SOURCE: "A Feminist Rereading of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart'," in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 24, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 283-300.

In the following essay, Rajan asserts that the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" is female, and contends that a new, gender-marked rereading of the tale, as filtered through theories of narrativity inspired by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Hélène Cixous, reveals "The narrator's exploration of her female situation in a particular feminist discourse. "

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Some contemporary feminists and theorists argue that there is a difference between masculinist and feminist discourse in literary texts. French theorists like Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous follow Jacques Lacan and psychoanalytic theory and trace the unconscious drives exhibited in the discourse of the text as repressed male/female desires. Even though these desires may be contradictory and conflicting, they reveal the position of the speaking subject (male or...