In 2023, I wrote an essay for an American literature class that I’ve never been able to stop thinking about. The assignment was interdisciplinary: take a piece of literature from the course and cross-analyze it with another academic discipline. Philosophy, anthropology, biology—whatever critical lens you wanted to apply. I chose criminology. The text was Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.“

I argued that the narrator could be a woman, and that the reason most readers never consider this possibility has less to do with the text and more to do with what they believe women are capable of.

I won an award for it. That part still surprises me, though it probably shouldn’t. The essay wasn’t radical. It wasn’t even arguing that the narrator is a woman—just that the assumption of a male narrator is an assumption, and one worth examining. The text never identifies the narrator’s gender, not once. And yet nearly every reader, every classroom discussion, every film adaptation defaults to male. The question I kept circling was simple: why?

That was years ago. The point still stands.

The following essay does not intend to argue in the favor of a female narrator, but instead will demonstrate how the application of knowledge from female criminology may provide a different interpretation of the narrator’s gender.

— from the original essay

Here is what Poe actually gives us: a narrator who is unnamed, ungendered, and unreliable. A narrator who loved an old man, lived with or near him, entered his bedroom every morning to ask how he slept, and eventually murdered him in his bed in the middle of the night. A narrator who insists, from the very first line, that they are not mad—which, of course, is exactly what a mad person would say, but more importantly, it is what a person who has been called mad would say. There is a difference.

The narrator tells us they were “never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before [they] killed him.” The word kind implies a nurturing character. The act of murder implies something else entirely. Both things exist in the same sentence, in the same narrator, and neither one tells us whether that narrator is a man or a woman. The language is doing something more interesting than gendering itself—it is contradicting itself. Kindness and killing, tenderness and violence, all housed in one body. That body could belong to anyone.

If the reader can imagine a man breaking the male stereotype by acting with kindness, then the reader should also be able to imagine a woman breaking the female stereotype by acting with violence.

— from the original essay

But readers pick male, almost universally, and they do it fast. They do it before they’ve finished the first page. They do it, I’d argue, because the narrator kills someone, and killing is something we have decided belongs to men.

When I wrote the original essay, I leaned on criminology—specifically, on research into female offenders and the patterns that distinguish female-perpetrated violence from male-perpetrated violence. It wasn’t a reach. The patterns in the research matched the narrator’s behavior so closely that the real stretch was continuing to assume the narrator was male.

Consider the relationship between offender and victim. Research consistently shows that women who commit murder overwhelmingly target people they know intimately—relatives, partners, close acquaintances. One study cited by Koons-Witt and Schram, drawing on Greenfeld and Snell’s 1999 data, found that roughly 52.7 percent of victims in female-perpetrated murders had a direct personal connection to the offender—spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends—with an additional 31.9 percent described as close acquaintances. Male offenders, by contrast, were far more likely to target acquaintances or strangers, with 54.6 percent of their victims falling into the acquaintance category and 25.1 percent being strangers.

Now consider the narrator. The narrator tells us outright: “I loved the old man.” They enter his room every morning. They call him by name, in what Poe describes as “a hearty tone.” They inquire about how he slept. Whatever the exact nature of the relationship—family, caretaker, close companion—it is intimate, domestic, and personal. The narrator does not kill a stranger. The narrator kills someone they see every day, someone whose bedroom they can walk into without suspicion.

That pattern does not point exclusively to a male offender. If anything, it points the other way.

The narrator fits the general behavior of a female offender, in terms of the vulnerability of their victim.

— from the original essay

Then there is the method. This is where it gets harder for most readers to sit with, and that discomfort is part of the point.

Female offenders, the research tells us, are more likely to attack when a victim is in a vulnerable state—asleep, intoxicated, incapacitated. Bunch et al. note that women “prefer to attack a man who is asleep, drunk, handicapped, or somehow incapacitated” in order to compensate for physical difference. They may use a weapon or choose the moment carefully. The violence is not impulsive. It is calculated around the reality of the body doing the calculating.

The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” never considers attacking the old man during the day. Not once. They wait until he is asleep. They open his door with excruciating patience—it takes them an hour just to get their head through. They move in total darkness. They are not acting on impulse; they are acting on a plan they have rehearsed for seven nights in a row. When the old man finally wakes, startled, the narrator does not lose their advantage—the old man is still in his bed, in his own room, at night, disoriented. The environment itself is the weapon before any physical violence occurs.

This is not the behavior profile of a man who kills on impulse or in a confrontation. This is the behavior profile of someone who has thought very carefully about the fact that they might not win a direct fight.

I want to be clear about what I am and am not arguing, because the original essay was careful about this too, and I think the care is important. I am not saying the narrator is a woman. Poe didn’t say, and I don’t need to say either. What I am saying is that the automatic assumption of a male narrator reveals something about the reader, not the text. The text is ambiguous. The reader is not. The reader has already decided, before the first paragraph is over, that a person capable of this kind of violence must be a man. And that decision is not coming from the story. It is coming from somewhere older and deeper, from a set of beliefs about gender and violence that most people have never been asked to examine.

Traditional gender roles are binary in the way that locked doors are binary—they work perfectly well until someone picks the lock. Women are supposed to be polite, accommodating, nurturing. Men are supposed to be dominant, aggressive, harsh. The system insists that everything a woman is, a man cannot be, and vice versa. So, when a narrator is kind in the morning and a killer at night, the reader sorts those traits into the only two boxes available: the kindness is feminine, the killing is masculine, and since the killing is the louder act, the narrator must be male.

But this is a failure of imagination, not a failure of evidence. If a reader can accept that a violent male narrator is capable of tenderness—calling the old man by name, inquiring about his sleep, being “never kinder” than in the week before the murder—then the reader should also be able to accept that a nurturing female narrator is capable of violence. You cannot have one without the other. The stereotypes break in both directions, or they hold in both directions. You do not get to pick.

