SOURCE: "'Moral Insanity' or Paranoid Schizophrenia: Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'," in Mosaic, Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 39-48.

In the following essay, Zimmerman demonstrates that Poe's narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" displays characteristic signs of what was in Poe's day classified broadly as "Moral insanity" and today diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. Zimmerman also makes the case that Poe's sophisticated insight into his character's psychology suggests the author did considerable research into his protagonist's condition using scientific texts and journals in order to lend accuracy and verisimilitude to his tale.

In our time, creative writers are expected to do their "homework," and consequently to find "Modern" scientific accuracy in a literary text comes as no surprise. To discover similar scientific accuracy in a text from an early period is a different matter—one which involves not only questions about the sophistication of the artist but also about the sophistication of...