The Pychotic Behavior in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Munro’s “The Vandals”
"The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843) written by Edgar Allan Poe, and "The Vandals" (1994) written by Alice Munro are two gothic short stories which deal with inexplicable, psychotic behaviours. In the first story, "The Tell-Tale Heart", an insane man kills and dismembers an old man for no sane, explainable reason. In "The Vandals" a young womans childhood is catapulted into the future, where the reader is left in the dark about the reasoning for her outrageous behavior. From the paranoid, intense tone in " The Tell Tale Heart", to the more sedate, mundane tone of the "Vandals" we can see that "gothic" behaviors and elements exist in both stories, yet each represents a different point in the development of the genre.
Pychotic behaviours exist in both stories. In "The Tell Tale Heart", where the pychotic behaviours are more profound and noticeable, to the internal pychological difficulties experienced by Liza in the "Vandals". The reader can immediately detect that the narrator in "The Tell Tale Heart" is insane, as he attempts to convince the audience otherwise:
True!-- nervous--very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses-- not destroyed-- not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily-- how calmly I can tell you the whole story. (Poe 19)
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The narrator is aware of his pychological problems, and his attempts to convince the reader otherwise just confirms our asumptions. Even his illogical reasoning for the death of the old man gives the audience insight to how insane this man really is. He even admitted to loving the old man, yet the fact that "he had the eye of a vulture" (Poe 19) drove him mad. He wanted to "rid [himself] of the eye forever". (Poe 19) To kill someone that has never wronged you just because of a simple cataract proves how irrational and crazy this man really was. There is no doubt that he is not intelligent, as he did go about the murder with precise caution, yet just the excuse for the murder is enough to detect his profound psychological disorder. On the other the psychological problems encountered by Liza are not as detectable. She undergoes a dramatic, scarring event which affects her entire life:
Liza's face was trembling with her need to laugh. Part of her wanted to make Ladner stop, to stop at once, before the damage was done, and part of her longed for that very damage, the damage Ladner could do, the ripping open, the final delight of it. (Munro 288)
The audience eventually realizes that Liza was malested, and her irrational outburst in Ladners' home was then understood. This event scarred her for life, and resulted in the psychic death of her innocence. She had attempted to deal with it alone, which drove her to completely destroy Ladner and Bea's home. The rage had accumulated throughout her life, and her way to finally deal with it, was to in some way affect his life harshly aswell.
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The Pychotic Behavior in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Munro’s “The Vandals”. (2023, May 30). Retrieved from https://phdessay.com/the-pychotic-behavior-in-poes-the-tell-tale-heart-and-munros-the-vandals/
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