This is precisely why a potential escape from death creates such an enticing end to this story.“After all the attacks and denigration, after all the emphasis on his dubious metaphysics or even more unfortunate personal pathology, we can still go to Poe’s fiction for illumination that writers of a more psychologically sophisticated era are oddly handicapped from providing.” (Shulman 245-262). Death as a concept has retained this aura of unease and inevitability (and certainly had it in Poe’s time). Worshipping a fertility god(dess) is one thing, but to devote time and thought to Hades, or Death, must have been seen as a bad omen in antiquity. It could be argued that the scarcity of descriptions stems from the negative conception of death as the end of natural life. Naturally, one wonders why that is death is, after all, an unavoidable fact of reality, a destiny to which all that is born and that lives must succumb to. Jung for the symbolization of the death drive, figures as a minor character in the breadth of the Greek mythos. Even Thanatos, who was later used by the psychiatrist and psyhoanalyst Carl G.

In Greek mythology, few (if any) descriptions exist of Hades' appearance as a humanoid god. Regardless of what one believes happens after death, it still marks the end of a life (or, at the very least, one form of said life). An occurrence rationally explained only by the narrator’s madness leaves open the possibility that something supernatural took place: it introduces the potential for rebirth.Īt the core of Poe’s tale is the common conception of death as a finality and an inevitability. Thus, it becomes difficult to truly decipher the final sentence of the story: “It is the beating of his hideous heart!” (Poe, 1966, 982). What is more, the borders between that which stems from a deranged psyche and that which is overtly fantastical (or Gothic) are erased.

Fisher (2002), a Duke University PhD alum who specializes in American and Victorian studies, points out, “ realized at the outset of his career that Gothicism was eminently compatible with psychological plausibility in literature” (78).

By telling the story from the perspective of a deluded man, Poe manages to build an atmosphere of uncertainty and dark gravity. An enchanting quality is ascribed to the heart which seems to hypnotize and force the narrator into the act of murder, but even after the act, “the murder, instead of freeing the narrator, is shown to heighten his agony and intensify his delusions” (Gargano, 1963, 179).

Tale of the heart