A woman who deliberately acts with violence is not accommodating. A woman who commits murder is not nurturing.

— from the original essay

There is another layer worth examining, and it’s the one that made the original essay feel less like a literary exercise and more like something that actually mattered. It has to do with who gets studied and who gets ignored.

Female criminology, as a field, barely existed before the 1970s. Koons-Witt and Schram point out that prior to that decade, “much of what was known about those who violated the law was the result of research involving exclusively male populations.” Women who committed crimes were not studied because, broadly, people did not believe women committed crimes—or if they did, it was assumed to be self-defense, or an aberration, or madness. The research wasn’t there because the interest wasn’t there, and the interest wasn’t there because the belief system didn’t allow for it. Women were victims. Men were perpetrators. The end.

This is not a historical footnote. This is a reading practice. The same framework that prevented scholars from studying female offenders for decades is the same framework that prevents readers from imagining a female narrator in a Poe story. It is the same impulse: women do not do this, therefore I will not consider the possibility that a woman did this. It is a refusal dressed up as common sense. And it is so deeply embedded in how we read that most people don’t even notice they’re doing it.

When a woman does commit a violent crime, she defies the role she’s been assigned, and that defiance carries consequences beyond the legal system. As Koons-Witt and Schram put it, “in committing crime, females violate their gender role expectations.” They are not studied the way male offenders are studied. They do not generate the same academic, institutional, or public interest as female victims. The woman-as-victim is a comprehensible figure. The woman-as-perpetrator is not. So, she is filed away, unexplored, and the gap in the research reinforces the gap in the imagination.

Because women defy their gender role expectations in committing crime, they do not generate the same responses from scholars, practitioners, and the public as women who have been victimized—they are not studied or researched.

— from the original essay

There’s one more thread from the original essay that I want to pull on here, because I think it’s the most interesting and the most uncomfortable.

The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” begins the story with a plea. They are “very, very dreadfully nervous.” They ask: “why will you say that I am mad?” This is not a person calmly recounting events. This is a person who has been accused of irrationality and is attempting, before the story even begins, to get out ahead of that accusation. They do not want to be dismissed. They want to be taken seriously. They want to prove, through the meticulous retelling of their plan, that they are not acting on emotion. They are rational. They are composed. They thought everything through.

This is significant regardless of the narrator’s gender, but it takes on a different texture if the narrator is a woman. The accusation of madness—of hysteria, of emotional irrationality—is not a gender-neutral charge. It has never been a gender-neutral charge. Women have been called hysterical for centuries, literally and clinically, for exhibiting emotions, for expressing anger, for insisting on things that made other people uncomfortable. The narrator’s desperate need to appear rational, to preemptively defend against the accusation of madness, reads differently when you allow for the possibility that the narrator has spent a lifetime having their rationality questioned on the basis of their gender.

The original essay noted that previous scholars had suggested “that female criminality was related to the dissatisfaction of women with their femininity and their attempts to become more masculine.” This framing is itself a product of the same system—it pathologizes a woman’s violence as a failure to be feminine rather than accepting it as something a woman is capable of—but it does point at something real about how the narrator behaves. The narrator is performing rationality. They are performing composure. They are overcorrecting against the very accusation they anticipate, and the overcorrection is part of what makes them sound unhinged. It is a condition of overcompensation: explanation after explanation, justification after justification, not because the narrator is confident in their sanity but because they expect no one to believe them.

If the narrator is a man, this is the monologue of a madman. If the narrator is a woman, this is something far more layered—the monologue of someone who knows that her anger, her violence, her capacity for harm will never be read as rational, no matter how carefully she explains it.

The narrator removes themselves from their femininity in order to avoid these remarks of emotion-based irrationality.

— from the original essay

I want to return to the fact that this started as a college assignment, because I think that context matters. I was twenty years old, sitting in a American literature class, and I was told to apply a lens. I picked up criminology because I was curious about it, and what I found was that the research—the data, the statistics, the patterns—aligned with the narrator’s behavior more closely than the assumption I’d been carrying since high school. I was not trying to make a provocative argument. I was trying to follow the evidence, and the evidence kept pointing toward a possibility that nobody had asked me to consider.

That’s the thing about assumptions. They feel like facts. The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a man—everyone knows that. Except Poe never said so. And when you look at the narrator’s relationship to the victim, the method of the murder, the circumstances of the attack, the desperate performance of rationality, and the preoccupation with not being called mad, you find a narrator who behaves more like a female offender than a male one. This is not conclusive or definitive, but enough to make the assumption worth questioning.

I won an award for asking the question. That was nice. But the real takeaway, the one I’ve carried with me since, is simpler than any academic argument: we read gender into violence before we read the text. We decide who is capable of what before we have the evidence. And we do it so automatically that it feels like reading, when really, it is something closer to refusal—a refusal to imagine that the person holding the knife could look different from what we expected.

While the narrator could very well be intended to be read in a masculine perspective, the text’s ambiguity creates a strong possibility for a feminine perspective; otherwise, Poe may as well have explicitly identified the narrator as a man.

— from the original essay

Poe left the narrator’s gender ambiguous. That ambiguity is not a flaw in the text. It’s a question the text is asking. And most readers never hear it, because they’ve already answered it for themselves.

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The original essay, “Qualifying the Female Narrator Through Studies in Criminology,” was written for an American literature course at Middle Tennessee State University. It received the William J. Connelly Writing Award upon completion. The arguments above draw from and expand on that work, with reference to Bunch et al.’s “The Psychology of Violent Female Offenders: A Sex-Role Perspective” (1983) and Koons-Witt and Schram’s “The Prevalence and Nature of Violent Offending by Females” (2003).