The Rape of the Lock 883split personality disorder: He clearly exhibits a Dr.
Jekyll/Mr. Hyde-type persona, with the extremes
of adoration and detestation cohabitating the same
body. This conflicting manifestation of his mental
illness comes to substitute for the usual motives of
murder (jealousy, greed, lust, and so on) and shape
both the protagonist’s and the antagonist’s destinies:
“Object there was none. Passion there was none. I
loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He
had never given me insult. For his gold I had no
desire. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this!”
The narrator’s delusional paranoia reaches its
climax after the murder, when the police officers
arrive to investigate complaints of “a shriek [which]
had been heard by a neighbor during the night;
suspicion of foul play had been aroused; information
had been lodged at the police office, and they (the
officers) had been deputed to search the premises.”
At first, he greets them with a suave boldness that
even he finds surprising: “In the enthusiasm of my
confidence, I brought chairs into the room, and
desired them here to rest from their fatigues, while I
myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph,
placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath
which reposed the corpse of the victim.” His audac-
ity, however, soon manifests itself. As the beating of
the tell-tale heart grows louder, the narrator sud-
denly becomes violent, lashing out at the officers in
an erratic fashion. The color drains from his face,
and he begins gasping for air, raving like a rabid
animal. Then, in a flash of insanity, the narrator
becomes overwhelmed by his paranoia, which leads
to his eventual self-incrimination: “They heard!—
they suspected!—they knew!—they were making
a mockery of my horror!—this I thought, and this
I think. But anything was better than this agony!
Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I
could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt
that I must scream or die!”
The irony of the final scene is that the narra-
tor’s mental psychoses, which compel him to waiver
between sane and insane, inevitably prove to be his
fatal flaw. Initially, the police officers do not intend
to arrest him—they are simply responding to a rou-
tine complaint. What they do not know, however, is
that the narrator’s deteriorating mental state, com-
bined with his personal guilt over the murder, have
taken over his ability to act like a rational individual.
His guise of sanity quickly disintegrates, and in the
end, he begs them to tear up the floorboards and
silence the beating of the old man’s heart.
When viewed through the thematic lens of “ill-
ness,” the surprise ending of “The Tell-Tale Heart”
becomes an exposition of the duality of human
nature (in this case manifested through the psycho-
pathology of the split personality). As Poe cunningly
illustrates, not only are human beings capable of
emotional extremes (for example, of good and evil),
but that in many individuals, they often coexist
within the same body.
Tanfer Emin TuncPoPE, aLExaNDEr The Rape of the
Lock (1712, 1714)
Alexander Pope’s neoclassical mock-epic poem The
Rape of the Lock was first published anonymously
in Lintot’s Miscellany in 1712. It was revised and
republished under the poet’s name as the expanded
five-canto version in 1714, which included the
supernatural Rosicrucian machinery featuring sylphs
and gnomes, guardian spirits of fashionable virgins.
As the “epistle dedicatory” attached to the second
edition makes clear, the poem’s plot and premise
center on a real historical quarrel between Catho-
lic families of high standing in early 18th-century
London, a quarrel precipitated by a British noble-
man’s apparently misguided flirtatious gesture. The
poem makes light of Lord Petre’s illicit snipping of
a lock of hair from the head of the celebrated beauty
Arabella Fermor and the protracted dispute between
their families that this act engenders.
Like all mock epics, which use epic conventions
to represent mundane or trivial subjects for comedic
effect, The Rape of the Lock makes abundant refer-
ence to the catalogue of epic poems that would have
been well-known to its 18th-century reader. The
poem opens, for instance, with a traditional epic
invocation of the muse, though the inspirational
figure called upon is a mere mortal, Pope’s friend
John Caryll, who asked Pope to compose the poem
in order to reconcile the warring Fermor and Petre
families. Moreover, the major events of the plot are
depicted as comparisons to famous epic battles (for