A Psychoanalytic Study Of The Morbid Characters In Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic Tales

Edgar Allan Poe is an outstanding writer in American Romantic period. Along with Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, Poe ranks among the greatest literary stars in the American literature. Different from his contemporaries, he chooses to explore themes such as murder, death and revenge and develops a style characterized by grotesque and horror.Poe is also a famous Gothic writer. Different form the traditional Gothic writers, his Gothic tales are endowed with psychological significance. He advances the Gothic literature by exploring the deepest recesses of human psyche. He intends to psychologize the Gothic and has endeavored to modify the traditional Gothic model in his tales. He successfully creates a great many morbid characters in his Gothic tales. The spiritual world of these characters is distorted and evil. Through depicting these morbid characters, Poe gives a detailed description in the dark side of human nature and shows the reader that kind of crazy, cruel, and distorted personality.By interpreting the morbid characters in Poe’s Gothic tales from psychoanalytic perspective, this thesis puts Freudian personality theory into a textual practice. Freudian personality theory not only has significant meanings for text analysis, but also has the significance for exploring the complexities of human nature. With the employment of theories including the structure of personality and the development of personality, this thesis focuses on studying the morbid characters in Poe’s nine Gothic tales, showing their evil side of human nature, unbalanced personality and split personality.This thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter is the introduction, which gives a brief sketch of Poe’s literary career, his Gothic tales, and Freudian personality theory. The second chapter will interpret the morbid characters in Poe’s Gothic tales by using Freudian personality theory. The third chapter tries to explore the reasons for the creation of the morbid characters in Poe’s Gothic tales. The last chapter is the conclusion of this thesis.