Understanding Grotesquery In Poe's Short Fictions

Edgar Allan Poe is regarded as a point bridging romanticism and modernity, the rational and the irrational, the popular culture and the avant-garde. His short stories demonstrate a constant interest in the use of the grotesque. This thesis analyzes some of the manifestations of grotesquery in Poe's short fictions, in order to help facilitate understanding.Chapter One briefly introduces Poe's short story writing. Chapter Two examines the first group of Poe's grotesque narratives in which mysterious confrontations take place within the selfhood of the same protagonists. Using Freudian theories of the ego as my theoretical framework, I note that the opposition is produced by the reversed relationship between the two primary elements of the ego--- the conscious and the unconscious and that the upside-down ego causes the split of what is normally taken as the "self.Chapter Three explores male claustrophobia as a common feature shared by another group of Poe's grotesque short stories--- his love stories. I believe that the failure of the bisexual communication, the masculine inclination of Poe's female characters and the feminine dispositions of his male protagonists contribute to create the abnormality in these short fictions. Here again Freud's theory of mother-fixation sheds light on the sexual perversion.Life and death is a motif that has aroused keen interest from many Poe scholars. Chapter Four discusses his third group of narratives in which he blurs the demarcation between the two worlds and exposes the lasting sufferings associated with both of them. The cruelty of death, the affliction of life as well as afterlife and the terror of resurrection enwrap these in an intensely mysterious atmosphere. Schopenhauer's theory of the ultimate will helps to reveal Poe's pessimistic spirit embodied in these tales.Chapter Five is the conclusion in which I argue that fictions of Poe exhibit a desire to oppose and subvert the value system of his time and anticipate the coming of modernity. Meanwhile, Poe's aesthetic advocation of the unity of impression, psyche and suggestiveness also support an interest in the irrationality and grotesquery of human existence.