Sexlessness And Fantasy: Lacanian Psychosexual Analysis Of Edgar Allan Poe's Poems

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is a genius in American literature renowned both for his immortal literary creation and his tragic destiny which inflicted him incessantly throughout his life. His lyric poems mostly boast of strong aspiration for morbidly pure love and fantastic beauty. Lacan's "Symbolic Logic of Sexuation", was originally intended to determine the difference of sex, but the function of sexual desires involved enable us to recognize the implicated general human nature of Poe's poems because they can be associated with two conspicuous yet neglected features of his poems—sexlessness, which is the symbol of the latent inhibition, and fantasy, which is the means by which the subjects are able to hanker for satisfaction. By such an analysis, the whole process of the psychological movement of the subject can be regarded as the act of forbidding sexual desires and the concealment of remnant sexual desires which is accordingly projected in his poems through outward sign of sexlessness and fantasy. It is in this manner that the subject is able to shun off the painful and undesirable reality depicted in the poems.These two tangible features of Poe's poems are the focus throughout this paper. Each feature is generalized from and proved in almost all of the lyrics of him by dint of textual analysis. To fit the features well, Lacan's theory is expounded in a sequence from the brief introduction to the two stages of the whole process of sex identification. So the two features are corresponding to the two stages of Lacan's thought. The structure of the thesis will be like follows: the first chapter deals with the brief introduction of Lacan's psychological theory and the "Symbolic Logic of Sexuation" in particular; the second chapter is about the perception of sexlessness as the symbol of hidden sexual desires in the first stage of the "Symbolic Logic of Sexuation"; the third chapter goes further to relate Poe's pursuit of fantasy on women to the fulfillment of the remaining sexual desires of the protagonists after the phallic function; last but not least, the fourth chapter summarizes the function of the poetic language in the analysis and the influence of the personal experience of Poe on his poems; the conclusion is that hiding sexual desires is the means to acquire sex identification and maintain the equilibrium of the mind of the subject, while the pursuit of fantasy on women is an alternative way of seeking satisfaction.