SOURCE: "Observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story': Moral Insanity and Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'," in Literature and Science as Modes of Expression, edited by Frederick Amrine, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989, pp. 141-52.

In the following essay, Bynum asserts that Poe and his reading audience alike were familiar with the thencurrent debate about "Moral insanity" and points out that while readers of "The Tell-Tale Heart" are drawn into the mind of a deranged killer, they still identify with the terror of his victim because of their frame of reference outside the text.

David R. Saliba has recently argued that Edgar Allan Poe's "structural omission of an objective viewpoint for the reader [in 'The Tell-Tale Heart'] forces the reader to experience the tale with no point of reference outside the framework of the story". "The reader", says Saliba, "is led through the story...