Male Gaze In Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories

Edgar Allan Poe, poet, short story writer, and critic, was a controversial figure in the antebellum America. The "Death of Beauty" short story series by Poe is particularly well-known for their peculiarity and mysteriousness. This thesis attempts to explore the distorted and morbid relationship between the male and female characters in these stories from the perspective of the literary approach---"male gaze".In the age when Poe lived, with the eruption of the first industrial revolution, immense transformation took place in the society, leading to the female awakening movement. As women had played a vital role in Poe’s life, he was particularly concerned about this movement. The sharp contrast between the female tenderness and affection and male indifference and cruelty in Poe’s life propelled him to take the side of the females with much hesitation. Accordingly, he revealed the "male gaze" scheme and the distressed and oppressed living situations of the women in his age, foreseeing the revolution to take place in the relationship between the sexes through a depiction of the changing gaze in his short stories and calling for the arrival of a new male and female relationship that is based on equality, respect and affection.Many researchers have turned their attention to the relationship between Poe and several women most endearing to him through study of that between the male narrator and heroines in Poe’s works. Yet this dissertation is dedicated to taking a different approach and plumbing into the influence of the women’s awakening as a whole in the patriarchal society in Poe’s age on his works dealing with "Death of Beauty", making out Poe’s attitude and position in the new social trend which is part and parcel of the broader feminist movement.