SOURCE: "Hawthorne's Transplanting and Transforming The Tell-Tale Heart'," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 23, No. 2, Autumn, 1995, pp. 231-41.
In the following excerpt, Kopley offers insights into the critical reception, principal themes, and structure of "The Tell-Tale Heart" as he argues that that Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poe's contemporary, used elements of the story in his novel The Scarlet Letter.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851) has long been recognized as having an affinity with Edgar Allan Poe's tale "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), especially with regard to setting and characters;1 a reader may therefore wonder if Hawthorne's preceding novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850), also possesses an affinity with a Poe tale. In an early review of The Scarlet Letter (April 1, 1850), George Ripley noted several parallels between Hawthorne and Poe: "The same terrible excitement . . . the same minuteness of finish—the same slow and fatal accumulation of details, the same exquisite coolness of coloring, while everything creeps forward with irresistible certainty to a soul-harrowing climax." Then he qualified his observation, nothing Hawthorne's softening of the supernatural. But while he quoted amply from The Scarlet Letter, he did not go on to identify a specific related Poe tale.2 Yet Ripley's general observation may be taken as encouragement for a search for a correspondence between The Scarlet Letter and a work of fiction by Poe. Such a search is rewarded, for evidence suggests that even as Hawthorne may have rebuilt the House of Usher for The House of the Seven Gables, he also transplanted "The Tell-Tale Heart" for The Scarlet Letter.
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