The Sound of Guilt: Embodied Memory and Auditory Hallucination in "The Tell-Tale Heart"

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) has long been read as a study of guilt: a murderer betrayed by a conscience he cannot silence. This study argues that the dominant guilt paradigm, in both its moral and psychoanalytic forms, leaves three formal features insufficiently explained: the narrator’s inability to locate the origin of his murderous intention, the heartbeat that appears before the murder is complete and before discovery is imminent, and the confession that produces disclosure without understanding. Drawing on literary trauma theory particularly Cathy Caruth’s account of the unassimilated event, Dominick LaCapra’s distinction between acting out and working through, Judith Herman’s account of traumatic memory, and Anne Whitehead’s theory of formal mimicry this paper offers a qualitative, theory-driven close reading of the tale as established in Thomas Ollive Mabbott’s edition. The analysis is organized around three categories: traumatic temporality, intrusive return, and failed testimony. It argues that Poe’s manipulation of time, auditory repetition, and narrative framing formally reproduces patterns associated with unassimilated experience more coherently than the conventional model of repressed guilt. Most significantly, the tale presents signs of disturbance that precede the narrated murder, withholding any representable origin and leaving only the formal structure of a belated and repetitive experience. The claim is therefore not that a fictional narrator can be clinically diagnosed, but that Poe’s narrative form is strikingly isomorphic with structures later theorized under the language of trauma.

Keywords: trauma theory; Edgar Allan Poe; “The Tell-Tale Heart”; Cathy Caruth; Dominick LaCapra; acting out; testimony; narrative temporality; repetition compulsion; American Gothic