbance in the mental process that may result in confused thinking and reduced awareness of ones environment. Foucault also states that delirium is essentially the most integral part of madness when he states: “this remorse, this belief, this hallucination, these speeches, in short, this complex of convictions and images which constitutes a delirium.” (96) Although Foucault was referring to an example from Diemerbroek, a man who suffered from melancholia, it is clear that these same principles are applicable to the hallucinations and delusions the narrator experiences in “Tell-Tale Heart.” The heightened sense of hearing for instance shows that the narrator not only felt that he or she had a superior sense of hearing that allowed them to hear things the average human wouldn’t hear, such as a persons heartbeat form a distance, or people having a normal volume level conversation form afar, but it also shows that the narrator believed that this sense of hearing was true, rather than it being imagined, which it most likely was. As far as the “speeches” Foucault is referring to, it is apparent that the narrator experiences these as well, perhaps not in the traditional speaking to another person form, but more along the lines of giving the speeches within their own mind, which is even more indicative of the madness within the short story. “But why do you say I have lost control of my mind, why do you say that I am mad? Can you not see that I have full control of my mind? Is it not clear that I am not mad? (64) Just by that first quote alone, it is rather easy to determine that the narrator is experiencing delirium, they are talking to themselves, they are asserting that they are not mad, but rather suffering from an “illness,” and they do not understand that the thoughts they are experiencing are morally wrong. This is very clearly the essence of delirium that Foucault is exploring; the delirium induced by passion was the man that pushed the narrator of Tell-Tale Heart off the cliff of sanity, into the pit of madness. So it is quite evident that the misfortunes the narrator of Tell-Tale Heart experiences are passion and delirium, however, Foucault argues that passion and delirium work together as a type of team that induces this state of which he refers to as madness. “Many persons, not to say all, succumb to madness only from being to concerned about an object. Inside the image, confiscated by it, and incapable of escaping from it, madness is nonetheless more than imagination, forming an act of undetermined content, Foucault claims on page 94. (94) While this quote is rather long, it encapsulates the idea that madness begins with passion, and once the individual begins to take to much of an interests and a focus on a singular object, delirium ensues, and once the delirium takes over the mind, the door of madness is swung wide open, and it is seldom shut. In the case of “Tell-Tale Heart,” the singular object that the narrator began to develop and obsession for was the old man’s eye, and then the delirium followed as the narrator grew progressively more fixated and disgusted with the eye throughout the story. It appears that without delirium, passion itself might not even be a suitable avenue for which madness may roam, the two stigmas work closely to create a full-induced state of madness. Overall, the concepts of madness present in Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” are almost identical of several of the concepts found in Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, especially focusing on the idea that passion in too much of a high dose without balance, induces a state of delirium, which in turn causes one to go mad.
The narrator of “Tell-Tale Heart” displays this idea when they first begin to obsess over the old man’s eye, then they begin to hallucinate, falling into a delirious state of mind, and finally the narrator kills the old man, and without any sanity left attempts to hide the evidence. This form of madness persists in today’s society, as many artists grow so immersed and passionate about their work, it begins to consume them. What is perhaps most important to extrapolate from both Foucault and Poe, is the idea that balance is the key to a healthy lifestyle, while this concept is not directly stated in the text, it is implied strongly given the circumstance of what can happen when passion overcomes
reason.