From Anxiety To Transcendence

The theme of death in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe is always a hot topic under discussion. Many critical essays focus their attention on life experience of the author. They say that Poe became a pitiful orphan when he was only two years old and even through his life he suffered many great hardships. To abreact his feelings of oppression, Poe was accustomed to depicting miserable scenes of death. Other essays hold the opinion that Poe wanted to achieve a kind of intensive effects to touch the readers'feelings, therefore the theme of death naturally becomes an easy method. Some critics point out that Poe was an aesthete and the theme of death made a strong aesthetic sense in his works.In a sense, the opinions above are of course reasonable. But all of them have neglected that the death is not the problem which Poe himself must face but one that we all must face. That is to say, the theme of death is a universal problem in human society. Montaigne said that to study the philosophy is just to study the death, and also Poe declared, through the mouth of his characters in his writing, that he wanted to find the essence of death. So Poe' fascination with the theme of death is not only a result of his miserable life, or an aim to achieve strong effects or aesthetic feelings, but also a kind of thought and exploration into the essence of death. In fact, what Poe expressed in his works was inevitability of death, horror of and anxiety to death, and also human responsive behaviors under the horror and anxiety, such as shirking, resisting, and in the end, transcending. Only realizing these problems can we have a more accurate understanding of the subject of death in Poe' works.This thesis includes three chapters. In the first part, it plans to explain several popular opinions about the theme of death in Poe' works. These opinions associated death with the intense effects and the aesthetic feelings. This paper would like to show that although the works of Poe can actually achieve intense effects of horror and the aesthetic sensation of death, it is rather a superficial meanings of Poe' works. And the second chapter will give a thorough analysis to the theme of death in Poe' works and try to find the profound meanings of Poe' dealing of the death theme: complicated and multi-faceted attitudes and responses toward death. The third chapter is a brief conclusion of the thesis.