In comparing Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Tell-Tale
Heart," and Virginia Woolf's "A Haunted House," the mood of the stories is strikingly
different.
In Poe's tale of horror, "The Tell-Tale Heart,"
the narrator is insane, though he insists repeatedly that he is not. His insanity drives
him to murder the old man with the "Evil Eye" who lives with him, simply because he
feels the man's eye is a curse on him. The narrator then conceals the body beneath the
floor boards in the house. As his psychosis increases, he imagines he hears the beating
of the old man's heart. His madness finally takes over as the murderer reveals to
investigating police what he has done, as he cannot bear to listen to what he imagines
to be the beating of the dead man's heart.
By comparison,
Virginia Woolf's "A Haunted House" is a very different kind of tale. It is a ghost
story, but there is no horror here. In fact, if anything, the mood of the story revolves
around love. The house is haunted by a husband and wife who very much loved each other
in life. Now as they haunt the house where they lived, they open and close doors and
move things, but never harm the couple that lives there now. The ghosts are looking for
something, and as is the case with Poe's story, there is a "pulse," but this is the
house that is like a living thing, and the pulse quickens as they draw closer to
discovering what they seek.
By the end of the story, the
treasure they seek is the love they shared in life: to find it in someone else. As the
ghosts visit the narrator and her husband as they sleep, the narrator awakens, and in a
moment's time, she realizes that the treasure the dead couple seeks is what resides in
the hearts of the narrator and her husband: it is "the light in the
heart."
Whereas Poe's story is based on the insanity of a
murderer, Woolf's story is based upon loving ghosts who wish to find the love
they had shared, with others who have found that same treasure
themselves.
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