Abstract
This essay re-examines Henry James’s complex relationship with Edgar Allan Poe by focusing on the echoes of one of Poe’s most celebrated tales, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), that later reverberate in James’s “The Aspern Papers” (1888). It highlights the similarities, both in mindset and behavior, between the two stories’ devious and deranged first-person narrators, whose actions result in the death of a fellow human being. It further discusses the narrators’ fear and refusal of their own mortality, which finds expression in their hostility, and barely contained revulsion against a man (in “The Tell-Tale Heart”) and a woman (in “The Aspern Papers”), whose principal defining traits are old age and physical decay.
Highlights
This essay re-examines Henry James’s complex relationship with Edgar Allan Poe by focusing on the echoes of one of Poe’s most celebrated tales, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), that later reverberate in James’s “The Aspern Papers” (1888)
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In A Small Boy, from the perspective of old age, James recalled with genuine fondness and deeply-felt gratitude the sheer delight he had experienced as a child while reading—or listening to his brother William’s reading of—Poe’s tales and poems, savoring the sound of every word
Summary
This essay re-examines Henry James’s complex relationship with Edgar Allan Poe by focusing on the echoes of one of Poe’s most celebrated tales, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), that later reverberate in James’s “The Aspern Papers” (1888). An additional link between Poe and “The Aspern Papers” might be found in the description of the—very old—Poe devotee Sarah Helen Whitman in Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Short Studies of American Authors (1879), a description that presented remarkable similarities to James’s portrayal of Juliana Bordereau.
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