Female Images In Male Gaze

Allan Poe is an outstanding writer of poems and stories. His short fictions have caught the attention of many critics and scholars over the past century. Among them, three short fictions ("The Oval Portrait", "Berenice", and "Ligeia") about women's death and madness are picked out here by the present author for analysis. Using the classical film narrative and examining the social, cultural and psychological contexts of women in aspects of male gaze, male fantasy, female desire, and female subjectivity, the paper ventures to interpret Poe's female images in those works.In the male gaze category, the female characters of these tales are discriminated and oppressed. They are forced by men to be the objects of male characters' desires and are made victims as well. But their reactions are very different. From these tales, it is found that the images of women created by Poe are of three kinds. The model-wife in "The Oval Portrait" is a woman of silence without the spirit of resistance because she is too submissive to resist; Berenice in "Berenice", and Rowena in "Ligeia" are women with the spirit of resistance because they try to protest the repression imposed upon them by the...