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,
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)
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