Do You Hear What I Hear? Stethoscopic Listening in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart"

Critics frequently call attention to the theme of "moral insanity" in Edgar Allan Poe's" The Tell-Tale Heart" without considering the broader implications of the narrator's "overacuteness of the senses." Rather than treating the character's acute hearing as symptomatic of mental imbalance, Kristie Schlauraff proposes that his mode of listening causes his unraveling. This article contextualizes the character's mental instability within nineteenth-century concerns regarding the predominance of rationality over emotion, a shift exemplified by the increasing authority of physicians over patients. The narrator's listening practice, Schlauraff argues, mimics a new technological and diagnostic intervention known as mediate auscultation, or stethoscopic listening, which distanced medical practitioners from their subjects by providing a way to access the intimate soundscape of their bodies and bypass narrative accounts of illness. Like a physician wielding a stethoscope, the narrator accesses two key soundscapes: the conventional sonic environment all the characters perceive, and the internal environment of the human body only the narrator discerns. His failure to navigate these competing soundscapes demonstrates the potential dangers of heightened hearing and the powerful influence of sound. As an allegory for stethoscopic listening, "The Tell-Tale Heart" offers a critique of the scientific community's growing emphasis on rationality and sensory observation to the detriment of such human characteristics as morality and empathy.