On The Ethics Of Allan Poe

It is not exaggerating to say that Edgar Allan Poe was the most controversial and most misunderstood genius in American literary history. His contemporary critics censored his moral character because of his vivid depiction of perverse criminals in his works. As a forerunner of aestheticism, Poe's pursuit of pure beauty and his resistance against the didactic function of fiction also made scholars tend to ignore the moral values in his works. Today critics no longer question Poe's sanity and moral sense as a serious writer, but "morality and Poe" becomes a rather neglected topic (Yu Ke,2004,3). In recent years, ethical literary criticism has been receiving more and more attention in Chinese literary criticism academia. As proposed by Professor Nie Zhenzhao, ethical literary criticism is an approach to literary criticism developed on the basis of ethical methods as well as the assimilation of them into the texture of literary critical methods. It aims at analyzing ethical significance of writers and literary works from a historical point of view. Ethical literary criticism can be applied to criticism practices by analyzing human-nature relationship, human-society relationship, human-other relationship, and human-self relationship described in a literary work. Through the analysis of these ethical relationships, the critics can reveal the writer's sense of morality, the moral tendency of the literary works as well as its educational significance. The author of this thesis will concentrate on the analysis of two ethical relationships, namely human-self relationship and human-other relationship represented in two of Poe's short stories, William Wilson and The Cask of Amontillado, in an effort to reveal Poe's morality and ethical significance of his stories.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One is an introduction, including the background, purpose and framework of the study. Chapter Two focuses on literature review of Poe and his works, and the theoretical basis—ethical literary criticism. Chapter Three interprets the split selfhood in William Wilson. Chapter Four interprets the ethical relationship between murderer and victim in The Cask of Amontillado. Then the author of this thesis concludes that through the depiction of these ethical relationships, Poe shows the conflict between good and evil and the depravity of human nature in these two works. Based on the conclusion of the previous chapters, Chapter Five carries on to discuss Poe's sense of morality and his works' educational values. Section one discusses the extrinsic causes of Poe's pessimistic world view and its effects on his writings. In section two, by examining the unreliable narrators which help to better understanding the ethical relations in the two stories, the author of this thesis will uncover Poe's unconventional moral view concealed in his unreliable narrators as well as Poe's predicament and warning of the mental dilemma of modern man. Chapter Six is the conclusion. The author finds that Poe is not without a moral sense. Poe expresses his loneliness and nothingness by describing murder, morbidness, ugliness and evilness in his works. Poe is pessimistic toward human nature. The remaining parts in this chapter are the significance, limitation, and future trend of this research. Poe embodies some ethical and moral ideas in these two stories, but due to his disappointment with human's resistance against the temptation of moral corruption, Poe expresses his moral attitude in his works in a pessimistic and implied way. Realizing this point is helpful to understand Poe and his works.